Work Text:
What the Tide Carries
The Fire Nation delegation arrived three hours late.
Katara was not surprised. She had learned, in the two years since the war ended, that punctuality was a political statement and that arriving early meant eagerness but arriving late meant we had other things to attend to first. She had also learned that Fire Nation officials were very good at political statements, even ones made without words.
She sat at the long table in Ba Sing Se's new Council Hall; a room that still smelled faintly of fresh plaster and had corners where the paint was slightly the wrong shade.
Beside her, Aang was talking to Minister Fanghui of the Earth Kingdom about water rights in the lower districts. He talked with his hands, the way he always did, fingers moving through the air as if the world he was describing were right there between them and he just needed to sketch its outline. Katara had loved that about him once.
She watched his hands and thought, not for the first time, about the conversation she had been not-having with him for the better part of a year. The conversation that started somewhere around the sixth time someone had congratulated her on being with the Avatar; not congratulated her, Katara, master waterbender, daughter of the South, last of something but congratulated the Avatar's girlfriend, as though she were an extension of him. She had smiled each time, she was getting good at that.
Sokka was somewhere to her left, eating, she could hear him without looking.
The door opened.
The Fire Nation's delegation was led by a young man who looked, Katara thought, like he was wearing the role of Fire Lord the way new soldiers wore armour. He was twenty-two or twenty-three now, she had to think about it; they'd met so young and aged so fast, he had grown into his face somewhere in the years since the war. The scar was the same and the gold eyes were the same, however.
She had seen him twice in the two years since the war ended; once at the initial peace ceremonies, which had been so overwhelmed with ceremony that she'd barely spoken to anyone, and once at a regional summit in Omashu eight months ago where they'd sat at opposite ends of a very long table and she'd watched him handle a room full of people who didn't trust him yet with patience.
He sat at the far end of the table, across from King Kuei, and did not look at her. That was fine, she did not look at him either.
The summit was about trade routes.
This was the thing nobody had prepared Katara for, about peace, how much of it was trade routes. How much of it was harbour fees and grain tariffs and questions of which nation's currency would be accepted at which ports. She had imagined, before the war ended, that peace would feel like the morning after a long rain.
She had not imagined that it would feel like sitting at long tables arguing about who owed whom three copper pieces per bushel, being referred to as the Avatar's companion, her name in the briefing documents listed below Aang's with a small asterisk that designated her role as support staff and representative liaison. She had not imagined that the world she'd helped build would find such a tidy way to make her feel like she was decorating someone else's life.
She was, technically, not an official delegate. She was here because Aang had asked her to come, because he trusted her, and because the Southern Water Tribe had no formal diplomatic apparatus yet, she was the closest thing to a Water Tribe voice that this room was going to get. But she was here and she had chosen to be here. Aang needed people he trusted at his side for these negotiations and she loved him. She did not let herself look too directly at the thing underneath it; the question of what she had agreed to become, and whether she'd agreed at all or simply arrived without anyone asking.
Today, she mostly listened.
She read the room; the Earth Kingdom ministers who were here primarily to demonstrate that the Earth Kingdom was a power that negotiated with other powers rather than being negotiated around, the Northern Water Tribe representative who sat with a stiff upper back and the various Fire Nation officials who carried themselves with the careful posture of people who knew they were being watched for any sign that they were still the enemy.
The trade route in question was a northern corridor through Fire Nation waters that Earth Kingdom merchant vessels had traditionally used (the war had closed it) now the Earth Kingdom wanted it reopened and the Fire Nation was willing in principle but uncertain about security. There were still pirates and pockets of violence that the new order hadn't smoothed out yet and the Water Tribe representatives were interested because several of the affected merchant routes also crossed water they considered theirs.
"Master Katara," said Minister Fanghui, which was not her title but she had stopped correcting it, "your people have traditionally maintained patrol vessels in the sector near the—"
"We did," she said. "Before the war, the Southern Water Tribe ran escorts for merchant convoys in that area. We could again, with the right agreements."
"What sort of agreements?" This from Zuko's end of the table. Not from Zuko himself but from his minister, a careful woman named Jian.
Katara looked at Jian. "Passage rights. Recognition of Southern Water Tribe authority in our traditional waters and compensation for the patrol vessels and their crews."
"Reasonable," said Jian, which surprised Katara slightly.
She glanced, reflexively, toward the Fire Lord.
He was writing something, or pretending to write something. His brush moved with a deliberate unhurriedness that suggested he was doing it mainly so he would have somewhere to put his eyes.
She looked away.
At the midday break, Katara stood at one of the hall's tall windows and ate a rice cake and looked out at Ba Sing Se's new streets. She was thinking about her mother.
This was not unusual. She thought about her mother often; not with fresh grief but with a chronic ache, a constant low note under everything. She thought about her mother because she was the last woman of the Southern Water Tribe who could waterbend and the weight of that was something she had been carrying with her since she was eight years old and had chosen not to examine it to its full extent. Katara was the last waterbender of the South, she had been raised on that fact the way you were raised on food, absorbing it so young that it felt like part of her body. The war had taken the benders. The Raid had taken her mother. And Katara had become, without anyone explicitly assigning her the role, the living proof that the South still existed.
She could not die and she could not fail. She could not be merely human, a girl who sometimes didn't want to heal anyone and just wanted to stand in the ocean and bend the water until her arms ached and there was nothing in her head but the sound of waves.
She was the last one.
And then there was Aang.
She watched the street below, two children arguing over a stick, and thought about Aang's hands moving through the air to describe the world, how she loved him, and the conversation two months ago when he had said, carefully, that they both knew airbenders needed to come back to the world, that she was the person he trusted most and that the future he wanted to build was one he wanted to build with her. He had not used the word obligation, he was much too kind to use that word, instead he had used words like hope and together and family.
She had said, yes, she wanted that too.
She had meant it when she said it. She was not sure she meant it now in the same way and had been setting this uncertainty down every time it surfaced for months now, because there was always something more urgent. And more importantly, she did not know what happened if she looked at it directly. She was the last Southern waterbender. She was the mother of the Air Nation's future. She was the Avatar's companion and support staff and representative liaison. She was twenty-two years old, she was very tired and she did not know, standing at this window, who exactly she was when she stripped all of those titles away.
"You came out early," he said. Zuko was standing six feet away, holding a cup of something hot and looking at her with an expression she couldn't quite categorise.
"I needed air." She looked back at the window. "The room was too stuffy.”
"Every summit room has that quality." He came to stand beside her. "It's the number of competing interests, they generate heat."
She glanced at him. "Spoken like someone who has been in a lot of summit rooms."
"Spoken like someone who has been in a lot of summit rooms and didn't particularly enjoy any of them."
She looked out the window again. Below, the children had resolved their stick dispute and were now apparently on the same side of it, working together toward some purpose she couldn't identify from this height. "The water rights section is going to be difficult," she said.
"I know."
"Fanghui is going to want symbolic concessions so he can show his ministry back home. Things that look significant without shifting much actual authority."
"Yes." He was quiet for a moment. "How are you planning to handle that?"
She glanced at him again. It was a genuine question, not rhetorical, as most questions directed at her had been lately. "Give him the language he needs and protect the substance behind it. Make him feel like he won the argument while making sure the agreement says what it needs to say."
The corner of his mouth moved slightly. "That's exactly the right approach."
"I know."
Another silence. The street below continued its business, somewhere a vendor was yelling something she couldn't make out, a rhythm of syllables that sounded like an argument between two people who were actually fond of each other.
"I didn't know you'd be here," he said. "I mean—" A slight pause, a small adjustment in his posture. "I knew the Avatar's delegation would have Water Tribe representation. I didn't know it would be you."
"They needed someone who knew the pre-war patrol agreements." She kept her voice easy. "I'd done the research."
"More than the research. You walked into that room and you knew exactly what you were doing." Another pause, different from the first. "I'm glad you're here. For the negotiations, I mean. The Water Tribe hasn't had a voice at these tables that actually knows what it's talking about."
She looked at him directly then, trying to figure out if she was being managed. She was good at detecting management; at identifying the words that were to talk around the point rather than communicate a truth. He looked back at her. Whatever he was, he didn't appear to be managing her.
"Thank you," she said, and meant it simply.
The bell rang for the afternoon session, they both turned from the window.
The afternoon session was the difficult one.
The water rights conversation deteriorated within twenty minutes into the kind of circling argument where everyone was actually arguing about something other than what they were saying. Fanghui wanted acknowledgement. The Earth Kingdom wanted to be seen as a power that other nations negotiated with, this need was understandable, Katara felt in her own chest when she thought about the Southern Water Tribe's position in these rooms, it was expressing itself as an increasingly technical argument about the definition of traditional maritime authority that was going nowhere because both sides were using the phrase to mean different things.
She watched this for twenty minutes before she asked to speak.
Fanghui gave her the floor with an exasperated expression.
"I want to separate two things that are getting conflated," she said. "There's the question of what the current jurisdictional boundaries are, which is a legal question and which we can answer by looking at the post-war agreements, and there's the question of what they should be, which is a political question which we're not going to resolve today. What I think we can do today is agree on a framework for how we'll answer the second question; who's in the room, what records we're using and what the process looks like."
The room considered this.
"A working group," said Fanghui.
"A working group," she agreed.
"With Water Tribe representation."
"With Water Tribe representation. Southern specifically." She held his gaze. "If we're using pre-war records, we need someone who knows what the Southern Tribe's actual historical position was, not the simplified version."
Fanghui looked at her for a long moment. "Agreed," he said.
She felt the shift in the room, she had caused this, not Aang nor any of the senior ministers but her.
She looked at her notes and did not look toward the end of the table, and without looking, knew that Zuko was watching her again.
The dinner that evening was held in one of Ba Sing Se's new reception halls; all high ceilings and good stone and furniture that was slightly too formal for the space. Katara sat between Sokka and an elderly Earth Kingdom lord named Feng who had opinions about this year's crops. She drank tea and ate and listened to Lord Feng describe the difference between highland and lowland crop cultivation with genuine attention, because Lord Feng had lived through the war, survived it and had kept his farm running through forty years of occupation and deserved to talk about his carrots to someone who was actually listening.
Across the table, Aang was being luminous, there was no other word for it, he had a quality in social situations that she had always admired and sometimes envied. A genuine warmth that made people feel like the most interesting person in the room; he remembered names, asked the right questions and always laughed at the right moments, not for effect but because something had actually struck him as funny, and the laugh was so real that it made other people's laughter feel real too.
She was proud of him, she was always proud of him.
She was also aware, watching him work the room, of something she had been noticing for months without naming; the way his presence organised everything around it. She had been doing this for years, and she wasn't sure she would know how to stop if she tried. She wasn't even sure it was wrong, he was the Avatar, the shape of the world's future, someone who needed and deserved support. She loved him, she had chosen this.
She was just starting to wonder if the choosing had happened all at once or gradually, piece by piece, without her fully noticing what she was agreeing to.
"You're thinking very loud," Sokka said, beside her.
"I'm listening to Lord Feng."
"You've been staring at the middle distance for about two minutes."
"I'm processing what Lord Feng said about lowland carrots."
"Sure." Sokka ate something. He didn't push it, which meant he'd decided this wasn't the moment. She made a note to have the real conversation with him later, when there was space for it. Sokka was, underneath the terrible jokes and the extremely aggressive approach to mealtimes, one of the sharpest readers of people she knew. He had been watching her for a long time.
She turned back to Lord Feng and asked a question about highland cultivation, he was delighted, and the evening continued.
On the other side of the room, Zuko was at a table with the senior delegates; Jian, several of the Earth Kingdom ministers, the Northern Water Tribe representative who had finally said something during the afternoon session. She found her eyes going to him three times before she stopped counting and simply allowed it, because she was honest enough with herself to recognise that pretending not to notice something was a different activity from actually not noticing it.
He looked up, at some point, and their eyes met across the room. She looked away first.
On the second day of the summit, they ended up in the same working group.
This had been inevitable, given the outcome of the previous afternoon, she had proposed the working group, had insisted on Southern Water Tribe representation and she was said representation.
She had known it was coming and had spent the twenty minutes before the session running through the conversation in her head, deciding how she was going to be in the room, what kind of professional distance she was going to maintain. Then she'd sat down across from him and he'd said, "I read your notes from this morning," and she'd said, "Which notes," and he'd said, "The framework you proposed for the pre-war records comparison," and she'd said, "And?" and he'd said, "You've done more research than anyone else in that room," and she'd said, "I know," and they'd gotten to work, and none of her preparatory distancing had been necessary because it turned out they were very good at just working.
This was the surprise. She had expected friction, there was history with Zuko; years of being on opposite sides of the same war, the injury of Ba Sing Se where he had chosen his father at the moment she'd been ready to trust him, then the last weeks of the war where he had come to their side, fought beside them and helped her seek closure over the ugliest parts of herself. They were at peace now and she had made a decision to treat him as the person he was working to be rather than the person he had been when it was easiest to fail.
