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There is a storm the night she is born.
Outside the caves, the sea rages and the wind howls in times with her mother’s cries. The aunts and grandmothers gather around and pet her mother’s hair as the labor wracks her body. The storm quiets for only a moment as she slips from her mother’s womb. Her mother baptizes her in saltwater and names her Katara.
***
For the first long span of her life she knows nothing but the warm caves where the tribe sleeps and the joy of playing in the waves and the lazy contentment of sunning on rocks. Her father teaches her to hunt in the shallows where the fish are plentiful, and her mother teaches her to weave shells into her hair, and her brother shows her the places where the shiniest rocks can be found. When storms toss the waves high above her head and lightning spikes and twists in tempestuous patterns, Katara is not afraid.
“The sea keeps us safe,” her father tells her. “And the sea will always bring you home.”
Katara and Sokka go to a beach covered in sea glass and shed their pelts while they collect blue and green pieces of sparkle to bring back to Kya.
She hugs them fiercely close, and tells them, “Never leave your pelt unguarded. Never, never.” Katara does not understand why this is important, but she promises anyway.
She understands, later, when Kya sheds her pelt and then does not return. Hakoda searches the beaches for weeks, and it is only when the winter storms come that he returns to the caves and admits defeat.
Katara and Sokka sing a mourning song. Hakoda listens to their cries and refuses to hunt.
Days pass. Kya does not come home.
Hakoda sings a song of lamentation and loss and unbearable pain; then he slips into the sea, and Katara does not see her father again.
***
The world of men is cruel, and rough, and unyielding. Katara knows this. But the best sunbathing is on the beach where men’s scent lays heavy, and the winter has been long and harsh.
She tells Sokka she is going. He cannot drum up the energy to care. He is wooing a female from another tribe, and he is focused on that. “Sure,” he says, and she takes that as permission.
Katara sheds her pelt when she hits the rocks. She hides it carefully, always. She remembers her mother, remembers the whispered words of caution while Kya brushed out her hair. Katara remembers her mother, who was strong and brave and beautiful and never came home. Katara will not be captured.
She sunbathes on the beach that is heavy with the scent of men, and does not fear them. It is the cold season, when the storms rage and the surf beats angrily against the shore. They are almost never on the beach during this weather; and if they were, Katara knows that she can grab her pelt and dive into the sea, and the sea will take her home. She is never unsafe while her toes dangle in saltwater.
The sun is wan and thin and gray, but it feels warm and nurturing after so many months in her tribe’s caves. Katara basks in the glow of the winter rays and thinks that she should go across the sea, where she hears there are golden beaches that are warm and drenched in sun all year round.
It is then, naked and relaxed and daydreaming, that she sees him. He is tall, pale even by the standards of men. His hair is dark like the ink of a frightened squid, like the depths of the sea trenches where fish with long teeth hide. But his eyes are gold like sunset on shallow waves, gold like early morning, gold like the underside of a shell. Katara decides, on impulse, that she trusts him.
“Are you alright?” he asks, and his voice is low and husky and concerned. Katara tries to meet his eyes, but he is looking at the ground and blushing. She frowns. Is he afraid?
He removes the outermost layer of his clothes — a jacket, she thinks — and offers it to her. “It’s alright,” he says. “I won’t hurt you. Maybe put this on, though?”
Katara does not take the proffered layer. She tilts her head, considering the boy before her. Her pelt lies in a small hole some feet away, covered by a rock. She could reach it before he drew his next breath, if she needed to. She does not want to.
“You’re a selkie,” the boy says, and Katara turns and disappears into the water.
Men are not to be trusted.
***
The next time she sees him, he is on a boat.
“He’s just a human,” Sokka says, when she leaves to follow the boat out to sea. Katara does not respond. She does not care to.
The boat hits rough waters while it pulls in its fishing catch. Katara sees her human near the bow — he is not in danger, and she is oddly relieved. A different human, one she does not know, falls from the boat. The sea, Katara thinks, will have its due. This boat of humans cannot stray this far from the shore without paying the toll.
