The Reporter Who Came in from the Cold

by kangaroo2010

Katara would never forget the day they brought the spy with half-a-face in. A loyal Communist, she goes about her duty with pride and determination, but the more she learns about the man before her, the more she begins to question everything she's ever known.

Trigger Warnings: This story contains dark themes, adult language, smoking, and drinking. While violence is never explicitly shown, it is referenced extensively, and the results of violence are treated very seriously.

This is also, oddly enough, not a romantic story. It can certainly be read that way, and if you want to see the glimmerings of romance sprouting up towards the end, you're more than free to do so; I intentionally wrote it a bit ambiguously.

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This story is dedicated, first and foremost, to the men, women, and children who suffered through one of the most traumatic periods in human history, a period and a time that we in America allow ourselves to know far too little about. It is also dedicated to John le Carre, for inspiring me to try writing a spy story that's not really about spying, and, last but never least, to my wife, whom I love with all my heart. Te amo, querida.

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The Reporter Who Came in from the Cold

THE DAY THEY BROUGHT IN THE SPY DAWNED BITTER AND SHARP AND COLD. Katara would always remember that, remember how even the sun itself, as she watched it slowly crawl across the horizon while her brother struggled to start their car, seemed little more than a ball of pale orange ice painting the clouds purple and gold. The air stung at her face, a brutal wind slicing out of the north, each breath she took sending shards of chill sharp as knives down her throat. She shivered as she stood there, stamping her feet, the tips of her fingers tingling, even as she shoved her thick, mitten-covered hands deep into the pockets of her parka. Behind her, Sokka bellowed a string of curses in Manchu, an outburst followed by the sound of a wrench pounding on the car's engine. Each blow sent the sound of the clangs rippling down the street, echoing off walls and shivering in the silence of an early January morning in Harbin. Each bang made her wince, but it wasn't the cold that made her shiver.

"You shouldn't talk that way," she said over her shoulder in Mandarin, eyes still firmly fixed on the horizon.

There was a pause, a few more blows of the wrench, before Sokka replied, in Manchu, "What was that, Sis?"

She shivered once more, her eyes darting around, looking for the slightest hint that someone might have heard. "I said, you shouldn't talk that way," she repeated, again in Mandarin. "I know you're angry with the car, but still, someone could hear."

"What?" came the confused reply, once more in Manchu, and she didn't have to look to know that her brother was frowning and rubbing his chin. "What's wrong with…oh, right." Suddenly, with nary a pause, he shifted gears, and when he spoke again, it was in his thickly accented Mandarin. "I guess I just…lost my cool there for a minute…you know…ha…" There came the sound of boots shifting, no doubt as her brother looked around, performing the same check she was, but with far less subtlety, as was his wont, she thought with a mental sigh. "Silly me," he continued, in an awkward, strained tone, "I must've subconsciously flashed back to listening to Gramps fight with those stupid goats of his."

Katara nodded, closing her eyes and doing her very best to not pray for strength, because she was a loyal citizen of the People's Republic, and prayer was merely a crutch for weak minds poisoned by imperialist lies, fit only for old women and reactionary pigs. For so the Chairman says, she reminded herself, and the Chairman is always right.

Always right…

"Whatever," she said, heaving a sigh of relief as the conversation firmly shifted into a politically safe language. "Grandfather was a reactionary, like Father, and was lucky he didn't live to share Father's fate."

Sokka didn't even pause before he made his reply. "Yes, he was. Such is the fate of all those who stand against the People's Republic."

"Indeed." Another sigh, and after a final glance, she tore her gaze away from the horizon, wiped her mind of the ice and the cold of the dawn, pushed aside the strange, chill feeling deep in the pit of her gut, and started marching back towards the car. Without a word to her brother, or even so much as a glance, she opened one of the back doors, took out her satchel, and slung it over her shoulder.

Sokka watched it all, one eyebrow up as he scratched the back of his head with the wrench. "What're you doing, Sis?"

"Going to work," she snapped, reaching in and pulling out her brother's satchel before slamming the door with her boot. "If we leave now, we can just make it on time," she finished before tossing Sokka his bag.

Sokka was caught completely off-guard, dropping his wrench before awkwardly fumbling the bag into his hands. The wrench struck the concrete below their feet with a clattering ring that shivered in the air like a bad lie. "Oh…um…" He fumbled some more, not entirely sure what was going on. "But…it's…you know…it's cold…"

"So it is," Katara replied, already heading off in the direction of the office. "All the more reason to get to it. As the Chairman says, Be resolute, fear no sacrifice, and surmount every difficulty to win victory." She allowed herself to smile as she set her shoulders and began to stride down the street in earnest. "In this case, we must surmount the difficulty of a cold morning and a faulty car in order to be about our work on behalf of the People's Republic."