They argued, twice, once about jurisdiction boundaries in the outer shipping lanes and once about the phrasing of a non-interference clause, and both arguments were direct; neither of them yielded quickly. But the arguments were clean, just two people who understood the material and disagreed about a specific point and worked it until they found the actual point of disagreement and then found the compromise that addressed it.
Pei, the junior Earth Kingdom minister in their group, kept looking between them.
"You've worked together before," she said, during the mid-morning break.
"Not exactly," Katara said.
"We were on opposite sides of a war," Zuko said, "and then on the same side for the last month of it."
"Ah," said Pei.
"He's easier to work with than he was when he was trying to capture us," Katara said, meaning it as a compliment and watching him register it as such, which she appreciated.
"You're more or less exactly as difficult as you were then," he said.
"Good. I've been consistent then."
The almost-smile. She was starting to recognise it; the slight softening around his eyes, absence of self-consciousness about it. He didn't manage his expressions the way most political figures she'd met managed theirs, or if he did, he was extraordinarily good at hiding that he was doing it.
She turned back to the clause they'd been arguing about.
The afternoon of the second day, she went looking for a certain record in the archive room that had been set up adjacent to the council hall for the summit's duration. It was a small room, more of a large closet that had been converted by the addition of two tables and approximately four hundred documents, and when she got there, it was occupied.
Aang was sitting in one of the chairs with a stack of documents in front of him, and he wasn't reading the documents. She knew this look, she had seen it on him in the months after the war
She sat in the other chair.
He looked up, "Hey."
"Hey."
He looked back at the table. "I've been thinking about the Air Temple sites," he said. "The Eastern Temple, they've started preliminary excavation, trying to recover the archives before the structure deteriorates further and the first reports came in this morning."
"And?"
"There's less than we thought." His voice was level. "A lot of what we thought might be recoverable was actually… the damp got into it. A hundred and fifty years of nobody maintaining the drainage."
"Aang…"
"Every fragment we lose is—" He stopped, collecting himself. "It's not just a document."
"I know," she said, and reached across and put her hand over his.
He turned his hand and held hers, and they sat like that for a while. They were two people who had been keeping each other company in the aftermath of enormous things for long enough that they knew how to do it without speaking, when Katara remembered this, that uncertain part of her shifted again. She sat with him, loved him but also in the back of her mind, heard the echo of her own thoughts at the window, you understood what you represent. They were both last things, carrying the weight of that, and somewhere in the weight of that shared understanding was also the question she kept not asking, whether being understood was the same as being met in yourself?
She did not ask the question but held his hand.
After a while, he squeezed her hand and released it to look at the documents again. "What are you here for?"
"Pre-war Water Tribe patrol records. Dates and routes."
"Third stack, left side," he said. "I organised things this morning."
She found the stack, took what she needed and went back to work.
On the third morning, there was an incident.
She heard about it secondhand. She'd been in the archive room when it happened, and by the time she came out, the corridor was already settling back into its normal shape. A Fire Nation guard and an Earth Kingdom official had argued in one of the antechambers. Not physical, but close, and the sound of it had carried, several Earth Kingdom delegates had heard it and now the morning session had a tension in it that the previous two days hadn't.
"What was it about?" she asked.
"Scheduling mainly? A miscommunication about which meeting room was being used for what." Sokka replied, having witnessed the whole thing. "But it wasn't about the scheduling, obviously."
"No."
"It was about being in the same building as Fire Nation soldiers and not being sure whether the war actually ended or just paused."
She looked at the council hall door. "How bad is the room?"
"Manageable. But it'll take someone doing something to shift it."
Zuko opened the afternoon session with fifteen minutes that he had clearly not planned in advance. He stood at the head of the table and he didn't apologise for the incident, it hadn't been his fault and an apology would have been dishonest, but he said, in plain language, that his delegation's presence in these negotiations was a privilege they intended to honour with conduct that matched the seriousness of the work. That he expected the same from every member of his delegation and if there were grievances he expected them raised in this room, through these channels, not in hallways.
Then he sat down.
The room's tension did not disappear, but it changed. Katara looked at her notes and thought, that was exactly right. A response that addressed the actual problem rather than the visible surface of the problem.
The evening of the third day, she walked.
Ba Sing Se at night had a different quality than in the day, the big machine of the city standing down into something that was just people moving between their homes. She had developed the habit of evening walks years ago, in the war, when the days were so full of urgency that the only way to process them was to move through a slower version of the world and let things settle.
Katara walked without direction and eventually found herself in a small park near the inner wall. The park had a fountain, nothing elaborate, just a stone basin with water trickling into it from a carved channel, the kind of thing that existed in cities simply for decoration as they were so far from any real water. She sat on the bench nearest the fountain and listened.
She was trying to be honest with herself.
The thing she'd been setting aside for a year had developed, in the last three days, into something with more shape. She could feel it in the way she'd been aware of Zuko's position in every room they'd shared. In the fifteen minutes he'd spent at the head of the table that afternoon had sat with her differently than anything else that had happened in three days of meetings, how her eyes kept finding him across rooms and then finding something else to look at. She was not stupid. She could identify what was happening but also was not willing to put a name to it, because putting a name to something gave it power, and that required you to do something about it, and she did not have the strength for that currently. She was not going to figure out what it meant tonight.
"You're out late."
She startled. He was on the path at the edge of the park, in plain dark clothes rather than his official robes, looking at her.
"So are you," she said, tilting her head trying to decipher if this was a trick of the light, merely conjured by her subconscious.
"I needed— yes." He looked at the park. "May I?"
She moved slightly on the bench. He came and sat at the far end of it, leaving enough space between them to be unambiguous.
The afternoon session," she said, eventually.
"The afternoon went well."
"Your opening remarks shifted the room."
He was quiet for a moment. "Something needed to shift it."
"It was the right thing to say."
"It was the truth, which sometimes amounts to the same thing."
She looked at the fountain. "I've been thinking about that. About how often the diplomatic thing and the true thing are different and which one actually works."
"The diplomatic thing works more often in the short term," he said. "The true thing works more often in the long term. The hard part is that most people in these rooms are optimising for the short term."
"Are you?"
He considered this seriously, which she appreciated, he gave real consideration to questions rather than reaching for the nearest defensible answer. "I'm trying not to be. I don't always succeed."
They sat in silence, the distant sound of the city being a city.
"I didn't know you'd come here," he said. "To this park, I mean. I come here sometimes during these things. When the meetings get too much."
"The meetings are a lot."
"They are. The work matters, I believe that, But they—"
"They have a quality."
"Yes." The almost-smile, audible in his voice even without seeing his face. "They have a quality."
"What do you do with it?" she asked. "When the work is important and it's too much."
He thought about it. "I try to remember what I'm actually working toward." He turned his head to her. "Do you know the village of Yangshui? In the northern colonial territories?"
"No."
"Small place. Mixed population, Earth Kingdom families and Fire Nation families who've been living alongside each other for two generations. The market there is… it's just a market. People selling things, people buying things, Earth Kingdom spices and Fire Nation spices on the same stall, children from both backgrounds running between the carts. I went there two years ago, just after the war ended, because it was in an area with a lot of tension and I needed to see what it was actually like. And it was just a market. The tension was real, the old fears were real, but the people were buying food and negotiating prices, the children were playing. And I thought that's what we're doing. We're making sure that the market can keep existing, that the children don't grow up in another war."
She looked at him.
"I'm sorry," he said. "That's— I don't usually say things like that in—"
"No," she said. "Don't apologise." She looked at the fountain. "I needed to hear that."
They sat for a while longer, the fountain between them, the city around them. Long enough that the quality of the silence shifted several times and she stopped tracking the shifts.
When she finally stood to go, he stood too (the old formality) as she started to make a joke about it and then didn't, because it wasn't something to make a joke of, it was just who he was.
"Good night," she said.
"Good night, Katara."
She walked back through the lantern-lit streets of Ba Sing Se and thought about markets and children playing and the loneliness of carrying something enormous with nobody to put it down with, she did not examine too carefully the warmth she was carrying home alongside all of that.
The summit concluded on the fourth day with the signing of a preliminary framework agreement.
It was incomplete and would need three more rounds of negotiation before it became the kind of binding document that actually changed anything on the ground but the bones of it were solid and the water rights language was better than anything that had been in the room at the start of the week, the working group structure would bring the right people back to the table for the follow-up work. She had built a piece of this, her fingerprints were on three clauses because she had known what she was doing, not because she was standing next to someone who knew what he was doing.
She stood in the hall while the celebration drinks were being poured and felt proud yet tired in proportions she couldn't quite sort out.
Aang found her. He put his arm around her shoulders and said "we did good" with the inflection that you were part of this. She appreciated the acknowledgement but also noted, with honesty that came to her at the end of long days when her defenses were down, that being included in someone else's we was not the same as having her own I.
She did not say this, but simply said "we did" and pressed into his arm.
Across the room, the Fire Nation delegation was doing its exit handshakes. Zuko shook hands with Kuei, with Fanghui, with various ministers, with the Northern Water Tribe representative who had finally started contributing on the last day. He caught her eye across the room.
A nod, she returned it.
Then the doors, and he was gone, she turned back to the room that remained.
They flew north to Yangshui province two days later.
Appa's saddle at altitude was something that she had loved since she was fourteen; the cold, the height, looking at the world from somewhere she cannot be touched. She laid on her back and watched the clouds go over, letting the wind take the summit-thoughts and replace them with something closer to blankness, which was its own relief.
Sokka was giving Suki an extensive breakdown of the last few days. Aang was flying, one hand on the reins, thinking several things at once. She looked at clouds and thought about the ocean.
Katara had been the last Southern waterbender for fourteen years, something she had been aware of her entire life, but now the awareness cultivated a colder, darker spot within her. Oftentimes she found herself pushing to ignore it, the grand responsibility of reviving a culture that had been deemed lost, then Aang asked her to join him; she couldn’t ignore it anymore.
She thought about what Zuko had said, you understand what you're actually working toward. For him it was the market in Yangshui, the children running between the carts. For her, what? What was she holding in her mind when she sat at those tables and fought for clauses in documents that would take years to mean anything? It was the South. The cold, the blue of the ice at certain hours, the way the ocean smelled in winter, which was nothing like the way the ocean smelled anywhere else. It was her grandmother's hands, which knew things that Katara's hands had learned, a chain of knowledge passing from palm to palm across generations. It was the techniques she had recovered from old descriptions, from fragments she had figured out herself because there was no one left to teach her.
She needed to go home. She had known this for a while and had been postponing it because there was always more urgent work, the world needed her in the places where she could do the most immediate good, because going home meant sitting with the loss in a way that moving kept her from having to do. She would go, not yet, but eventually.
She watched the clouds. She thought, briefly, about a fountain in a park at night.
Yangshui province was in a difficult transition.
Fire Nation infrastructure, Earth Kingdom population, a Harmony Restoration Movement camp that had been operating for eight months and was still figuring out what it was doing. The Harmony Restoration Movement was one of Aang's most important ongoing projects; an organised effort to address the human questions left behind Fire Nation occupation; who owned the land, who could stay, what happened to the people who had been born here and knew no other home. These were not simple questions, but they needed to be worked through, one community at a time, and the working-through required people.
Katara went to the medical tents first, because that was where she always went first.
The camp had a small clinic staffed by two Earth Kingdom medics who had basic training and were currently overwhelmed. She spent the first afternoon making rounds, assessing, addressing the things that had been waiting for someone with better skills than they had. A child with an infected hand that had been treated incorrectly and was starting to show the wrong signs. An elderly man with a joint inflammation that had been misdiagnosed as something more serious and was actually quite manageable. A young woman with a fever that had been breaking and returning for a week, which turned out to be a water-borne illness that she'd been treating the symptoms of without treating the source.
She worked, and was good at this, you put your hands on someone and something changed without having to wait months for a policy document to filter down to the humans it was supposed to affect.
The child with the infected hand was eight years old and did not cry while Katara worked, just watched with enormous serious eyes, following the blue glow of the bending.
"Does it hurt?" Katara asked.
"It's cold," the girl said. "Nice cold."
"Tell me if it stops being nice cold." The infection cleared and the girl's hand was clean as she fell asleep in her mother's arms while Katara was still cleaning up.
Katara sat in the medical tent after, in the quiet and ache in her bones that followed difficult healing, and let herself be empty for a while.
She thought about the girl. About the knowledge in her hands that had fixed what the medics had been unable to fix, not because they were incompetent but because this particular skill had been made deliberately rare by the same violence that had made her the last one. This knowledge was hers. She had earned it through years of practice and the driving need to be useful to people who needed her. It was also something else; the inheritance of women she had never met, techniques that had been passed down and refined over generations, the collective knowledge of a culture that the war had nearly finished.
When she died, this would end, unless she did what was required of her.
She pressed the unless flat and went to find Aang for the evening's meeting.