But the boy is at the side of the boat, and he is yelling and throwing ropes and floating rings and wooden rods overboard, and suddenly Katara finds herself pushing the fallen human upwards and back towards the boat. They break the surface of the water, and he yells, and ropes fly, and Katara ducks back under the waves. Hakoda would be incensed to learn that she had saved the life of a human. But she could swear that she saw her human, the boy, right before she dove; and he looked like he wanted to say thank you.
***
She goes back to the beach. He is not there.
She sheds her pelt, day after day, and sunbathes naked on the sand. She cannot understand what keeps him away. She cannot understand what keeps drawing her back.
It is months and months and months before she sees him again. It is sunset, and the sand is bathed in red and gold when she sees him walking towards the water.
“I didn’t think you’d come back,” he says, when he finally finds her. “I didn’t want to hope.”
She says nothing, only pulls him towards the sea. If she can shed her pelt, surely he can sprout gills — and she has wanted nothing in her life so badly as she wants this human boy with ink-black hair and haunted eyes.
“I can’t,” he says. “But you should go back. The people I’m with will trap you, if they can.”
Katara tugs him towards the water once again.
“I wish I could,” he says, and sinks down to sit on the sand. He holds out an arm to her, and says, “Sit with me? I’ll tell you the story my mother told me about the very first sunset.”
Katara sinks into the sand beside him, and listens.
***
“You’re obsessed with a human,” Sokka says.
“I can be obsessed with whoever I want,” Katara answers.
“Just don’t get hurt,” he responds.
“I won’t,” she says.
“Don’t let him take your pelt,” Sokka says.
“I won’t,” she repeats.
***
“Shall I tell you about the creation of the first lily?”
Katara nods.
“Alright. When the world was young…”
The tale does not matter as much as the voice that tells it. The story does not matter as much as the mind that spins it.
(His name, she learns, is Zuko.)
She speaks little, on the nights that she meets him on the dunes. He is there every night. She knows, because on the few nights that she did not come to greet him, she watched him from the waves. He waited, patient, for a long while, until finally he followed the dim light of the early-morning moon back to the world of men.
(His world is a world of men, and she does not belong there.)
His voice when he tells her stories is rich and sweet and full of life. Katara longs for a world that she has not seen or touched or heard of, when he tells her stories. She wants it; she wants to walk on streets paved with stone and buy candied fruit. She can only imagine it. He knows what she is; stepping away from the sea makes her heart seize and her brow bead with fear. She cannot leave her pelt. She cannot leave the sea.
Zuko asks for her name; then he never questions her again. He never asks after her pelt or her tribe or her cave; he simply tells her stories. She sings for him, sometimes, hunt-songs and songs of change and newness and wonder. When she leaves, he watches her until she slips out of sight beneath the waves.
There is some small, reasonable part of Katara that tells her not to return. She does not listen.
He tells her stories, night after night, of the Good Neighbors and the Fair Folk. He does not ask about selkies. He does not ask about the sea.
Katara returns to the caves and does not answer Sokka’s questions.
“What does he know?” Sokka demands.
She says nothing.
“You put us all at risk,” he accuses her.
Katara does not argue, and she does not speak of her human.
***
“I want you to stay with me,” says Zuko one day.
Katara does not answer him.
“I won’t ever make you,” he swears.
He is lying. Katara knows this. Humans lie. If she gives him her pelt, she will never see the ocean again.
She flees.
***
“You haven’t gone to the beach lately,” says Sokka.
Katara shrugs.
“What happened to your human?”
“He’s just a human,” Katara says. “You were right.”
She hunts with her brother, and sings the tribe-songs, and dances in sun-dappled waves. Just as she has always done. But her heart longs for the small rocky beach, and a boy with ink-black hair and golden eyes.
***
“I think I met the son of a seal-wife,” says one of the aunts one day, while they brush out their hair on the warm rocks outside the entrance to the cave. “He did not look like us, but he stood on the sand and sang a hunt-song. His mother must have taught it to him.”