Behind her, she knew her brother was muttering in very impolite language as he closed the hood of the car and tossed his tools in the trunk. No doubt, to him, his choice of words was quite clever.

To her, it would no doubt be a bit on the asinine side of things, which was why she drowned it out by humming the latest revolutionary anthem and continuing on her way.

---

Until around noon, her day progressed in a haze of complete and utter normality. She attended the morning briefing, filled out and filed reports, participated in the ten o'clock staff exercises, went back to her reports. Her brother disappeared into his own realm, and she saw nary hide nor hair of him, which was just fine by her. She had her own work to do, and without her brother standing beside her, stumbling through his subpar Mandarin, the Han Chinese who filled her office were more likely to forget the fact that she was ethnically Manchu, and thus politically suspect. Thus, she was able to stick her head in her papers and her files and her reports and do her best to serve the Proletariat, just as she had every day since she could allow herself to remember.

This air of normality was shattered at noon. It did not come unannounced, this wave that would upend her world. It came heralded by a tide of whispers, like wind whistling through the chimes that hung from her Grandmother's hut, back before the Japanese stomped her village into dust. The whispers rose and fell, a current of energy sparking and crackling through the air, raising the hairs on the back of her neck, rising higher and higher, whispering louder and louder, a pulse deep in her blood, thumping and thumping, her instinct tingling until she had no choice but to look up and wonder what had happened.

For that was what the current was saying, nay, all but screaming.

Something has happened.

Something big.

Katara had learned long ago to beware of somethings, especially big ones.

"Comrade Katara!"

She leapt to her feet, snapping to rigid, military-grade attention as she shouted, in a booming voice fit for a parade ground, "Ready and willing to serve the People, Comrade!"

The young man who had come to fetch her nodded, his head snapping up and down in affirmation. "Comrade Katara, you will follow me!"

"At once, Comrade!" Katara did not even think about asking where she was going; in fact, she didn't even consider the possibility of wondering where she was going, or what she was going to be asked to do. She just waited until the young man turned on his heel and started marching away, whereupon she followed him, striding five paces behind him as if she was marching in the May Day parade in Beijing.

Indeed, the most honest way to describe how her brain worked in that moment would be to observe that she didn't think at all.

---

"Wait here, Comrade!" the young man said, a command that she obeyed, standing at military-grade attention as he went up to the big oak doors he had led them to and rapped his knuckles against the wood. A few seconds passed, or a few minutes, Katara would not have been able to say which. She was far away, floating with the clouds through the brisk winter day, flying ever higher, her mind as blank as the sea at night, or so she imagined the sea to be at night.

She honestly didn't know. She'd never seen the ocean.

The door opened a crack, and a barking voice asked after their business. The young man barked back his answer, informing whoever was asking that one Comrade Katara had been brought, as ordered. The first voice acknowledged this before dismissing the young man, and then the door opened and Katara snapped back into her mind just long enough to die a little bit inside.

Standing in the doorway was the last person Katara could possibly have wanted to see, if she ever allowed such reactionary things as personal wants and desires to enter into her mind anymore. The young man looked as he always did, his uniform crisp, fresh, immaculate, his uniform cap perched atop his head at a jaunty angle, his perennial cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth as if it had been glued there. His face was hard and cold, but his eyes were on fire, raking Katara's body up and down, sparkling as he did everything but smack his lips in desire. Vomit burned at the back of Katara's throat, and it was all she could do not to reach out and slap the lechery from the young man's eyes.

She pushed the urge away, burying it alongside the urge to take a bath every time she found herself standing before the young man known as Jet. The revolution is not a dinner party, she reminded herself, and personal feelings cannot be allowed to interfere with the Work of the Party. So she told herself, then as ever.

So she told herself, every single day.

"Good afternoon, Comrade Katara. How are you doing today?"

She clicked her heels and barked, "Ready and willing to serve the Will of the People, Comrade!"

Comrade Jet nodded, slow and languid, his eyes having never once, in all the time they had been standing there, looked at her face. It was times like this when Katara couldn't quite stop herself from wondering if Comrade Jet even knew what her face looked like.

She would wonder that, right around the time that she would wonder if it mattered.