The Harmony Restoration work in Yangshui was complex, which she had expected, but also in ways she hadn't fully anticipated. The camp's mediators were mostly young and idealistic from nations other than the ones whose conflict they were mediating, which created a problem, they understood the politics better than the people. They knew the formal history of Fire Nation colonisation, knew the policy arguments, could cite the dates, the legislative instruments and the Harmony Restoration principles, but they did not know what it felt like to be an Earth Kingdom farmer who had watched his father's land be re-titled under Fire Nation law, or what it felt like to be the Fire Nation child of that farmer's Fire Nation neighbor who had grown up working the adjacent land and knew no other home.
She spent the first three days observing, sitting in on meditations and listening. She watched where the process broke down, which was almost always at the same point, when the conversation shifted from the formal question to the human question, which was what happens to the people who are standing here right now?
The medics liked her, which she suspected had something to do with the work and the fact that she was clearly not going to tell them they were doing everything wrong. She appreciated they were doing something hard with inadequate tools and yet they were still trying.
Lieutenant Yuna, the Fire Nation liaison officer, was a different matter.
Yuna was thirty, methodical, and looked at Katara on the first day with wariness. Katara met this wariness directly.
"I'm not here to tell you how to do your job," she said.
"With respect," Yuna said, "that is what people say before they tell me how to do my job."
"With equal respect I genuinely don't have a better handle on the Fire Nation side of this situation than you do. You've been here eight months and I've been here three days." She took a breath. "What I might have is a different perspective on why the meditations keep stalling at the same point and I'd like to share that if you're interested. If you're not, that's fine too."
Yuna looked at her for a long moment, re-calibrated. "I'm interested."
They talked for two hours that first evening. Yuna knew the situation in granular detail; every family, property dispute and historical grievance on both sides. What she was less certain about was the emotional logic of why certain arguments landed and others didn't, why the same factual information produced different responses from different people. Katara had been doing this since she was fourteen. Together, over the two hours, they started developing a different approach to the mediation structure.
It was good work. She went to sleep on the third night tired but a weight lifting from her shoulders.
On the fifth day of their stay in Yangshui, she was coming back from the clinic when she saw the dispatch rider at the camp entrance.
Three dispatches that day. One for the camp administrator, one for Aang's delegation and one for the Fire Nation liaison office.
The one for Aang's delegation she read over Sokka's shoulder, because he had gotten to it first.
The Fire Nation was sending a senior representative to assess the situation and coordinate with the Harmony Restoration work. This representative would arrive at Camp Three within the week, the representative was Fire Lord Zuko. She read it twice.
Sokka, without looking up from the dispatch, said "So."
"So," she agreed.
She went to find Aang.
Aang had received the news. "It makes sense," he said. "The situation here is serious enough to warrant direct attention at the highest level."
"I know it makes sense."
"And you've been working well with his delegation at the summit—"
"I know, Aang."
He looked at her. He was perceptive; this was something she occasionally forgot because he devoted so much of his perceptiveness to other people. "Is this a problem?"
She thought about the park fountain. The silence that had been between them at the summit and that she had been very deliberately not giving a name to.
"No," she said. "We'll work well together here too."
He accepted this. Sometimes, he was too trusting of her answers, which was either a gift or a failure of nerve, and she spent the rest of the day doing the work in front of her and not thinking about the work that was coming.
He arrived on a Tuesday, in the late afternoon, in plain clothes.
She heard the stir before she saw him; the adjustment in the camp's energy that happened when someone important arrived, a kind of collective posture-correction that people didn't know they were doing. She was finishing a session with one of the mediators when it happened and came outside to find him standing in the centre of camp with Yuna and a map, pointing at something, wearing dark red and brown. He had brought guards, she could see them at the perimeter, and a small delegation of four officials, none of them in formal robes.
She walked across camp toward him. He looked up when she was about thirty feet away, and something in his expression shifted.
"The councils," she said, when she was close enough. "I've been working with them for five days. They're not ready for a formal meeting yet but I have a framework that might get them there."
"Can I see it?"
"Come inside."
She laid out the framework on the large table in the camp's main meeting space; all the documents, pre-war land records, jurisdictional analysis, the parallel jurisdiction structure she'd built with its joint committee provision. She walked him through it the same way she'd walked Yuna through it, from the evidence base through the logical structure to the practical implementation.
He read. He asked questions, aimed at the actual stress points in the structure, the places where it was most likely to fail, he'd identified all the same weaknesses she'd identified and worried about.
"The joint committee," he said. "The rotating chair is smart but the first six months will be the hardest. You'll need someone to hold it while both councils are still learning how to use it."
"I know. I was thinking of a neutral mediator, someone with no stake in the local land questions?"
"From which nation?"
"That's the problem." She looked at the documents. "Whoever it is, one side will perceive them as biased toward the other. It might need to be someone with a foot in both, someone from the colonies themselves."
"There are people like that. Born here, raised here, both cultures in them." He looked at her. "Most of them have been invisible to both sides for their entire lives."
"Invisible in a way that might be useful now."
"Exactly," He turned a page. "The southern district boundary, this line here isn't accurate. The pre-war records you're working from were transcribed from older records and there was an error in the transcription. The original Fire Nation survey puts the boundary here." He moved his finger slightly to the left. "I had someone verify it against the archive copies last month."
She looked at where his finger indicated. The difference was small, maybe a quarter mile, but it would affect three properties directly and have implications for two others. "Why were you looking at those records last month?"
He met her eyes. "Because I knew this was coming, I've been preparing."
She held his gaze for a moment. "Thank you," she said. "I'll revise the map."
"We can do it now if—"
"Tonight," she said. "I want to think things through first."
He nodded.
That evening, the camp had its weekly shared meal, a tradition that the Camp Three director had established in the first month, everyone eating together regardless of national affiliation, practising the habit of the same table. It was one of those small things that she'd initially been sceptical of and had come to believe was genuinely important.
She sat between Sokka and Bea, the camp mediator who had a talent for saying the right thing to the wrong person. Zuko was four seats down, across from Aang. She watched them talk and she was aware that Bea was watching her with an expression of mild interest.
"You keep track of where he is in the room," Bea said.
"I'm aware of the whole room."
"More specifically him."
"He's a head of state in a sensitive diplomatic situation. It's reasonable to be aware of his position."
Bea ate something. "Sure."
Sokka, on Katara's other side, made a sound.
"Stay out of it," Katara said, without looking at him.
"I'm not in it," Sokka said, immediately. "I'm just sitting here eating."
"Your eating has a quality right now."
"My eating always has a quality."
Bea was still watching her with the expression. "I'm not saying anything," Bea said.
"Good," Katara said.
"I'm just noting what I observe."
"Please stop observing."
Bea smiled and went back to her food. Katara looked at her own food and thought about what it meant that two different people in the same evening had noted the same thing about her, and decided that she could think about what it meant later.
The next morning she woke early and went to the edge of camp where the irrigation channels began and bent water in the pre-dawn dark.
She did this when she could, found water and worked with it, not for any purpose but because she needed the contact. She had learned this about herself in the war, if she went too long without bending for its own sake, something went tight in her chest.
The irrigation water was different from the ocean. Slower, carrying the mineral memory of the land it had been routed through. She worked with it carefully, feeling its character, practising the finesse she needed for the mediation situation, the ability to read flow and redirect it without forcing, which was also a useful way to think about negotiation.
She was deep in this, fully present in the practice, when she felt the presence of someone standing a short distance away.
She let the water down gradually and turned.
Zuko was standing on the path with a cup of tea, he was in his plain clothes again.
"I didn't mean to interrupt," he said.
"You're not interrupting." She let the last of the water settle. "Early riser?"
"My uncle always said the best hour was just before the world started moving." He came a few steps closer. "I didn't know you practised like that."
"Every morning I can." She dried her hands on her sleeve. "You?"
"When I can." He looked at the irrigation channels. "The water here is different from the coast."
"Everything carries the character of where it's been." She looked at the channels too. "What do you do with the firebending when it's just for itself? What do you practice?"
He was quiet for a moment. "Precision and Control. I spent a long time— when I was young, when my father was still—" He stopped and started again. "I was trained to produce power. I've spent the last several years working on the opposite, the smallest flame I can make and hold."
She looked at him. "Why?"
He met her eyes. "Because it's harder and because the people around me were afraid of Fire Nation bending for a long time."
She was quiet.
"I don't always manage it," he said. "The fear doesn't disappear because I want it to but it was something I could do."
"I understand that," she said. "The want to reshape what you are so the world can receive it better."
"Yes." He looked at the sky, slowly shifting colour as the sun broke through the clouds. "I'm not sure how healthy it is, long term."
"Probably not very." She picked up her things. "But it comes from a good place."
"Does it? Or does it come from shame?"
She looked at him again. He had a habit of asking questions like that, directly and without preamble, it wasn’t something Katara was used to, most people didn't ask questions that cut right to the difficult centre of what they were discussing.
"Probably both," she said. "I think most good impulses come from somewhere complicated but that doesn't make them less good."
Something in his face opened slightly. "That's— yes. That's probably right."
She walked back toward camp, and he fell into step beside her, neither of them mentioned that they had been having a conversation that was not about the work.
She found him again, unexpectedly, two days later.
She had been looking for a quiet corner to revise the framework documents and she'd ended up drifting toward the medical tent's dry-season annex, which was underused and had a good table with reasonably comfortable light.
He was there.
Sitting outside the annex on an upturned crate, with two children she didn't recognise; a Fire Nation boy of about seven and an Earth Kingdom girl of about five and a small flame on his palm that was shifting shapes. A hawk. A lizard. A running deer. The children were transfixed, leaning in.
She stopped at the edge of the clinic clearing and watched.
The girl reached for the flame. He pulled it back, fast and smooth, no interruption to the shape, he rebuilt the shape further from her fingers and said something she was too far away to hear, the girl laughed and accepted the new distance.
This was the thing about him that she kept adding to her internal record of him. He was careful. She thought about what he'd said about practising the smallest flame, wanting to reshape what he was so the world could receive it. She thought about her own bending, the way it had been redirected after the war towards service, having done this partly by choice and partly by the world's expectations
After a while they ran off. He sat quietly, flame extinguished, looking at his hand.
She walked over, he heard her and looked up.
"Don't make that face," she said.
"What face?"
"The one where you're checking whether I'm judging you for it."
He was quiet. "Old habit."
"I know." She sat on a nearby crate. "Those children were lucky."
"They were bored."
"Still." She shrugged, and looked at her notes. "When did you stop flinching when people from other nations reacted to your firebending?"
"I haven't entirely. I've gotten better at waiting for the actual response rather than preempting the reaction I expect." He looked at his hand. "There was a period early on in the first year after the war where I would catch myself doing things with fire and then watching for fear in the room, looking for the moment when they remembered what it meant."
"Did they? Remember?"
"Sometimes. Less often now." He looked up. "You?"
She was quiet for a moment. "There was a period when I would stop mid-healing if a patient tensed. I would stop and wait and check." She cast her gaze to the side. "I spent a lot of time apologising for having skills."
He looked at her, not with pity but recognition.
"What changed?" he asked.
"I stopped apologising… or well I'm in the process of stopping." She looked at her notes again. "I decided the skills were the skills, I worked for them, but it came from somewhere that wasn't a choice and spending energy apologising for it wasn't energy I didn't have to spare."
"That sounds—" He stalled. "Harder than it sounds."
"Much harder." She looked up. "Still working on it."
He nodded. "Me too."
They worked in the afternoon light, her with the documents, him with whatever correspondence he'd brought out to sit with and she was aware that this was the most comfortable she'd been with anyone in a long time.
It was Sokka's idea, because the town had exceptional grilled meats and Sokka had been informed of this by no fewer than three camp staff members and had decided it was practically a civic obligation to investigate.
The market was in the contested central square, which at night had lanterns lit and stalls full with the smell of cooking oil and spice in the warm air.
Katara bought a fish skewer from an old man with a fire-bright eye who told her, entirely unprompted, that he had been selling fish in this square for thirty-one years and had no intention of stopping because some bureaucrats in Ba Sing Se couldn't agree on which wall the fence post went.
She adored him.
She ate her fish and walked. Ahead, Sokka and Suki were moving toward whatever grilled-meat establishment had been recommended. Aang was beside her, talking to one of the camp mediators who had come along. The market moved around them, warm and indifferent.
After a while, she found herself a few steps ahead of the group and found Zuko a few steps behind her.
"These are good," she said, without turning.
"I know." He had one too. "I've been here before."
She turned at that. "When?"
"Two months ago. before the formal visit."
She looked at him. "You came alone?"
"Small team. No robes." He ate. "The old man with the fish told me about the fence post too."
"He seems to feel strongly about the fence post."
"He has a point about the fence post, actually. I've been trying to get the border commission to address it for six months."
She laughed, which surprised her, and he smiled at the laugh, his face fully in it. She looked at him for a moment too long and then looked at the market.
They walked together. The market wound around the square and down a side street. The stalls sold everything: food and fabric and tools and small decorations and Fire Nation spices alongside Earth Kingdom spices in the same stalls, years of proximity having blended the culinary traditions into something that was both and neither.
"What do you think of it?" he asked, after a while.