Katara looks up, her heart clenching with an emotion she cannot name.
“How sad,” says another. “To know that part of you belongs in the sea, but having no pelt, no way to come home.”
Katara thinks of Zuko, standing alone on the shore, singing a song for her. Asking her to come back. She thinks of Hakoda, who sang his death-song and let the sea take him away, far from the tribe and their caves. Katara has always wondered if the sea had taken him back to Kya, in some way. If that was its way of taking Hakoda home.
She wonders where the sea will take her if she lets it.
***
She goes back, many nights later, when the moon is full.
He is asleep.
There is a hut on the beach now, a little ramshackle makeshift thing made of driftwood and covered by sailcloth. It is hardly more than a lean-to, something to keep the rain off of the camp he has made, with a sleeping roll and a fire pit. He is asleep now, breathing deeply and evenly beside the gentle glow of the coals that are all that is left of his cook-fire. He has built this, she knows, because he has been waiting for her.
(His hair is longer. Has she truly stayed away from him for so long?)
She sheds her pelt and lays beside him, content for now to watch him dream. Moonlight turns his skin to silver; his hair falls like a shadow over his face. She reaches out to touch it, and it is as smooth and silky as her own pelt. She strokes him gently, running her fingers lightly through his hair, fascinated with the way it slips through her fingers and falls back against his cheek. He does not stir. Katara hums softly, a song of longing and wanting and needing, a song of apology, a song of thanks. When she looks back down at his face, his eyes are open, and he is watching her like a man who is dying of need, like a sinner looking at their god, like a sailor seeing home after months adrift at sea.
“You came back,” he whispers.
She nods.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t,” he says. His voice is low, just a murmur, as though she is an illusion that will shatter and fade if he speaks too loudly. His hand comes up and strokes her face, once, gently.
Katara leans into the caress, and Zuko repeats it, touching her with soft, reverent fingers. He traces the line of her cheekbone, her jaw, her temple; he threads his fingers into her hair and smooths it away from her face. “I waited,” he says. “I think I would’ve waited forever. I came back every night, hoping you would return.”
She thinks of the long days since she has seen him, and the endless longing for their beach and his voice and his shy smile, and is glad that he missed her too.
“And you came back,” he whispers reverently. His finger traces the shape of her lower lip.
“For you,” she murmurs, and leans forward to press her lips to his. He pulls her closer, and she rises over him and fits her body to his, and the feel of his skin on hers washes over her like crashing waves. He feels like the sea, like the endless depths and steady pull of the tides. His skin tastes of saltwater, and when she cries out his name it sounds like waves breaking on the shore.
Later, they sit close to the water, huddled together in a blanket, naked limbs tangled together under the wool. Katara is amused at Zuko’s discomfort with nudity; his body is beautiful, long and rangy and silvery-pale in the moonlight so he looks nearly as fey as she. But he is human, and they are odd about things like this, so she lets him wrap the blanket around them before he pulls her against him and holds her close.
“Come back to me again,” he whispers as he nuzzles her hair.
“Always,” she murmurs back.
***
She comes back to him, again and again.
He never asks her to stay, but his golden sunset eyes are sad when she slips back into the water. Katara thinks that she would give up more than the sea to prevent his sorrow.
“I think I love him,” she tells Sokka one day.
Sokka’s eyes are full of heartbreak as he looks at her. “Do I have to lose you, too?”
She curls close to her brother and does not answer.
“He’s a human,” Sokka tells her. “If he can trap you, he will. They can’t help it. They don’t understand what it means to be free.”
Katara thinks of Zuko hiding his body beneath a blanket, of the tribes who still sing the mourning songs for brothers and sisters who wandered ashore one day and never came back. She thinks of her pelt, always hidden close at hand. She thinks of her human, her lovely gold-and-silver boy, and the look in his eyes when he said, I want you to stay with me. I won’t ever make you. She wonders what he would do if she placed her pelt in his hands.
“I think I love him,” Katara repeats out loud.