"I'm glad to hear that," Comrade Jet leered, a hint of a snake-like smile pricking at the corner of his mouth that lacked a cigarette. "As it just so happens, I have just the thing to help you serve the People today."

Katara tried not to think about the stories that filtered through the female staff, the ones that always began with Comrade Jet saying those exact same words. She tried not to remember how those stories played out, tried not to think of the things that were left unsaid, the dark, slithering horrors that lurked between the lines, that hid behind the eyes of her fellow female comrades. She tried to keep such images from her mind.

She really did.

"Whatever the People and the Party need of me, I am ready and willing to do, Comrade!"

Comrade Jet nodded, and it was only then that Katara noticed that he was holding a folder in his hand. Her heart fell into her boots.

The stories always mentioned the folder, too.

"Excellent! Now…correct me if I'm wrong, Comrade Katara, but…you speak Japanese, do you not?"

Katara frowned. That was not part of the script, not part of the stories. It was a change, a deviation from the norm, if one will. Struggling to keep her uncertainty from her voice, she asked, "Um…pardon, Comrade…?"

Comrade Jet chuckled, a sound that made Katara's skin crawl in spite of her best efforts. "Yes, I can see how that would be a confusing question…according to your personnel file, you learned rudimentary Japanese during those pigs' occupation of this sector of our proletarian paradise. Is that correct?"

Katara swallowed hard, and hoped that it was not obvious. "Yes, Comrade, it is correct."

Comrade Jet's smile grew. "Good. And after the glorious victory over the Japanese imperialists and their reactionary puppets, you continued to cultivate this language, did you not?"

Katara felt the sense of dread and dirt fade away, only to be replaced by ice-cold fear. Her head spun, and she felt as if the ground was opening up beneath her feet.

For Comrade Jet's roving gaze was not the only thing to fear in the halls of Harbin's branch of the Ministry of Public Security, not in the least, not while Chairman Mao's Great Cultural Revolution was purging the People's Republic of reactionaries and imperialist lackeys.

She squared her shoulders and desperately tried to push the fear away. "I have a gift for languages, Comrade. When this was discovered by the Party, I was encouraged to complete my studies in Japanese, and given further instruction in English and Russian, the better to serve the People's Republic."

"And I'm glad the Party had such admirable foresight in this matter, for, you see, you are the only person in this office who speaks Japanese." He paused, reached up, took a long drag from his cigarette, tapped the ash onto the floor, placed the cigarette back in the corner of his mouth, right into the dent all of its predecessors had made in his bottom lip. "And, as it so happens, today, we have great need of someone who can speak the language of the pigs who once oppressed our great and glorious People." He come forward, not stopping until his chest was only a few centimeters from the tip of Katara's nose. She could feel his breath upon her brow, could sense his eyes roaming, searching, probing, desiring.

She felt very hot, very dizzy, and very, very alone.

"Are you ready to bring your…unique…skills to bear on behalf of the People's Republic of China?"

She sent her mind soaring off into the clouds, far away from where she stood, and nodded. "To the death, Comrade."

"Good." He took his file, and pressed it, softly, gently, searchingly, into her chest. "Take this file. Read it back-to-front, then read it a few more times. Report to the basement at two o'clock precisely. You are attached to the Investigation Section until further notice. Understood?"

Carefully, so as not to give his fingers an excuse to wander, she took the folder and tucked it under her arm. "Understood, Comrade."

He smiled, and leaned down, coming so close to her ear that his cheek brushed her own.

"And just so we're clear," he whispered, "I expect your full and unrestrained gratitude for this great opportunity upon your return to my section."

She didn't gulp. Her voice didn't falter. Her eyes didn't waver.

She would always be proud of that.

"Yes, Comrade. I understand completely."

"Good." He straightened, stepped back, and bowed his head. "Dismissed, Comrade."

She nodded, turned on her heel, and marched away, slowly, calmly.

It was very important to her that she not flee.

---

"…caught him poking around a military base up at the border. Reports from locals about him wandering around, asking questions, had been filtering in for several weeks, so we were already looking for him. How he got so close to the base, we honestly don't know; he's obviously highly skilled in infiltration and stealth, though how he would've been able to blend into the local population is anyone's guess. Point is, when he was spotted, the base immediately sent a patrol out after him. He attempted to flee on horseback, but a lucky shot took down his horse, and he was still trying to free himself from underneath it when we caught up to him. Are you getting all of this, Comrade?"