She considered the question seriously. "I think they're more complicated than the frameworks we've built for addressing them. I think most of the people here just want to know if their lives can continue, whether their children can go to school, if the water runs and whether the fields will still be theirs in ten years. I think the political question of ownership is less urgent to most people than the practical question of when the world will be stable and I think we sometimes get those priorities inverted."
"We do," he said. "The legal frameworks are necessary, but they take so long, and the people living with the uncertainty can't wait for the legal frameworks to catch up."
"Which is why this camp matters." She looked at a stall selling sweetened bean cakes. "The mediation work, the day-to-day work of figuring out how people can live next to each other it's doing something the policy process can't do."
"The policy process makes the conditions and the human work happens inside them."
She nodded, "And without the human work, the conditions don't become anything."
"Yes." He was quiet for a moment. "My uncle always said you couldn't boil tea by telling the water it was hot."
She looked at him sidelong. "That's either very wise or a complete non sequitur."
"He would say those are the same thing."
She smiled, something passed between them in the look that she did not try to intercept or redirect. She just let it pass, and then she looked at the street ahead as they walked.
"What are you working toward?" she asked.
"Yangshui market," he said immediately. "Now it's more of a feeling than a place, the people here are…" He trailed off. "What about you?"
She looked at the lantern-lit street. "The South," she said. "The water"
He was quiet for a moment. "You should go back," he said. "At some point. Not just visit but really go back and spend time."
"I will." She said it like a promise to herself. "When there's a good time."
"There's never a good time for the important things."
"No," she agreed. "There isn't." Ahead, Sokka made a triumphant sound that could only mean he had located the grilled meats.
Two days later, a working group meeting that was supposed to include six people ended up including only two because the Earth Kingdom representatives were delayed by a road issue and the Fire Nation junior minister had developed a fever.
Yuna put her head in the meeting room doorway, looked at Katara and Zuko sitting on opposite sides of the table, and said, "Do you want to start without them or reschedule?"
"Start without," they said, simultaneously.
Yuna looked between them as though she just had a hypothesis confirmed, and left.
They worked for four hours on the southern district property documentation, which was the most technically complex part of the framework, the piece where the pre-war records were most fragmented and the most careful reconstruction was required. She had been working on it alone for three days and had gotten as far as she could get alone, which was most of the way but not all of it. He knew the Fire Nation archive records in a way that filled the gaps.
They worked at the same table, spreading documents between them, and it was good. She liked working with someone who worked the same way she did; silently when thinking, verbally when discussing, with no need to narrate the process. He put something down when it was done and picked up the next thing. He did not require her to confirm that what he'd done was good, he knew when it was good and she did too so they moved on.
By the middle of the afternoon they had built something solid; a documented reconstruction of the southern district's property history, accurate enough to support the jurisdictional framework she'd designed, cross-referenced against both the Earth Kingdom municipal records and the Fire Nation administrative archive.
She looked at it.
"This is good," she said.
"Yes." He was reading back through his section. "You know what this means for the Choi family claim."
"That their boundary dispute with the Hsieh household has been based on a faulty transcription for forty years and they're both right."
"Which means the fence actually goes through the middle of the Hsieh vegetable garden."
She rubbed her eyes. "We're going to have to tell them."
"We're going to have to tell them."
They looked at each other.
She laughed first, and then he did, an entirely new problem created from solving one, and there was nothing to do about it except find it funny.
"We'll bring them both to the table at the same time," she said. "So neither of them can come to us privately first."
"Yes." He was still smiling. "You're good at this."
"At property disputes?"
"At peace."
She looked at her notes. "I've been doing it for two years, you learn what works."
"You do but it also requires what people actually need, which is different from what they say they need, that's something you either have or you don't."
She looked up at him.
"I'm paying you a compliment," he said.
"I know." She was quiet for a moment. "I'm not used to it."
The words came out before she'd decided to say them, she heard them land and waited.
"Not used to compliments in general?" he asked, with genuine curiosity. "Or from people you work with?"
"From people I work with." She thought about how to say the next thing. "I'm usually the support."
He was quiet for a long moment, "That's a waste."
She looked at the table. "Yes," she said. "I've started to think so too."
The rain started on the third day after that.
The camp's paths turned to mud and the meeting tent developed a leak that Yuna addressed with a combination of buckets and barely concealed fury. Everyone's patience shortened by approximately twenty percent.
The dispatches were delayed. Two of the scheduled mediation sessions had to be moved because the space flooded. Katara found herself, on the second afternoon, in possession of several hours of freedom.
She went to the covered annex of the medical tent, which was dry, and spread her documents out and read. The pre-war record situation was, the more she looked at it, significantly more complex than anyone had realised when they'd started, there were gaps and deliberate omissions, each one she found gave her a clearer picture of how the situation had actually developed, which gave her better tools for understanding what it would take to undo it.
She had been there for twenty minutes when she heard the rain change quality, footsteps arrived outside and paused at the entrance.
She looked up.
Zuko stood at the annex entrance, slightly wet, holding a folder.
"The main meeting tent," he said, "is now approximately a pool."
"Yuna's going to take it personally."
"She already has." He looked at the space. "Is there room?"
She moved her bag. He came in and settled on the other side of the table with his folder, and they worked in the sound of the rain. It was the third time they had worked in proximity like this.
After a while he said "What are you reading?"
"Pre-war Water Tribe maritime authority documentation. I've found three separate archive sources that contradict each other about the territorial extent, which suggests the Fire Nation was deliberately maintaining ambiguity about what we were actually entitled to."
"Deliberately?"
"The ambiguity was useful. If nobody could agree on what the Water Tribe's pre-war rights were, it was easier to simply not address them."
He was quiet for a moment. "I didn't know that."
"I know." She turned a page. "You're not personally responsible for every deliberate policy choice the Fire Nation made before you were born."
"No but I'm responsible for addressing what it left behind."
"You're addressing it." She looked at him. "That's actually what you're doing. It's slow and it's messy, there are a hundred things pulling at your attention at once, but you are doing it."
He held her gaze. "How do you know?"
"Because I watch how you work." She heard herself say this and was not embarrassed by it. "You showed up here in plain clothes and asked what was actually happening, you found me a pre-war archive record that I needed and hadn't known existed."
He looked at the table. "I've been thinking about the archive," he said. "The Fire Nation one. How much of it has information that other nations need and don't know exists, information about their own history."
"That's exactly right."
"I've been— I've been building a case to the council for an access program. Not full access, that's not politically possible yet, but structured access for research. Scholars from all nations." He swallowed. "It's going slowly."
"But you're doing it."
"Trying to." He turned a page in his folder. "What you said earlier about the Southern Water Tribe's maritime rights. The ambiguity was deliberate, but the underlying record exists. I can help you find it, if you want. The actual original documents, not the transcriptions."
She looked at him. "You'd do that."
"I'd be doing the right thing, which is different."
"You'd still be doing it."
He met her eyes. "Yes."
They stayed in the rain for the rest of the afternoon, and she did not let herself press anything flat.
She did not plan it. Katara had been telling herself, for weeks now, that noticing was not doing. That she could be in rooms with him and notice whatever she saw but still hold it at a distance.
She had believed this until the fourth evening of the rain.
The evening had ended early, nothing to be done when the paths were rivers and the meeting tent was a bucket collection, and people had drifted back to their sleeping quarters. The camp quieted into the sound of rain. She should have gone to her tent, but she had been moving along a path for weeks that she knew where it was going and had been telling herself she would stop before she got there, and now was finding that stopping was more impossible than continuing.
She went to the covered workspace at the camp's far end instead, and sat in the small dry space with the rain making a wall of sound around it, spreading her documents out, she did not read them.
She felt something for him. It had been building since the fountain in Ba Sing Se, or possibly since Omashu eight months ago, or maybe even since the war, she couldn’t name it but a warmth had been growing inside her for so long it began to frighten her. It was not infatuation, she had been in enough difficult situations to know what infatuation was and what it wasn't. It was something more solid than that, that had been growing in the dark for a while and had arrived fully formed when she was ready to acknowledge it.
She was also in a relationship. She loved Aang.
She heard his footsteps before she saw him. She would have known his footsteps in the dark by now.
"Katara," he said. He stopped when he saw her, something in his face.
"I'll find somewhere else," he said.
"You don't have to."
He came in out of the rain and stood at the entrance of the covered space, the space was small and the rain made a wall around them.
She had been thinking about what he said, the people I trust, and about her mother, the shape of the life she had been living compared to the life she wanted to live. She had been thinking about this for four rainy days, she was tired and his presence had become too loud within her to ignore.
"Katara," he said, just her name.
She stood up.
She was standing and then the distance between them was much smaller, his face was very close, she could feel the warmth that came off him and his hand came up and touched her jaw very carefully, as though asking a question.
“Katara,” he said again, her name a sigh on his lips.
She answered it.
The kiss was not tentative. She kissed him and felt him go still for a fraction of a second and then he kissed her back, one hand in her hair, the sound of the rain was very loud.
It was heat and pressure and a desperate, hunger finally unleashed. It was the taste of rain and something uniquely, fiercely Zuko. A small, shocked sound escaped her throat, swallowed instantly by his mouth.
Katara’s hands, which had been clenched at her sides, flew up. They didn’t push him away but instead fisted in the rich fabric of his tunic, pulling him closer. She kissed him back with equal fervour, all her frustration, her confused longing pouring into the connection. His arms wrapped around her, one hand splayed against the small of her back, pressing her firmly against the solid plane of his chest. The other tangled in the hair at the nape of her neck.
His tongue traced the seam of her lips, and she opened for him willingly, the sensation sending a jolt of desire straight to her core. It was a dizzying heat that had nothing to do with firebending. It was the heat of skin, of shared breath, of a need so profound it was terrifying.
Her thoughts scattered like leaves in a storm. There was only this; the slick slide of his mouth on hers, the rough texture of his tunic under her fingers, the hard muscles of his back shifting as he held her. The drizzle continued, a few stray drops catching on their eyelashes.
His mouth left hers, trailing a path down her jaw to the sensitive column of her throat. She gasped, her head falling back, offering him more. His lips were hot, his breath hotter against her damp skin.
“Zuko,” she breathed, the word a plea and a prayer.
His hands moved, one sliding from her back to her hip, gripping her possessively. The other hand rose, his fingers deftly finding the intricate knot of her Water Tribe sash. A single, firm tug loosened it. The heavy blue fabric fell away, slithering to the stone floor with a soft whump. Her tunic, now loose, gaped open at the collar.
The cooler air on her newly exposed skin was a shock. He pulled back just enough to look at her, his eyes blazing with a fire that stole the breath from her lungs. His gaze travelled from her eyes, down to her parted, kiss-swollen lips, to the open neckline of her tunic. The sight of the smooth skin of her throat and collarbone, glistening with a fine sheen of rain and perspiration, made his breath hitch.
Slowly, he brought his hand up. He didn’t touch her skin. He hooked a single finger under the loose collar of her tunic and gently pulled it aside, just enough to reveal the delicate curve of her shoulder.
He lowered his head, his lips hovering a hair’s breadth from that newly bared skin. His warm breath washed over it, raising goosebumps. Katara trembled, her knees going weak, held up only by the steel band of his arm around her and the dizzying promise of his mouth on her skin. She was lost in a sea of sensation, drowning in him. Every coherent thought had burned away, leaving only the aching want.
It was in that perfect, heated silence, as his lips finally made contact with her shoulder in a kiss that was somehow more intimate than all that had come before.
When she pulled back, the distance between them was still small. She was breathing harder than she wanted to be. He looked at her, she didn't have a word for his expression.
She thought, Aang.
The thought landed like cold water as she stepped back.
"I—" She stopped. Her hands were shaking, which she hadn't expected. "That was— I shouldn't have done that."
"Katara."
"I'm with Aang." She said it like an anchor. "I'm still… I haven't—"
He nodded, his jaw was tight. "I know."
"I'm sorry." She meant it, it wasn't enough, she knew it wasn't enough.
"Don't apologise," he said, which was not quite what she'd expected.
"I should."
"Maybe." He looked at her. "I don't regret it. I should probably regret it but I don't."
She looked at him, and the terrible thing was that she didn't regret it either. She regretted the timing. She regretted what she'd done to Aang, who was in his tent three hundred feet away and had no idea. She did not regret the kiss.
"I need to think," she said.
"I know."
"I need… I need to go."
"Yes."
She went back out into the rain. She was already wet by the time she reached her tent, as she sat on her cot and listened to the rain on the canvas.
She had done something she couldn't undo. She had also, for the first time in longer than she could clearly remember, felt entirely like herself.
She did not know what to do with both of those things being true at the same time.
The rain stopped on the fifth day.
Katara was handling it, working in the same rooms with him. She did not allow the night of the rain to be visible on her face, nor did she seek him out, and she made sure that when they were in the same space she was doing something concrete and useful.
He was handling it too, he gave her the space she clearly needed, working alongside her in the groups they were required to work in with the same focused attention he brought to everything and no indication of what she knew he was managing. If anyone was watching for signs, they would not have found them.