“You belong in the sea,” Sokka replies.
“What if I can have both?” Katara asks.
Sokka only puts an arm around her and holds her close.
***
She gets tired of waiting.
Zuko watches her dive into the water, as he normally does; then he turns to walk away, back to the world of men. Katara waits until he cannot see her, and then she emerges from the water and sheds her pelt and follows him.
She holds her pelt wrapped around her like a cloak to cover her nakedness, but she has no clothes. And beyond that — she has seen enough humans to know that she does not quite look like one of them.
(She is a selkie, and there will always be something a little uncanny about her. She belongs to the sea. It leaves its mark.)
It is dangerous. If she is caught, or seen, she is too far from the water to flee the grip of men. She trusts Zuko, but not all humans are like Zuko. If she is seen, and someone takes her pelt, they will take her away and hold her captive and she will never see Zuko or the ocean or her brother ever again. She follows Zuko anyway.
He goes to a cottage that she assumes is his home. The door is unlocked; Katara lets herself in, and curls her toes against the unfamiliar feeling of wood floorboards beneath her feet. She drapes her pelt over the back of a chair, deliberate.
“You’re here,” he says wonderingly when he sees her. “How are you here?”
She smiles at him, shy now. “You let me leave,” she says. “I got tired of you letting me leave.”
He reaches for her, and she curls into him, easy and gentle like the morning tide.
“Ask me to stay,” she orders.
“Stay,” he whispers into her hair. “Please.”
She does.
The next morning, when she wakes in Zuko’s bed, surrounded by blankets heavy with his scent, her pelt is still on the chair where she left it. He has left her a note —
Working today. Come back to me tonight?
She only smiles, and slips her pelt over her shoulders, and goes back to the caves, to the scent of saltwater and damp rock, to tell her brother that he was wrong.
“You’re staying with him,” Sokka says.
“I love him,” Katara answers. “And he does not try to tame me.”
“Come back when you can,” Sokka tells her, and it is the gentlest kind of goodbye, because she sees in his eyes that he truly does understand.
Katara thinks that this is what love is, a letting go, a come back to me, a kind benediction and a farewell. She kisses her brother on the brow, and softly hums a song of love and gratitude and belonging. Sokka weeps when she leaves, and she hears a song of farewell and heartache and pride and boundless, boundless love echo over the waves behind her. Katara reaches the beach, and sets her feet on the path toward the world of men.
Toward Zuko.
***
His love keeps her safe. Her pelt hangs in the closet, next to his coats and her skirts, and Zuko never touches it. The closet is only locked when strangers come to visit, and Zuko laughs off the idea that his wife is anything more than human.
(The neighbors know she is fey, but by their way of thinking, Katara makes the best smoked fish in the village, and if Zuko wants to pretend that his woman is not a seal-wife, then that is none of their business. They whisper behind their hands, and wonder how he has kept her happy for so long, and how long it will be before she finds her pelt and disappears into the waves forever.)
Katara dives into the sea sometimes, when Zuko is gone on the fishing boats and she misses the pull of the tides. Then she returns to the caves, and hunts with her brother, and dances between the waves, and sings the tribe-songs. Sokka kisses her brow when she leaves, and commands her to come back when she can. He does not weep when she goes. She returns to the little cottage, and Zuko is always waiting. There is a fire in the hearth, and a place for her to hang her pelt, and a warm pair of arms waiting to welcome her.
His love keeps her safe, and his love guides her home.
***
There is a storm the night their daughter is born.
Katara insists on going down to their beach. Zuko protests, but takes her anyway, and holds her hand while the aunts and grandmothers gather around and pet Katara’s hair and sing the birthing-songs as the labor pains wrack her body. They grumble at Zuko’s presence, but he refuses to leave.
Finally their daughter slips from Katara’s womb into the world as a particularly demanding crack of thunder sounds above them. Katara baptizes her in saltwater.
“We’ll call her Kya,” Zuko whispers into Katara’s hair. Katara smiles, and kisses her daughter’s tiny webbed toes.