So the past half-hour had gone for Katara. After her…meeting…with Comrade Jet, she had returned to her desk to find all of her previous work already cleared away. Taking the hint, she had buried herself in the folder she had been given, before reporting to the Investigation Section at precisely ten minutes to two. She had been forced to wait for a good half-hour after that, perched precariously on the edge of a chair so uncomfortable it could've been considered a miracle of engineering, shivering because the heat seemed to be broken in this part of the building and she hadn't thought to bring her coat. Finally, a young man had appeared before her, introduced himself as Comrade Haru, and strode off, leaving Katara to lag behind, struggling to take notes, walk, and not look hurried, all at the same time.

It was, quite frankly, beginning to piss her off.

Not that she'd admit it.

"Yes, Comrade." She made a few more notes, poked an eye up from behind her notepad. "Did he attempt to resist arrest?"

Comrade Haru shook his head, not once having bothered to look at her in any way, just striding on, eyes locked on some distant, invisible horizon. "No, he did not. Like all good spies, he knew when the game was up and fell back on his cover."

"As a…journalist, correct?"

Comrade Haru scoffed. "That's his story, at least. And a rather flimsy cover, if I don't say so myself. Still, since when have the riben guizi ever been known for intelligence? Oh, and he wasn't armed, either."

That brought Katara up short. Her eyes going wide with surprise, she asked, "Seriously? No weapons of any kind?"

"Nothing beyond a simple pocketknife, no. According to the officer who performed the initial interview, he seemed very amused that we thought he would have a weapon. Made some crack about how he leaves that sort of thing to his sister."

Katara frowned. "His sister?"

Another short, sharp nod. "Indeed. There was another individual with him, who seemed to be taking pictures. He claims that this individual was his younger sister, who travels with him and takes all of his photographs. Referred to her as his muscle. However, no one was able to get a good enough look at the individual in question to be able to confirm or deny this story, and as the individual was able to make a clean getaway, we're still somewhat in the dark. We have, however, put our units along the Soviet and Mongolian borders on alert, so no doubt we'll catch this person very soon and clear up any remaining confusion."

Katara nodded. "I see…is there a Japanese embassy in Ulaan Bataar?"

Finally, it seemed, Katara had found something to bring Comrade Haru to a stop, as he paused mid-stride, and turned slowly to face Katara. "Where now?"

Katara bowed her head, quickly smothering any un-comrade-like feelings of pride and triumph in their cradle. "The capital of the Soviet imperialist puppet state in Mongolia, Comrade. If these imperialists really are Japanese, this sister may try to make contact with the embassy there."

Comrade Haru lifted his head up and let it slowly drop. "I see. Well, I can't think of a reason why the riben guizi would not have an embassy there, or at least some sort of consulate. I'll have to send a cable to Beijing, see if our intelligence assets in Mongolia can be put on alert, in the unlikely event that this strange individual is able to slip our grasp." He lifted his head once more, let it drop, and a strange half-smile formed that made Katara think his face would look much better with a mustache. "Good work, Comrade. You are to be commended for your foresight."

It went without saying that Katara would receive no credit for the suggestion, leaving her no choice but to bow her head and mutter, "It is my honor to serve the Revolution, Comrade."

"So it is for us all," Comrade Haru replied, in a tone of voice that marked him out for a true believer; Katara found herself liking the man instantly, for all that his outward manner was brusque and businesslike. Without another word, though, he turned back on his heel, and began his forward march once more, Katara tagging along just a step behind, because she had long ago learned the perils of being too forward in the People's Republic.

It took another ten minutes, during which Comrade Haru continued to rattle off information and Katara continued to try to jot it all down, but, in the end, they reached their destination. Comrade Haru announced their arrival not with words, but by coming to stop so suddenly that Katara almost tripped over her own feet as her momentum struggled to carry her a few meters more. She turned back to face him, and Comrade Haru smiled.

It even reached his eyes, which made it one the kindest smiles Katara had ever seen in her entire life.

"Pardon me for asking, Comrade, but…have you ever conducted an interrogation before?"

Katara grimaced and shook her head. "I'm afraid not, Comrade, but I have studied the methods and procedures."

Comrade Haru nodded. "Good. Normally, I would be wary of allowing a first-timer to interview a prisoner of this seriousness, but given your language skills…" He paused, pursed his lips, his jaw moving as if he was chewing on his words in an effort to shape them into something that would make sense. It was only then that Katara realized that his skin was of a darker hue than most Han Chinese, and it occurred to her in a flash of intuition that this young man was probably from the South, which meant that Mandarin was unlikely to be his first – or even his second – language.

Knowing exactly how he was probably feeling, she drew herself up to attention and waited.