Aang was the person she'd held on to through the worst years of her life, he was the person who had been present for the whole of her becoming who had known her at fourteen, stubborn and afraid, who had fought beside her and who had looked at her with full knowledge of all she was and loved her. She was also trying to be honest about the conversation she'd been having with herself, about what kind of love it was. The question of whether she and Aang made each other larger or whether she had been making herself smaller to fit better into the space his life required.
She did not think he had asked her to. She thought it was something she had done herself, with good intentions, in service of someone she loved and a future she wanted to believe in. But the effect was the same regardless of the cause, and the effect was: she was twenty-two years old and she did not know who she was outside the role she'd been playing.
She was working on knowing. She was trying. She just didn't know if she could do the working and the trying from inside the current arrangement.
She found the moment on the last evening before the scheduled departure.
Aang was not oblivious.
She did not tell him what had happened in the rain. She could not, it was still too raw from the night before to put it in any order that made sense. She told herself she would wait, that she would figure out what she needed to say, that she owed him a real conversation and not a panicked confession.
She was also being a coward. She knew it and hated it but did it anyway, which was the nature of cowardice.
At dinner two days after the rain, she sat beside Aang, and he told her about a letter from the Northern Air Temple site, they'd found another section of pre-war records, his face was lit with it, and she loved him. She also thought, I have been trying to become the person you need and I'm not sure I know the person I actually am. Her mind spiralled, The airbenders need mothers. The South needs a waterbender. Everyone needs something. And I gave myself away piece by piece and called it love.
That's not fair to him. He didn't ask for that. He doesn't know. Which was the most honest thing she'd been able to think in months, and it was devastating.
On the last evening before they were supposed to leave camp, she found him at the edge of the camp looking at the stars. The stars were clear after the rain.
"Katara," he said.
"I know," she said.
A long pause.
"I don't want to have this conversation," she said. "I know we have to."
"We don't have to tonight."
"But we do eventually." She steadied herself. "I love you. I want you to know that first."
"I know," he said.
"But I think there's a conversation I've been not-having with myself for a long time, and it affects you. I think I've not been fair to either of us."
He was quiet.
"I've been—" She felt around for the words. "I've been afraid that I gave myself away without noticing. That I became what you needed, what everyone needed and I stopped knowing what I actually was underneath that." She looked at him. "And I don't think that's a problem you caused. I think it's something I did. I just— I can't keep not-saying it."
Aang looked at the stars.
"I know," he said finally.
She waited.
"I've known for a while," he said, "that you were working something out. I kept thinking if I gave you time—" He stopped. "I wanted to believe that if I didn't push, it would come back to what it was but I think we've both been afraid of this conversation."
"Aang—"
"I love you," he said. "That's not going anywhere." He looked at her.
She felt the prick of tears, unexpected, and blinked them back.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"Don't." He looked at the stars. "We both knew. For a while."
They stayed there a while, he was her best friend. The love was real but it was not enough.
She walked back to her tent alone to lay on her cot and felt scraped clean, she had not told him about the kiss.
She told Sokka in the morning.
He went still, and then he hugged her very hard. "Are you okay?"
"Yes. Really."
"And Aang?"
"He will be."
He looked at her for a long moment, then nodded.
"Good," he said, and did not ask the other question, the one she could see behind his eyes. She was grateful.
Zuko was leaving that morning too. There was a formal farewell with Aang and Yuna and the councils, brief and correct. She stood at the edge of the gathering.
He found her after, while his delegation was preparing to move.
"The framework," he said. "It's solid. I'll have Yuna send weekly reports."
"Good." She nodded. "Thank you. For the council notes."
"You would have gotten there."
"I know but it was faster with you."
Something in his face, that familiar almost-warmth, the thing she'd been searching for without meaning to.
"The night of the rain," he said quietly, not loud enough for anyone else to hear.
She met his eyes.
"I know things are different now than they were that night," he said. "I don't… I'm not asking for anything. I just want you to know that I haven't—" He stopped, struggling to find the proper words. "That it wasn't nothing."
"No," she said. "It wasn't."
They looked at each other.
"Two months," he said. "The Reconstruction Summit in the capital. You'll be there?"
"Probably."
"I'll make sure there's a proper Southern Water Tribe seat."
"Thank you."
He walked back to his delegation. She thought, two months is not very long.
Katara’s last memory of the Fire Nation capital was the Agni Kai; the white lightning and the desperate cold sprint of her waterbending. Zuko falling, her saving him. She had stayed in that memory for years, feeling the cold of it in her hands whenever she was very tired or very afraid.
She had not been back since.
She stood on the transport ship's deck as the harbour came into view and breathed volcanic air for the first time in six years and tried to receive it simply, without the weight of the memory.
Caldera City in spring.
She remembered it was beautiful. The volcano rim and the terraced city and the harbour below. But remembering and seeing were different; the city climbing the inner walls of the caldera in layers of red and black and gold. The harbour mouth opened to a sea that in the morning light looked like the blue-grey of the Southern Ocean in early winter.
She stood on the transport ship's deck as they came in and breathed volcanic air, sulphur and warm stone, she thought, you are a long way from the South.
The South. She thought about the South all the time now, in a way she hadn't when she was younger, when she'd been in such a hurry to leave it and prove herself. She thought about the way the ice looked at certain hours, blue-white, and the cold of the water, the fact that there was no one left down there who could do what she could do. No one to teach and no one who understood the particular knowledge in her hands, not the fighting nor the healing, but the waterbending itself, the way the water felt when you were Southern and you bent it, the current of something ancient and wild that ran through your whole body.
She was the last person who knew what that felt like.
She needed to go home, she had known this for months, but there were other things that needed to be done first.
She was introduced as Master Katara of the Southern Water Tribe, which was better than the Avatar's companion. A guard who looked as though he had been selected for his absolute reliability showed her to guest quarters that were large and comfortable, looking out over the palace's inner courtyard. On the table inside the door was a small card, written in Fire Nation characters, which she could now read having spent the past two years making sure she could read the language of the nation she kept having to negotiate with.
The library on the east wing is open to delegation members at all times.
Z
She stood with the card in her hand for a long moment. Then she unpacked, and went to find the library.
The east wing library was extensive and wonderful. The organisation logic was not intuitive to her, she needed about ten minutes to figure out the system, which was chronological within categories that were organised thematically rather than alphabetically, but once she understood it, it was elegant.
She had been there for perhaps twenty minutes, in the third-floor reading room with the window overlooking the mountain, when the door opened.
He was in his plain clothes again.
She looked at him. "How did you know I'd want to read tonight?"
"I didn't," He came to the table. "I thought, if you had any time at all, this is where you'd go."
She looked back at the documents she'd been reading. "Is that a criticism?"
"It's the opposite." He set his tea down and didn't sit. "May I?"
They looked at each other across the small table.
"Two months," she said.
"Two months."
"We haven't—" She stopped. "This is the first time we've been alone since the camp."
"I know."
"I've thought about what I want to say when we were alone, and now I'm here and I'm not sure I have it."
"You don't have to say anything."
"I want to keep doing the work," she said. "The political work, the peace work. I want to do it in my own right, not as a support role. I want to go to the South and spend real time there. I want to find out what I know that needs to be preserved and figure out how to preserve it." Her mind raced trying to find purchase on the words. "And I want—" She stopped again.
He waited, he was very good at waiting.
She looked up. "I've been thinking about what I did and why, and I keep coming back to the same place. I wasn't ready to see what I was doing when I was doing it. I was running too fast to look at where I was going. That's not an excuse."
He met her eyes. "I'm not asking you to justify it to me."
"I know, I'm doing it anyway because I want you to understand where I am. I'm not asking you for anything tonight either. I'm still— there are things I need to do and I'm not putting something on you before I've done them."
"Okay," he said, nodding gently.
"But I'm not pretending I don't feel what I feel." She looked at him steadily. "Whatever that's worth."
He looked back at her with that look, the one she had spent an agonising amount of time searching his face for.
"It's worth a great deal," he said.
They sat in the quiet of the library, and after a moment he slid a piece of paper across the table.
"I found something," he said. "In the archive while I was preparing for the summit." He slid a list toward her, pre-war trade documents in Fire Nation archives, untranslated, relating to Southern Water Tribe shipping lanes.
"These would change our jurisdictional arguments," she said.
"I know."
"You know." She looked at him.
"I wanted you to see them. The history is all yours and I don't think it should be locked in a library."
She held his gaze.
"Thank you," she said, earnestly.
"You can start reading tonight." He found a second cup and poured her tea without asking, they spread the documents between them.
They talked in the margins of the texts; about the pre-war routes, about the jurisdiction implications, what the documents proved and what they suggested. It was the best intellectual conversation she'd had in months.
At some point she looked up and found him watching her, not the documents.
"What?" she said.
"Nothing." He looked back at his page. "You're different here than in meetings."
"This is a library."
"You relax," he said. "You stop being the room's representative and you're just reading."
She considered this. "I like reading."
"I know." A pause. "I like watching you read."
She looked at him. He met her eyes without apology. The library was very quiet. She was alone with him in a room full of the documents of her heritage. She looked back at her page.
She did not, this time, press anything flat.
The Reconstruction Summit ran for three days.
She had a nameplate.
Master Katara, Southern Water Tribe Representative.
She looked at it the first morning for longer than was probably visible and felt herself take a deep breath.
The summit was more complex than Ba Sing Se. More nations represented with more interests in the room. The agenda was ambitious; reconstruction financing across all affected territories, cultural restoration programs, territorial boundary documentation, and what the official agenda called Historical Acknowledgement Frameworks, a category that the official language made sound procedural and that was the hardest conversation on the agenda, the one that had no procedural solution. Historical Acknowledgement, what does it mean for a nation to acknowledge the harm it has done?
She had been thinking about this question since before the summit. She had lived inside it her whole life, the Southern Water Tribe's harm was documented and had happened to people she had loved, the question of what acknowledgment meant, what it was owed, and how it functioned in relation to the ongoing business of living in a world with the people who had done the harm, this was not abstract for her. It never had been.
The Earth Kingdom delegate who brought it to its sharpest point was a man named Meng, representing one of the rural northern districts.
He stood during the second afternoon session and spoke quietly, without notes, in a voice that demanded attention even from the most powerful seats of the room.
He said his village had been burned four times in forty years, the first time he was three years old, he didn't remember it, but his grandmother did and she had described it to him every year on the anniversary until she died. The second time he was nine, and he remembered it, what he remembered was not the fire but the quality of ordinariness that had preceded it, the smell of his mother baking bread soon replaced by the smoke of the fire. He said the third and fourth times were documented, were in the historical record, had been acknowledged in post-war statements and he was grateful for those statements.
The room was very still.
He was not here for an apology. He had understood, from the political coverage of these summits, that apology was not on the agenda and he was not here to demand it. He was here to say that his children were growing up in the same village where he had, and that he needed the world to understand what that meant for how they thought about what reconstruction was for. It was the possibility of his children growing up in a village that was allowed to finish baking its bread.
When he sat down, the room was still in a way that was different from silence.
Katara did not speak. Meng looked at her twice as he spoke with a look to check whether he was being heard.
He was.
When the room's stillness had held for long enough, Zuko spoke.
He said that acknowledgement mattered, that the Documentation Project would gather testimony, the true record needed to be built so it could not be denied. He said it plainly, without diplomacy-softening. He claimed the responsibility of his nation's history and said, we have to try.
The Earth Kingdom delegate looked at him and said "That's more than I expected."
"I know," Zuko said.
Katara sat in her seat at the head table and felt something move through her. The recognition of someone carrying something without being crushed by it, the difference between guilt that shrinks and guilt that acts.
The state dinner was long. She was seated near Aang, who was near Zuko's end of the table.
A senior council member named Kei leaned toward her during the third course. "You made an impression in the Historical Acknowledgment session."
"I didn't say anything."
"Meng noticed how you listened, he told me, and I want you to know that the Documentation Project was on the Fire Lord's agenda two months in advance, before today. He fought for it."
She looked at Kei, not sure why he was telling her this.
"He fights a lot of fights that don't get noticed," Kei said, and turned to the next course.
She looked at the end of the table, where Zuko was in conversation with an ambassador, turned slightly away. The line of his profile, the way he listened.
She looked at her food.
After dinner she went to the garden, sat by the fountain and named the thing.
She was in love with Zuko.
She had been in love with him, she thought, for longer than she'd let herself know since the fountain in Ba Sing Se or possibly the rainy afternoon in the covered corner of the camp when she'd kissed him and felt herself. The love had the shape of something that had been growing in the dark and was now standing in the light, requiring acknowledgement.
She had also kissed him while she was with Aang.
She was carrying this. It had been two months since the breakup, which was not very long and she had not figured out how to confess to Aang something that could not be undone, she was not sure confessing served anything other than her own need to feel absolved, which was not enough of a reason.
She was trying to figure out what she owed and to whom, and she was very tired of trying to figure out what she owed.
"Katara."
She looked up.
He was standing at the garden entrance, he looked as surprised to see her as she was to see him.
"The garden is my aunt's," he said, coming to the fountain. "Azula's. I try to keep them nurtured."