Finally, after giving himself a very subtle shake, he turned his full attention to her once more, his smile gone, but the glimmer of it still lingering in his eyes.

"As things stand, you role will not be to conduct an…ah…intensive questioning. Your role will be to talk to him in between…more extensive rounds of interrogation. Do you understand the purpose of your sessions with him?"

Katara nodded, calling forth the manuals she had read and the training she had undergone. "I am to be his friend, allow him to think that he can trust me, that I will help him, if only he will cooperate with me."

"Excellent, Comrade." He gave her a once-over, the first actual, deep look he had given her since they had met, and she was pleasantly surprised to find that, unlike with Comrade Jet, her skin did not crawl, and that she did not mind. "Between you and me, Comrade, I think you'll do just fine. Remember your training, and if you need anything, just knock on the door. And if he gets violent-"

"I was top-of-my-class in hand-to-hand training, Comrade Haru," she cut in, unable to keep a hint of very unrevolutionary pride from her voice.

To his credit, Comrade Haru did not seem to mind. "I'm glad to hear that, though, to be honest, the only session during which he is likely to be able to pose any threat to you will be today's." He reached into his pocket, and pulled out a thick ring from which hung an incomprehensible number of keys. He flicked through a few, muttering to himself in what sounded to Katara like Cantonese, before finding the one he wanted and sticking it in the keyhole in the door. "Ready, Comrade?"

Katara drew herself up and bowed her head. "As a true Daughter of the Revolution, I am always ready to serve the People's Republic."

Comrade Haru nodded, his expression grave and serious, his eyes still twinkling. "I'm very pleased to hear that, Comrade." He turned the key, and gave the door a push. "Good luck."

"Thank you, Comrade." And, with that, Katara slipped through the opening and walked into the room. In the middle of the room sat a plain, yet sturdy table. Fluorescent lights flickered in the ceiling above her head, and the room was silent except for the buzzing of the lights and the sounds she made as she went to the table's only available chair and began to set up her things. She took her time, just as she had been trained to do, letting her subject know that she was in charge, that they were living on her time table now, and that there was nothing they could do to change that state of affairs.

Finally, though, she could drag things out no longer. She turned to the man who was handcuffed across the table from where she would sit, put on her best professional smile, and bowed her head.

"Good afternoon," she said in her solid – if thickly accented – Japanese. "My name is Katara, and it is my pleasure to welcome you to the People's Republic of China."

Her subject nodded, made a big show of looking around, and sighed. "If you say so, Katara-san," he replied, in the most erudite and polished Japanese she had ever heard. "Can I go home now?"

She continued to smile as she took her seat, sitting up straight and true on the front edge of her chair and taking up her pen.

"How about we table that question for another time, hmm…?"

This got her another shrug, after which the young man leaned forward to allow his handcuffed hands to scratch at the thick, jet-black stubble that coated his face. Katara watched him closely, watched every move he made, took note of every twitch in his face.

She had to admit, he wasn't exactly what she had expected. For one thing, he seemed to be very tall for a Japanese, easily one-hundred-and-eighty-eight-centimeters or so. He seemed to be very fit, but in a thin, wiry sort of way, as if he lived a hard, active sort of life, an impression supported by his skin, which was not pale like most Japanese, but deeply tanned. He wore thick, wire-framed glasses, and his raven-black hair had been cropped short and close to his skull. His clothes were very Western, consisting of a well-worn sheepskin coat fringed with fur, under which was a thick woolen turtleneck sweater. On her way to the table, she had glanced towards his legs, seen the tattered, well-cared-for blue jeans and the heavy, very sensible boots on his feet. In short, he seemed to be the exact opposite of the fat imperialist Japanese devils of the propaganda films. If anything, he was closer to the snarling Japanese soldiers who had slaughtered her people by the tens-of-thousands than she cared to admit, even to herself.

And then there was the scar.

The scar covered most of the left side of his face, almost as if someone had slammed that part of his face onto a hot stovetop burner and held him there. In the midst of this scar was his left eye, white as milk and obviously dead, a startling contrast to the other eye, which was dark brown, almost black, and flecked with gold that glittered in the flickering ceiling lights.

And this was the eye that he was using to stare right back into her own.

"Go ahead and ask."

She blinked, startled, realizing far too late that she had been staring. It was only natural, but it was unprofessional nonetheless. She frowned, wiping the interrogator's smile from her face and leveling what she hoped was a venomous glare at him.

"I'll ask what I want, when I want, I'd advise you to remember that."

He shrugged, seemingly unperturbed. "Fair enough; your country, your show. Still, most of the time, when I first meet a new person, I find it best to tell them to go ahead and ask about what happened to my face. Helps to break the ice, I've always found."

Her eyes narrowed even more, quite without her telling them to do so. "Then I shall move that question to the bottom of my list. Remember: I dictate what we talk about and when, not you. Or shall I end this session and send you to another interrogation room for a lesson in manners?"

He smirked. She would always struggle with that term later, when trying to write up her report, but there was simply no other way to describe what happened.

The young man before her, so very far away from home, completely under her power, smirked.

"Seeing as I'm sure that I'll be getting said lesson in manners very, very soon, no matter what I say or do, I think I'll do my best to not cut our time short."

She nodded, not entirely sure where this was going. "I'm…glad to hear that. So, you will cooperate?"

This got her a fresh shrug, the most languid, unconcerned one so far. "Why not? All I've done is cooperate. I told that fat-nosed idiot up at the border everything I knew, and I'll do my best to do the same for you. Anything else you guys do to me is on your heads for being too thick-headed to know the truth when you hear it, not mine."

She caught herself grinding her teeth just in time to stop it before anyone but she could hear it. A tremor of irritation flashed up and down her spine, and it was all she could do to remember her role and not reach across the table to slap him across the face.

"Typical capitalist imperialist thinking," she growled, falling back on dialectic in her annoyance, and hating herself for it. "But that's neither here nor there." She moved her pen until it was poised over a fresh page of her notepad, and did her best to smile. "How about we start with your name?"

She knew the shrug was coming, was prepared for it, and yet it still managed to set her teeth on edge.

"Whatever you say, Comrade. For the thousandth time, my name is Tazaki Zuko. I was born in Osaka, Japan, in the spring of 1940, which makes me thirty-one-years-old this upcoming March. I am not a spy; I am a journalist for Asahi Shimbun reporting on the border conflict between your country and the Soviet Union, with a special focus on how it's affecting civilians on both sides of the frontier. My favorite color is blue, I can't shoot a gun to save my life, I hate long walks on the beach, and I would very much like to speak to a representative of my government." He took a deep breath, let it out, and cracked one of the most awkward, uncomfortable smiles Katara had ever seen. "So, can I go home now?"

Katara cracked her own smile right back, deciding there and then that she hated Tazaki Zuko, which meant that the next few weeks were going to be immeasurably easier than she had initially suspected.

"How about we go back to the matter of your name…"

Tazaki Zuko, so-called journalist, probable spy, groaned like a teenage boy being told to do his chores at that, which Katara was willing to chalk up as a victory.

---

"So," Sokka said from where he sat sprawled in a rickety chair at the equally rickety dinner table, puffing on a cigarette and sipping a glass of baiju, "you didn't get anything else out of him?"

From her post by what passed for a stove in what passed for an apartment, where she was cooking up some rice and vegetables and stirring a meat-based broth, Katara groaned, draining her own cup of baiju before pouring herself another helping. "Pretty much," she admitted, pinching her nose in a futile effort to drive away the migraine her interview had given her. "I spent three hours going around in circles with him, desperately trying to get him to slip up while he talked down to me as if I was a particularly idiotic puppy."

Sokka snorted, sipping his drink and stubbing out his spent cigarette. "Sounds about right. He cracked wise all the way back to his cell." He paused, tilting his head this-way-and-that, as if examining an obscure piece of art, before a thin, grudging smile spread across his face. "Though, I gotta give the guy this, for a riben zi, he's got balls. I mean, you should've seen him when we tossed him his food. He picked up the bowl, sniffed it, made this outrageous face, and said, and I quote, I'm sorry to tell you, but the culinary output of this establishment leaves something to be desired. I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask to speak to your chef."

Katara rounded on her brother, eyes wide, mouth hanging open. "You're kidding."

Sokka chuckled, unwittingly giving his sister one more thing to be angry about. That is so just like him, she grumbled to herself. My idiot brother, finding amusement in things that aren't remotely funny. "I am so not," he answered, lighting himself a fresh cigarette, completely oblivious of his sister's mounting frustration. "You should've seen it. Guy put this whole show on, snarked off in pitch perfect Mandarin, of the kind only university kids from Beijing would speak."

Katara frowned as she turned back to the stove and gave the broth a stir. "So, he speaks Mandarin?"

Sokka nodded. "Yup, and, according to Haru, his Cantonese is top-par, too."

"Huh…how'd you guys find that out?"