She looked at the plants differently.
"She's getting better?" Katara asked.
"Some days."
"I've been wanting to say something to you," he said. His voice was different, softer. "Since the rain."
She waited.
"I know you ended things with Aang." He held her gaze. "I know that was… that had to happen for its own reasons. I'm not— I don't want to make myself part of a reason if I'm not supposed to be."
"You're part of a reason," she said quietly.
He was still.
"Not the whole reason," she said. "Not even most of it, but I don't want to lie to you." She looked at the water in the fountain. "I kissed you while I was still with him. That was… I'm not proud of it. I broke up with him because I needed to be honest with myself, not because of you specifically, but the fact of you, of whatever this is, it made it harder to pretend I didn't know what I knew."
He listened. He did not try to absolve her, which she appreciated.
"What do you know?" he said.
She looked at him.
"I also need… I need to go to the South. I need to do something that's mine, that isn't about being someone's anything. Before I'm yours, if I'm going to be yours, I need to know who I am first."
"I know," he said. "I've been watching you for months."
"It won't be quick."
"I'm not asking it to be."
She looked at him, as she reached over and took his hand. He looked down at her hand in his. Something in his face opened, not for anyone but the two of them.
"I'm not asking you to have it figured out," he said. "I just want to talk to you, see you, maybe even be in the same room as you."
"That's enough?" she said, a mist gathering over her eyes.
"Yes." He nodded, laying a delicate kiss over the top of her hand.
She went to the Earth Kingdom's coastal region.
Lu Hao was a port city with good breezes, unreliable post, and a coastal reconstruction project that needed someone who understood both the political and the practical aspects of Water Tribe maritime culture. She arrived in late spring and set up in a traveling office above a shipping company and began the work of understanding what the coastal communities needed and what the post-war agreements had and had not provided for them.
She had her own work. She had her seat at the table. The nameplate still read Master Katara, Southern Water Tribe Representative and it was going to keep reading that.
Zuko wrote.
The first letter arrived twelve days after she'd left the capital, forwarded through the official delegation dispatch channel, the outer envelope in the formal hand of his office and the inner envelope in his own.
Katara,
The Documentation Project has its first formal coordinator. Her name is Scholar Yue Li, from the Order of the White Lotus, which I thought would please you, given the White Lotus connection. Kei fought the appointment in council on procedural grounds, which took three sessions to navigate. It passed.
There's a small recognition ceremony next month. I'd like it if you were there, but I understand if the coastal work makes it impossible.
The water in the harbour today was the grey of the Southern Ocean in early winter. I don't know why I noticed that. I thought you might want to know.
—Z
She read this letter four times, and wrote back.
Zuko,
I am glad to hear of the Documentation Project and the appointment of Scholar Yue Li. Given her ties to the White Lotus, I can think of no one better suited for the task.
Please accept this letter as my formal acknowledgement for the record, as my work with the coastal tribes prevents me from attending the ceremony in person.
As for Kei, tell him that the Historical Acknowledgement process is not a matter of bureaucracy, but of justice. Should he continue to use procedural obstruction to stall this work, he will find the consequences are anything but procedural. I’ll leave you to find the diplomatic way to deliver that.
I saw the same water from the deck of my transport ship today. It made me think of home.
—Katara
He wrote back.
The letters continued.
They were not love letters, she didn't have a word for what they were. They were letters between two people who liked the continuation of a conversation that had been going on since Ba Sing Se. She wrote about the coastal work, the challenges of advocating for communities whose interests had been invisible to treaty negotiations for forty years. He wrote about the Documentation Project and the council politics and, once, briefly and without elaboration, about his sister's most recent assessment, which had been better than the last.
She wrote about a boy in Lu Hao named Tao who was twelve years old and had a remarkable natural aptitude for healing that would have been trained and developed if he'd been born in the North but which had nowhere to go in the South's current situation. She wrote about the anger she felt about this and she was not sure she would have said it to most people but she said it to him.
He wrote back, Anger at systems is not the same as despair about them. Anger is the part that knows what should be different. The despair would be believing nothing can change. You're not writing to me like someone who believes nothing can change.
She sat with this for a while.
She wrote back, No. I'm writing to you like someone who is going to figure out what to do about Tao specifically and then figure out how to create something that addresses the situation that produced Tao.
He wrote, I believe you.
She found herself, at the end of long days, looking forward to sitting down and writing. She had been ending days with exhaustion and had organised herself to expect nothing more from any given day than the completion of what was necessary. This was different. The end of the day had something in it now, somewhere to put the thoughts that the day had produced.
She was examining this, as she had promised herself she would examine things. What she found felt like herself in his letters. Not the her that was performing competence or pre-editing her thoughts before they came out. She wrote to him the way she talked to herself, which she had not done with anyone except Sokka in a very long time.
Sokka visited her for ten days in the middle of summer.
He arrived as he had been away from her for too long and had a lot of opinions accumulating. He helped with the coastal work, Sokka's combination of strategic intelligence and absolute shamelessness about asking the obvious question that everyone else was tiptoeing around had gotten them out of more impasses than she could count. He ate at a heroic rate. He told her about Suki, about his ongoing work with the Kyoshi Warriors, about the political situation in the North, about a series of events involving a komodo rhino that he made her promise not to tell anyone.
On the fifth day he read one of her letters over her shoulder.
She would have objected more strenuously if she hadn't been in the middle of writing it and wasn't, honestly, slightly relieved by the opportunity to not be alone with it anymore.
"You're writing a lot," he said.
"We correspond. It's professional correspondence about—"
"This paragraph is about the harbour."
She looked at the paragraph. It was about the harbour. She had been describing the light on the water at low tide and what it reminded her of, the longing for home that was not the same as wanting to be in the place but the wanting of the self that had formed in the place.
"It's… contextual," she said.
"Katara."
"Sokka."
He sat down across from her. He had the expression that meant he was not going to be deflected but was going to try not to be annoying about it. "How are you? Genuinely."
She put her pen down. "I'm good. I'm working on it. Being good, I mean. I'm better than I was."
"Are you happy?"
She thought about this. "I think I'm at the beginning of being happy. I think that's different from being happy and also probably the right order." She looked at the letter. "I broke up with Aang six weeks ago, Sokka. I don't think I'm supposed to be happy yet. I think I'm supposed to be… figuring it out."
"And the figuring it out includes—" He gestured at the letter.
"Includes writing letters about harbour light. Yes." She met his eyes. "It's not— I'm not doing anything. I'm writing letters. I'm being honest with him and he's being honest with me and we're figuring out what's possible and I'm trying to know who I am before I'm anyone's anything."
Sokka looked at her for a long moment. "That's very mature," he said, with the tone of someone who found maturity mildly suspicious.
"I've been thinking about it for a while."
"Is he—" He stopped. "Is he good to you? In the letters."
She thought about I believe you. Anger is the part that knows what should be different. About the library, the documents, the history is yours.
"Yes," she said.
Sokka looked at the harbour out the window. He was quiet for a while. "Okay," he said. "I'm going to trust you on this."
"Thank you."
"I reserve the right to have opinions later."
"I expect nothing less."
He reached over and ruffled her hair in the same way he'd been doing since she was four years old, which she still affected to hate.
"You seem more like yourself," he said. "Then you have in a while."
She nodded at him, a faint smile ghosting her lips.
She thought a lot, that summer, about the South.
She was not there but the South was with her, having been with her increasingly since the archive documents and the understanding of what had been taken and what she was carrying. She was the last one, what she was working out now was what it required of her.
She had been carrying the weight of the South as an obligation; grimly and in the background of everything else. This had been, she understood now, a form of disrespect. Not toward anyone else but toward the South itself. Toward the women who had passed these skills through darkness and violence so that they would reach her, treating something as a burden was a way of not quite honouring it. What she wanted was a different relationship with the carrying. The pride of someone who understood what she was the heir to and was choosing to be worthy of it.
She wrote to him about this.
He wrote back,
I've been thinking about something related. The history my nation produced, not just the war, but everything before it and everything it is built on.
I spent a long time carrying it as shame.
Which is honest; it should be carried with shame, some of it. But I've been finding, lately, that there's a difference between carrying shame about the past and carrying responsibility for the future. The responsibility is what you do with the shame.
She read this twice and then wrote back three pages.
In the early autumn, the northern colonial territories had a drought.
It was a bad drought, the worst in a generation, an agricultural crisis that was particularly acute in the contested regions where the jurisdictional confusion between Earth Kingdom and Fire Nation meant that nobody could agree on who was responsible for water access and who should be organising a response.
The farmers didn't care about the jurisdictional philosophy, they cared about whether their crops would survive.
Aang was needed at the Air Temple sites, where the recovery work had reached a critical phase. Sokka and Suki were managing a border incident in the south. She was the logical choice for the north; both for the waterbending and for the fact that she had built the jurisdictional framework that the contested zones were operating under and understood its weaknesses.
She knew the Fire Nation was sending someone. She knew who.
She arrived at the northern camp to find him there, already in a working session with the local water council. She was shown in. She listened for five minutes, then asked for a cup of water and bent it to show the engineers what she thought the problem was.
The main channel valve. A redesign of the outflow aperture to work efficiently at reduced flow rates. The kind of solution that required knowing waterbending in your hands rather than knowing about it; the felt sense of what water did when there wasn't enough of it, how it gathered, where it pooled.
She bent the water from the cup, shaping the flow, showing them. When she finished and looked up, Zuko was watching her.
She met his eyes briefly and turned back to the engineers.
"Can you implement this?"
They could.
The first morning, she went to the dry edge of the irrigation fields before dawn and worked. She was here for a long time in the early dark, her hands in the diminished water, feeling the system's rhythms, learning what remained. The drought had not taken everything, water gathered in the underground channels that the pre-war engineers had sunk deep enough to survive a dry season. There was more than it appeared.
She was deep in the practice when she heard someone arrive on the path nearby.
He sat on a large stone and watched her work without interrupting, which she appreciated. When she finally let the water down and turned, he was looking at her with the expression she had come to think of as specifically for her.
"I've missed watching you bend," he said.
"I've been bending."
"I know." He paused, "I mean just watching you, watching from the outside."
She came and sat on a neighbouring stone. "What does it look like from the outside?"
"Like you and the water are having a conversation." He thought about how to say the next thing. "A lot of benders I've seen work like they're giving orders. When you do it, it looks like you're asking questions and listening to the answers."
She looked at her hands. "Southern style," she said. "There's less about the formal force of it and more about the…" She felt for the word. "The current. Reading the current and going with it rather than against it."
"I didn't know there was a difference."
"Most people don't. The Northern style is what most people have seen. It's older in the formal sense, more documentation and more training." She looked at the irrigation channels. "Southern style was taught more quietly. Person to person."
"And now?"
"And now I'm the only one left who knows it." She said it simply. "I'm going to do something about that, when I have the time. There are young Southerners who might bend if there were someone to teach them. I want to build the thing that teaches them."
He looked at her with those gold eyes, steady in the early morning.
"Tell me what you need," he said. "From the Fire Nation's side, The archive records. Political support for the initiative. Whatever form it takes, tell me what you need and I'll work on providing it."
She looked at him.
"I know it's not a debt to be paid and I'm not offering it as reparation. I'm offering it because you're trying to build something that matters and I have resources that could serve it. I'd like to use them for something worthwhile."
She was quiet for a moment. "The archive records first. The complete set of pre-war documentation, not just the maritime authority documents, everything relating to the Southern Water Tribe's pre-war history."
"I can do that."
"And eventually, I'll need to think about this more, some kind of formal standing. Something that lets a Southern waterbender school access the resources of the treaty framework without having to fight for every piece of recognition."
"I'll put it on the agenda for the next council session."
"Thank you."
They sat in the early morning, the drought-dry land around them, the water still present underground in the channels she'd been reading.
"How are you?" he asked.
She looked at the irrigation system. "I know what I want to do with the South." She looked at him. "I know what I want in other directions too. I'm just trying to be careful about the timing."
"I know," he said.
"How long are you here?"
"A week. Maybe ten days, depending on how the water situation resolves."
"Then let's resolve it."
They went back to work.
The drought work was different from the summits.
She waterbent for six hours the first day, four the second, three the third as the system's flow improved and required less intervention. She came home each evening with her arms aching and her hands tired with a feeling in her chest that she had not had consistently in years, rightness. The feeling of being precisely where she was supposed to be, doing precisely what she was supposed to do.
He negotiated. She watched him do it from a distance, across the dry fields, moving through the communities with actual attention. He stood in farmers' fields and listened to them talk about their crops for twenty minutes at a stretch, asking questions.
On the fourth day an old farmer named Huo showed them his peach trees.
The peach trees were still green, deep roots, Huo explained, the water table was low but not gone, the peaches would survive. He had planted them thirty years ago for exactly this reason, because you planted for the drought before the drought came. He showed them the grafting he'd done on the oldest tree, a technique he'd learned from his own father, who had learned it in the colonial territories from a Fire Nation orchardist, and who had brought it south when the political situation had shifted.
Huo offered them peaches. They leaned against the orchard fence in the warm afternoon and ate them.
"This is why," Zuko said, after Huo had gone back inside.
She looked at him.
"The work," he said. "When I need to remember what it's for. It's this man and his trees. It's this orchard still being here." He was quiet for a moment. "What's yours?"
She looked at the peach in her hand. "This, actually. This kind of thing… and the water." She looked at the irrigation channels in the distance. "But also I've been thinking about the girl in Camp Three, the one with the infected hand, the way she watched the bending. I want there to be a world where girls like her can learn."
He looked at her, she looked at the orchard in the warm afternoon.
"I've been wanting to say something to you," she said. "For the whole summer and now I have you in front of me rather than in a letter and I'm finding it harder to say."
He waited, waiting was always something he was good at.
"I'm not done figuring myself out," she said. "I don't think you should wait for me to be done, because I think figuring yourself out doesn't end, I think it's ongoing, I think it's the work of a whole life." She paused. "But I think I know enough now. About what I want. And I think… I want to try, properly, if you still want to."
"Yes," he said, softly.
She looked at him.
"Yes?" she said.
"Yes." The corner of his mouth curved. "I've wanted to try for quite a while. I've been waiting for you to be ready to say it."
"I'm saying it."
"I know." He looked at the orchard. "What does trying look like, given—"
"Given everything complicated about it?" She thought about this. "Letters keep happening. We're in the same places sometimes, we're honest about what's difficult and we tell each other how we feel… we figure it out as we go."
"That's— yes." He looked at her. "That's everything I want."
She reached over and took his hand, which she had been wanting to do since the garden in the capital, and he held it.
They sat against the fence with the peach trees and the autumn afternoon and the beginning of something she intended to tend as carefully as the old man had tended his trees, for the drought, before the drought came.
The second time happened three days later.
She had been waterbending all morning, a long sustained session that had pushed the main channel flow to something approaching its pre-drought rate, and she was tired. Her arms ached, her back ached, her hands were entirely alive in the way they always were after hours of sustained bending. She went back to the small building that served as the delegation's workspace and changed out of her wet outer layers, when she heard him knock on the door frame.
"The council session is postponed," he said. "The Earth Kingdom representative got delayed at the road."
"So we have the afternoon?"
"We have the afternoon."
She crossed the room.
When she reached him she put both hands in his collar and kissed him and felt him receive it fully without hesitation, as if he had been waiting for it. She was aware of all of it; his hands at her waist, in her hair, the warmth of him. She pressed into it and felt herself arrive somewhere she had been working toward for months.
When she pulled back, she kept her hands in his collar and looked at him, and he looked at her, and there was nothing more than just two people at the end of a long summer, finally in the same place.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi," he said, and his voice was different.
She kissed him again, slower this time, and let herself be entirely in it. She was aware of the warmth, the way he kissed her back like she was something worth taking time over, and she thought, yes, this is what being met feels like.
She moaned into his mouth, a sound of pure relief and hunger. Her hands released his robes only to slide up, threading into his hair, pulling him impossibly closer. The scarred side of his face was cool under her touch, a contrast to the feverish heat building between them. Her own body was a paradox; her skin was chilled from her waterbending, a lingering dampness on her arms and throat, but beneath Zuko could feel the warmth of her.
He walked her backward, his lips never leaving hers, until the backs of her knees hit the cushioned divan near the balcony. She broke the kiss with a gasp, her eyes wide.
“Wait,” she breathed.
His heart plummeted as his face stilled, a cold dread washing over the heat, I’ve pushed too far.
Her hands came to the clasp of his ornate outer robe. “Let me,” she whispered, her gaze locked on his. “Please.”
Her fingers worked the gold and ruby clasp. The heavy silk slid from his shoulders, pooling on the polished floor with a soft whisper. His undershirt, simple black cotton, was next. She pushed it up over his head, her palms smoothing over the hard planes of his chest, tracing the lines of faded scars. Her touch was warm. He stood there, letting her look, his own breath coming in short, sharp pants.
“You’re beautiful,” she said, so simple and earnest the words shattered him more than any passionate declaration could have.
He reached for her then, his hands trembling slightly as they found the ties of her blue tunic. “Not as beautiful as you,” he rasped, his voice thick with want. The water tribe garment was simpler, but his fumbling fingers felt clumsy. With a soft laugh she stilled his hands and undid the fastenings herself.
The blue fabric parted. Underneath, she wore a simple wrap around her chest, but it was the skin that stole his breath, dewy and glowing from her morning’s exertion, it gleamed in the afternoon sun streaming through the balcony screens. Tiny droplets of water clung to the hollow of her throat, the curve of her shoulder. He leaned in, unable to resist, and ran his tongue along the path of a droplet that traced her collarbone.
She shuddered, her head falling back. “Zuko…”
He tasted clean water and her, It was the most intoxicating thing he’d ever known.
He worked the wrap loose, his movements growing more confident and as it fell away he drank in the sight of her. Her breasts were full, tipped with rosy peaks that tightened instantly in the warm air. He cupped one, his thumb brushing over the taut nipple, and she cried out a sweet sound.
“Please,” she begged, her own hands scrambling at the waist of his trousers.
He helped her, kicking them aside, leaving them both gloriously and terrifyingly bare. He took a moment, his gaze sweeping over her; the curve of her hips, the lean muscle of her thighs. He was achingly hard and the cool air of the room did nothing to soothe the fire in his blood.
He lowered her onto the divan, the silk cushions beneath her. He followed her down, covering her body with his, and the sensation was electric. His heat against her lingering coolness. The rough hair on his legs against the smooth skin of her inner thighs. The solid weight of him, pressing her into the cushions.
He kissed her again, deeply, his tongue exploring her mouth as his hands explored her body. He mapped the dip of her waist, she writhed beneath him, her own hands roaming his back, his shoulders, gripping his hair.
“I need you,” he groaned against her neck, his teeth grazing the sensitive skin there. “Katara, I need you.”
“Then have me,” she panted, her legs falling open as she guided his hand between them. “Don’t make me wait any longer.”
His fingers found her hot centre. He slid a finger inside, and her whole body bowed off the divan, a choked sob of pleasure escaping her lips.
“More,” she demanded, her hips rocking against his hand. “Zuko, now.”
He positioned himself at her entrance, the head of his cock nudging against her. He looked down into her eyes, seeking one last confirmation. Her blue gaze was clouded with desire.
“I choose you,” she whispered, her voice trembling but sure. “I have for a long time.”
He pushed into her, slowly, giving her body time to stretch, to accept him. He buried his face in the crook of her neck as he sank fully inside, a guttural groan tearing from his throat.
For a moment, they both lay perfectly still, joined, breathing each other’s air. The world had ceased to spin. There was only the feel of him and the feel of her, sheathing him in velvet fire.
Then Katara moved. A slow, undulating roll of her hips that made him see stars.
He began to move, pulling out almost completely before thrusting back in, setting a rhythm that was both desperate and reverent. Each stroke a confession, he didn’t know if he said them aloud or if she simply felt them, but her nails digging into the muscles of his back, told him she understood.
The cool dampness of her skin was gone, replaced by a sheen of sweat that made their bodies slide together.
“Look at me Katara,” he begged, his pace quickening. “Please.”
She opened her eyes, glazed with passion. He held her gaze as he drove into her, each thrust hitting a spot that made her gasp, her eyes fluttering shut before she forced them open again, refusing to break the connection.
“I’m close,” she warned, her voice a broken melody. Her inner muscles began to flutter around him.
“Please for me,” he begged, one hand sliding between them to find the sensitive bud at her centre. He circled it with his thumb, the pressure firm. The combination of his thick length stretching her, the relentless rhythm of his hips and the focused friction on her most sensitive spot tipped her over the edge. Her climax broke over her with a force that stole her breath and her voice. She convulsed around him, a silent scream on her lips, her body arching into his.
The feel of her clenching, pulsing around him was his undoing. With a final thrust that seated him to the hilt, he followed her into the abyss.
He collapsed on top of her, his weight supported on his elbows, his face buried in her damp hair. Their hearts hammered a frantic rhythm against each other’s chests. The aftershocks of her pleasure still trembled through her, and he could feel his own body quaking with the intensity of it.
Slowly, the world came back.
He started to pull away, to roll to the side, but her arms tightened around him, holding him in place.
“Don’t,” she murmured, her voice drowsy, sated. “Not yet.”
He relaxed, letting his full weight settle onto her for a moment before carefully shifting them both, so they lay on their sides. He brushed a strand of sweat-damp hair from her forehead.
She looked up at him, her expression soft and eyes clear, full of a wonder that mirrored his own. She held his face in her hands, this face she had been watching for years, the scar and the gold eyes.
After a while he said, "I've thought about this for a very long time."
"I know," she said. "I have too."
"I didn't let myself think about it for a while because of—"
"I know." She pressed her forehead to his. "I know. Me too."
They stayed like that for a moment, foreheads together, just breathing.
"What happens now?" he asked.
"Now we keep going," she said. "And we figure out the rest as we go."
She felt him smile. "That's a very practical answer."
"I'm a very practical person."
"You are," he said, there was warmth in his voice. "and it's one of my favourite things about you."
She stepped back enough to look at him properly. He looked back with those steady eyes, and she thought, I'm going to figure this out, I don't have to know the whole of it right now, I just have to know the next step.
The next step was here, in this room, with this person who saw her.
Things changed in small ways.
He walked beside her rather than slightly behind. She reached for his arm when she wanted to make a point. He brought her tea without asking, setting it beside her hand when she was reading. She saved him a seat at the evening meals.
"So," Sokka said, having arrived after a nonsensical letter she had sent him.
"I knew you'd do the 'so' voice."
"I've been sitting on the 'so' voice for months."
"I know."
"Are you happy?"
She thought about it. The thinking itself felt different than it had three months ago. "Yes," she smiled. "I think I genuinely am."
"Okay. Good." A pause. "He'd better treat you right."
"He does."
"I'm going to have a conversation with him at some point."
"You absolutely will not."
"Just a light conversation. A friendly conversation between a man and the man who—"
"Sokka."
"I'm just saying I reserve the right."
"Noted and vetoed." She jabbed at him. "He treats me like a person, Sokka." She trailed off, softly.
Sokka was quiet for a moment. "Then I won't have the conversation," he said. "As long as that stays true."
"Thank you."
"But I'm watching."
"I know. I'd be disappointed if you weren't."
The drought broke on the last evening before their scheduled departure.
It came in from the north, real rain, the kind that had been building for a week in the upper atmosphere and was now arriving. The camp heard it coming; the change in air pressure, the drop in temperature and came outside to meet it.
She stood in the rain and turned her face up and felt it.
This was water she knew, not the tame water of irrigation channels or the harbor-water of cities, but the original thing; water from the sky, water from the long cycle of ocean to cloud to rain to river to ocean, the ancient water that had been doing this exact thing since before there were people to stand in it. She opened her hands, felt it in her palms and felt the response move up her arms, the waterbender's response that a fact of what she was.
She was laughing. She was soaked and she was laughing, around her the farmers were crying and the camp staff were shouting, all she could feel was the ache slip away from her bones.
She turned and he was right there.
She reached up and held his face in her hands, rain on both of them, looking at him. He looked back at her, Something in his expression, warm and just for her.
The water rights issue came back to a formal table in late autumn.
The Ba Sing Se work had always been a beginning and when the Earth Kingdom council decided to revisit the harbour fee structures in light of the patrol agreement progress, the whole question came up for review, the meeting was in the Fire Nation capital. This time she had a seat at the head table.
She had the archive documents. She had copies, had sent copies to both Water Tribe councils, and spent two months working with Water Tribe scholars to build a full legal case based on the pre-war record that the Fire Nation archive had been sitting on for sixty years.
When she laid it out, document by document, the conversation changed, the Earth Kingdom delegates had been expecting a negotiating position but what they received was a documented historical basis. Katara ensured that the difference was not subtle. Fanghui, who she had been working with for over a year now, went through three distinct expressions in the space of four minutes.
"This changes the framework of the discussion," he said.
"Yes," she said. "It does."
She did not look at Zuko during the session. She didn't need to but she could feel him in the room the way she sensed water, a heart string being tugged.
During the break, he found her at the window.
"You brought those documents to the table," he said.
"You found them, I just used them."
"Yes but you knew what to do with them," He looked at the harbour below. "How long have you been building this case?"
"Since the night in the library. I've been working toward it for months." She looked at her notes. "It was always going to take this long. You have to build the foundation before you can build the argument."
"Is the foundation solid now?"
She looked at him. "Yes… Thank you, for all of it, for everything."
"I was doing what was right."
"You were also doing it for me."
He held her gaze, a warmth spreading across his face. "Yes," he said. "I was."
The summit session on historical acknowledgement was its own kind of difficulty.
She had been in the Meng session in the capital three months ago, and had watched it crack the room open in a way that had shifted everything that followed. This session was different with delegates from the colonial territories.
Katara spoke, this time.