"Well, when he made his observation, Haru told him he was full of shit. Then, in what Haru called exquisite Cantonese, the asshole informed Haru that he should go ask his mother what this Zuko prick was full of, because, and I'm quoting Haru's translation here, She had a much higher opinion of my bodily fluids."

Katara didn't want to laugh, didn't even want to admit to herself that she wanted to laugh, tried as hard as she could to stop herself from even smirking, and, by and large, she was successful.

Barely.

"That's…you're right, for a Japanese imperialist pig – and that's assuming that he's actually Japanese – he has an impressive amount of gall. What did you guys do?"

Sokka shot her an incredulous look, as if he couldn't believe that she'd bother to ask such a stupid question. "We gave him a good thumping, of course. Now hold on," he continued, raising a hand as Katara started to round on him, "we didn't work him over, we know our orders, give you a day or two before we really start to go to work on him. Still, he was being a shit-head, and needed to learn his place, so we kicked him around a bit before taking his food away and leaving him alone in the dark."

Katara nodded, feeling somewhat mollified. Orders had come down from on high that their supposedly Japanese spy was to be interrogated by the book, which meant giving him the chance to voluntarily confess his crimes against the People before the People's Protectors applied more…forceful methods of persuasion. "Well, so long as you restrained yourselves. Did he have anything to say after that?"

Sokka nodded, but he didn't speak at first. Katara turned to him once more, watched the look on her brother's face, a look she couldn't even begin to describe. The silence stretched on, heavy and laden with unimaginable meaning, and still the rice sizzled and the broth bubbled and the married couple in the apartment above theirs launched into their nightly screaming match.

When Sokka finally spoke, it almost caught Katara by surprise.

"You know…he did, actually. He pulled himself up off the floor, spit the blood from his mouth, cracked this…I dunno…this hideous grin, that scar on his face really doesn't help him in that regard…and he said…he said…"

He paused again, for so long that Katara felt the need to prompt him. "He said…what, Sokka?"

Sokka shook his head, slowly, sadly, drained his cup of baiju and took a long, deep drag from his cigarette.

"He said…is that all you fuckers got? My Father used to beat me harder than that to round out a slow Tuesday."

There wasn't anything to say to that, or, at least, nothing Katara could think of, so she didn't even try. She turned back to her cooking and finished getting dinner ready, and then, without another word, joined her brother at the table to eat in silence.

They didn't speak another word to each other for the rest of the night.

Katara never would be entirely sure why.

---

"Restful night?"

Two days had passed since their first interview, two days during which her subject had been fed the bare minimum necessary to keep him alive and never allowed to sleep for more than an hour at a time. It wasn't particularly harsh treatment, especially compared to what was waiting for him should today's interview fail to elicit any worthwhile information, and yet, from Katara could see, such methods were already starting to take their toll. The subject's skin had lost a few shades of darkness, he listed back-and-forth in his chair like a drunken sailor, and even his dead left eye looked worn and tired. He still had his glasses, but they sat slightly askew on his nose, and when he spoke, his words were slightly slurred by his busted bottom lip. Dried blood from a superficial cut across his brow discolored the unscarred side of his face, and bruises were already developing across his face.

In short, the man who called himself Tazaki Zuko looked like hell, and by the look in his one good eye, he was well aware that things were only going to get worse from there.

Not that his mannerisms gave any indication of it.

He shrugged, taking a long drag from his cigarette and tapping the ash into an ashtray that, even though he had been given the pack of harsh, cheap Chinese cigarettes only fifteen minutes before, was already well on its way to overflowing. "Well," he said, wincing as he blew out the smoke, pausing to rub his ribs before continuing, "while I wouldn't exactly use the word restful, oddly enough, it wasn't the worst night I've ever experienced."

Katara felt an eyebrow pop, and leaned forward, legitimately curious. "Oh? Is that so? Then, I have to ask, what was the worst night you've ever experienced?"

He chuckled, though it didn't last long, and it looked like it hurt him. "That would have to have been the night of March 13th, 1945, the first big raid on Osaka, where I grew up. The Americans hit the city with what I found out later were nearly three-hundred B-29's at around thirty minutes to midnight, and didn't let up for a good three-and-a-half hours, though, let me tell you, it felt like an eternity to my just-turned-five-year-old mind. All night," he continued, cupping his handcuffed hands together and miming cradling a child, "I held my sister while we cowered with Mother in the shelter, everything around us shaking and people screaming and crying like the world was ending. Mother kept praying, on-and-on-and-on, holding us tight, hunched over us both, and Azula wouldn't stop screaming, no matter how much I sang to her." He stopped, pursed his lips in thought, nodded, and stubbed out his spent cigarette before lighting a brand-new one (since Katara, to show that his true interrogation had not yet begun, was still allowing him to light his own cigarettes). "Compared to that," he continued, sucking on his cigarette like it was the only thing keeping him alive, "the night I spent in a jail cell in Bangkok, the local cops using me for a punching bag, was child's play."