She spoke about the Southern Water Tribe's forty years of raids, about her mother, with the precision and the control of someone who had been thinking about how to say this for months. She spoke about what the raids had taken that was not property, not the things that reconstruction could address. She spoke about the knowledge in her hands, and the chain of women who had passed it to her, that the chain ended with her.
The room was quiet.
Meng, across the table, looked at her with pride.
After the session, Kei found her.
"The council voted this morning," he said, "to expand the Documentation Project's mandate and to include oral testimony collection in addition to documentary record. It passed by one vote. The swing vote was the oldest member of the council, who served the Fire Lord before Zuko's father. She voted yes because—" He paused, "She said she had waited thirty years for someone in that chair to say the things he was saying, and she intended to support it while she still could."
She looked at him.
"He's fighting," Kei said. "In case that wasn't clear. He's fighting for the right things and not asking for credit for it."
She nodded. "I know," she said. "I see him."
On the last day of the summit, she went to the palace garden in the afternoon before the closing ceremony.
Summer had given way to autumn while she'd been working, and the garden had changed, sitting by the fountain, letting herself be present in the moment.
She was going to go to the South.
She had made this decision in the last month. After the autumn she had understood that the South wasn't something she could approach from the outside, from the distance of good intentions. She needed to go back and needed to be there in the winter, when the ice was blue-white. She needed to be home with the intention of staying long enough to understand what home was asking of her.
She was going to go and she was going to come back.
She was also going to tell Aang the full truth, carrying the kiss for too long was becoming its own problem. He had received the modified truth with grace and she owed him the rest of it. Not to absolve herself, she had stopped pretending that confession was only about the person confessing, but because he deserved to have the complete picture of what had happened.
She was thinking about all of this, in the autumn afternoon, when she heard footsteps.
Zuko came and sat beside her, shoulder to shoulder.
"The ceremony's in two hours," she said.
"I know."
"You'll need to—"
"I'll have time." He looked at the fountain. "What are you thinking about?"
"Going to the South."
He was quiet.
"I've made the decision," she whispered softly. "After the ceremony, I'm going to go home."
He looked at the fountain. "When did you decide?"
"I've been deciding for months, but only made up my mind recently."
"What changed last week?"
She thought about it, "I've been afraid that if I go and stand in the South and I look at it clearly, I'll find out that I've lost something I can't recover. And I think I was afraid because if I found that, I wouldn't know what to do with it."
"And now?"
"I’m still afraid, but I know it’s the right thing to do."
He was quiet for a moment. "I'll be here when you come back."
"I know." She looked at the fountain. "I need to tell Aang about what really happened."
He looked at her, and was very still.
"He deserves to know, he's one of the best people I've ever known. He handled what I told him with more grace than I deserved, and I've been not quite telling him the full thing because I was protecting myself, and that's not fair to him."
"What do you need from me?" he said.
"Nothing. I just needed to tell you I was going to."
He nodded, slowly. "Okay."
She took his hand, he wrapped his fingers around hers and squeezed them.
"After the ceremony," she said. "I'll find him."
"Okay."
They sat in the garden as the autumn light moved across the plants.
She told Aang before the ceremony.
She found him in the palace's side garden where he'd been practising forms, alone in the late afternoon, and she sat beside him on the stone bench and told him the truth. He was quiet for a long time after she finished.
"I think I knew." He whispered, staring ahead.
She looked at him, heartbreak striking across her face.
"Not— I didn't know. I didn't think I wanted to know, so I didn't look too hard." He took a moment. "Is it… serious?"
"Yes." she said, casting her eyes back to the garden.
He absorbed this. "Are you happy?"
"I'm working on it," she said. "I'm getting there."
He looked at his hands. "I'm angry," he said. "I want to say that. I'm angry at how it happened, at the timing, at—" He stopped, taking a deep breath. "I want you to be happy. I've always wanted that and that doesn't change just because I'm angry."
"I know." She held his gaze. "I'm sorry for the way it happened. I was not my best self and you deserved better."
"Yes, I did," he said. "But I also wasn't looking clearly. So…" He looked at the garden. "We were both not entirely honest with ourselves."
"Yes."
They sat in the uncomfortable truth of that.
"Find what you need and be happy," he said, eventually. "And thank you for telling me the full thing even if it was late."
"I owe you more than thanks, I know that."
"You owe me honesty," he said. "Which you just gave me"
She pressed her hand briefly over his, before heading in to the ceremony.
Katara signed the document.
The ceremony was short, followed by a reception. She congratulated people and in turn congratulated herself for what she had achieved. She had brief genuine conversations with Meng, before talking to Scholar Yue Li about the Documentation Project's next phase, which was the oral testimony collection in the colonial territories.
Near the end of the reception, she found herself at the same high window she'd stood at in Ba Sing Se, the first summit, the beginning of everything.
He came to stand beside her.
"What are you looking at?" he said.
"The harbour. The opening." She looked out to the water.
He looked at it too, the mouth of the harbour, the sea beyond.
"The Documentation Project is going to face resistance in the next phase," she said. "The colonial testimony collection is going to be harder than the document recovery. People don't give testimony the same way they give records."
"I know. We're prepared for it."
"Good." She nodded. "The Water Tribe maritime case is going to need one more round of formal review before its precedent-setting rather than just evidence. I want to be in the room for that."
"You'll be in the room for that."
She looked at the water. "I'm leaving for the South in three days."
"I know."
"I don't know how long."
"I know."
She turned to look at him and found him already looking at her. Around them, the reception was happening; the ordinary sounds of a successful summit, people celebrating work that would matter in ways they couldn't fully see yet.
"I'll come back," she said.
"Yes," he said. "I know."
She reached over and touched his hand briefly, before turning back to the room.
After the reception, Katara found him in the library.
He was at the same table, with tea, and what appeared to be administrative correspondence that he was not reading, when she came in he looked up and set the correspondence down.
She crossed the library without stopping.
She had made a decision and she was not second-guessing it. She was not managing herself into a more cautious version of what she wanted. She wanted this, had wanted it for months, and she was twenty-two years old and she had been careful enough for long enough and she was going to the South in three days and she wanted to take this with her.
She sat beside him on his side of the table and looked at him.
He looked back.
"I'm leaving in three days," she said.
"Yes."
"I want to know what this is."
He reached up and touched her jaw, very carefully.
"I love you," he said.
The words landed without drama, hearing it was different from knowing it; it was the difference between seeing a thing from a distance and standing in it.
"I love you too," she said.
He looked at her with those gold eyes and she looked back, there was nothing in the space between them that needed managing.
Katara kissed him.
She poured three days of frustrated desire into it, having known what it felt like to be met with his entirety, and he met her again, his hands sliding down to grip her hips through the thin fabric of her dress.
He broke the kiss, breathing heavily. “Stand up.”
She rose, her body a tense line of anticipation. He took her place in the high-backed chair, pulling her to stand between his spread knees. From this position, she loomed over him.
His hands settled on her waist, then slid around to her backside, gripping the firm curves through her dress, kneading. His fingers found the tie at the side of her dress, one tug and the knot came loose. The blue fabric slackened but he didn’t pull it off. Instead, he pushed it apart, baring her from navel to knees.
She wore nothing underneath but simple, cotton. The sight of them, so innocent against the powerful, curved landscape of her hips and thighs, was the most erotic thing he’d ever seen. The damp patch at their center, dark and undeniable, made a low growl vibrate in his chest.
“Look at you,” he breathed, his thumbs caressing her smooth skin.
“Please touch me,” she begged, her voice trembling.
He pressed his palm firmly against the soaked wraps, right over her core. The heat that radiated through the thin fabric was staggering. She cried out, her hips bucking forward into his hand.
“You want me to taste you?” he asked, looking up at her, his eyes pure, filled with want.
“Yes.” She breathed out, tilting her head back.
He applied pressure, circling his palm, feeling the firm nub of her clit through the wet cotton. Her knees wobbled, he used his other hand to guide her, to slowly lower her onto his lap, so she was straddling his thighs, her back to his chest. The position bent her forward, over the arm of the chair, presenting the lush curve of her backside to him, the damp wraps pulled taut.
He kissed the small of her back, then his hands returned to her hips, holding her steady. Finally, he pulled the cloth down her thighs, past her knees, letting them pool around her ankles. She was completely bared to him now, open and glistening in the lantern light.
He didn’t hesitate.
He buried his face between her thighs.
The first, long, flat stroke of his tongue from her entrance all the way up to the throbbing bud at her apex made her scream. Her hands scrabbled against the carved wood of the chair arm, her back arching.
“Zuko!” She cried out.
He licked into her, circling her clit with the broad, hot flat of his tongue, then sucked it gently between his lips. She sobbed, her hips pushing back against his face, seeking more.
He gave it to her. One hand came around her hip, his fingers sliding effortlessly through her slickness to find her entrance. He pushed two fingers inside, curling them upward, and her inner muscles clenched around him in a vice-like grip. He groaned against her, the vibration shooting through her like a lightning bolt.
“Don’t stop, please don’t stop!” she babbled, lost in the sensation.
He fucked her with his fingers in a steady, deep rhythm, his mouth never leaving her clit. He licked and sucked, varying the pressure, learning what made her thighs tremble and what made her cry out. The library, a temple of silence and thought, was now filled with the obscene sounds of his mouth on her and Katara’s ragged, pleading cries.
He could feel her body coiling tighter, a spring wound to its absolute limit. Her breath came in short, sharp pants. Her knuckles were white where she gripped the wood.
“I’m… I’m gonna…”
He redoubled his efforts. His tongue became a rapid, relentless flicker over her swollen nerves. His fingers pressed harder, searching for that spot inside her.
Her body bowed as waves of pleasure crashed over her, one after another. She pulsed around his fingers, his tongue gentling to lap softly as she rode out the storm.
Slowly, she went limp, collapsing over the arm of the chair, her entire body quivering. He sat back in the chair, settling her in his lap, cradling her against his chest.
After a while she pulled back and rested her forehead against his shoulder and breathed, he pressed his lips to her hair.
"I'm going to miss you," she said, softly against his neck.
"I'm going to miss you."
"I don't know how long I'll be."
"I'll be here." He pressed his lips to her temple. "Take the time you need and find what you're looking for. Please Write to me." He pleaded
"I will." She lifted her head and looked at him. "Every day, probably."
The corner of his mouth moved, his face home to a soft smile. "Every day."
She kissed him again, slower, and felt the warmth of it all the way through. She was going to the South and she was going to find what she needed to find but she was going to come back to build something with him.
The Southern Ocean was cold in winter.
Not the comfortable cold of early autumn, but the real cold that the ocean had been accumulating for eight months in the absence of summer and that it now bore. She had grown up in this cold, and had learned her first bending in it.
She had been here for four months.
The first weeks had been hard, she had stood in the ocean and bent the Southern water, feeling both entirely herself and entirely unfamiliar, which was its own strange doubling. She had sat with Gran-Gran in the evenings and let her grandmother tell stories.
She had found the elder in the coastal village, a woman named Nana Siku, eighty years old, the mother of the last waterbender taken in the raids, who remembered everything she'd been told and had been waiting, she said when Katara arrived, for someone who would use it. They had spent two months sitting together in Nana Siku's house with its terrible fish-oil lamp and its extraordinary warmth, Katara had written everything down.
She had been building something, the shape of what a Southern waterbending school might look like, when there were students to teach, working with a Water Tribe council member named Pakto, who was young and serious, to develop the formal structure that would let the school exist within the treaty framework rather than outside it.
She had written to Zuko about all of this. He had written back with practical assistance, a message to the council member with the formal support of the Fire Nation's treaty office and with the other things, the letters that were also about the harbour light and what he was reading. She had called this love from a distance and it was good.
She was standing at the shore in the pre-dawn dark, which was where she always stood in the mornings now and she was bending.
The ocean bending, the original bending, the kind she had done at fourteen before the war had organised her gifts toward service and away from power. She raised a column of water off the surface and held it, feeling the response move through her from her hands up her arms and into her chest and everywhere.
She was the last Southern waterbender.
She was building the thing that would mean she was not the last.
She was twenty-two years old and she was standing in the ocean in the dark and she knew who she was.
She let the water down and stood in the ordinary waves.
There was a letter in her coat pocket that had arrived yesterday. She had read it before going to sleep and was going to read it again tonight.
Katara,
The Documentation Project collected its first colonial testimony this week. Forty-seven accounts. Scholar Yue Li sent me a summary, some of the accounts were what we expected.
I thought about you when I read it, about the things that reconstruction can't address and what the record can do. The council fight for the school's treaty standing is moving. I think your summit testimony did something.
The harbour water is grey today, I find myself noticing it more than I used to.
Come back when you're ready, not before.
—Z
She thought about her mother. I will hide what is most valuable so that it reaches you even if I cannot. It had finally reached her and she was going to make sure it reached the next person.
The tide came in.
She was the last Southern waterbender. She was the daughter of her mother's sacrifice and her grandmother's stories and the chain of women who had passed their knowledge through the dark because they believed it would reach someone who could use it.
She was Katara, daughter of the South, last of one thing and beginning of another.
She looked at the ocean and the ocean looked back.