Katara's hand instinctively flew to her notepad, and she began writing. "You were arrested in Thailand?"

The subject's remaining eyebrow perked in interest. "Wow, a Red Guard who's actually looked at a globe? The wonders never cease, it seems."

There was a lot Katara wanted to do just then. She wanted to fly off the handle, to deal out a beating that would put the ones the subject was receiving at the hands of her brother and his colleagues to shame. She wanted to scream and yell and call him every swear word she knew, specific language be damned. In that moment, as her finger subconsciously brushed where her red scarf was knotted at her throat, the man before her was everything that she hated in the world. He was a misogynistic relic of the patriarchal past, one more man condescending to her for the crime of being a mere woman. He was a capitalist imperialist dog, striding across China as if he owned it by right of birth. He was the epitome of the Japanese monsters who had made her childhood a living hell. He was the Nationalist soldier who had strung her mother up from a tree when she was eight for daring to not fall to her knees quickly enough.

He was, in short, everything she had grown to hate in the world.

She didn't say any of that, though, didn't do any of that, either. She had a task, she had orders, and it was in her interests to carry them out, least the People decide that she was the one who needed to be punished.

And, as far as she was concerned, in her deepest, darkest moments, the People had punished her family more than enough for their sins.

Instead, she pushed all of that aside, looked her subject right in the eye, and asked, "Why were you arrested in Bangkok?"

That got her yet another shrug, which seemed to be one his primary methods of communication. Katara's heart went out in that moment to the bastard's poor mother. "My sister and I spent about three months rattling around the northern highlands, and when it was over, we got our paper to publish a multi-part expose on the rampant corruption in the government, the brutal mistreatment of the Shan tribes, and how the American military and the CIA were intimately involved in all of it. Then, because I'm an idiot and my sister is crazy, we didn't immediately leave town, which was why we were around when the local bigwigs decided to punish me for it."

She nodded. "Both of you?"

"No, just me. My sister got away, thank God, because without her informing our embassy, I'd probably still be in that cell. And before you ask, they held me for about three days, and now I have four false teeth." He opened his mouth, tilting his head until she could see glints of gold and silver. "See?"

"Uh huh." She made a few more notes. "You understand, of course, that we will be checking all of this."

He seemed blissfully unconcerned. "How? Last I checked, the People's Republic doesn't have an embassy in Thailand."

She turned her attention back to her notes. "We have our ways. The Revolution has eyes and ears everywhere."

To this, he uttered a short, sharp back of the most derisive laughter she had ever heard. "That's rich. The only people you could talk to in Thailand are useless student radicals too busy getting high and laid to do anything useful, and overseas Chinese who hate your guts."

Her head snapped up, and her eyes narrowed. "What do you know about my countrymen overseas?"

He grunted, smoke shooting out of his nose. "Well, for one thing, I've spent a lot of time interviewing them. As far as they're concerned, idiots like you are tearing their homeland apart. Don't you read anything other than your own propaganda?" He scoffed, scoffed and smoked. "I bet you never even read Confucius."

She felt the rage crawling up her spine, saw red dots begin to dance across her vision. "Like you have."

He smiled, a horrid, strangled thing that creased his lips and proclaimed to all the world the contempt in which he held her, before beginning to speak in pure, unaccented Mandarin. "'The Master said, To study and at due times practice what one has studied, is this not a pleasure? When friends come from distant places, is this not a joy? To remain unsoured when his talents are recognized, is this not a junzi? To this, Master Yu said, It is rare to find a person who is filial to his parents and respectful to his elders, yet-'"

That's it, she thought, watching he ramble on, showing off what he felt was his self-evident superiority. That's how I break him. I show him that he is nothing special, challenge him, show him that he is nothing more than a gnat, eking out a living annoying the People before They swat him like the insect that he is. Feeling very satisfied with herself, she cut in, barking, "How about Book VII?"

He shrugged, stubbed out one cigarette, lit himself a new one, beginning his recitation with a cloud of billowing smoke. She marked that down, too, that penchant for the dramatic. Every moment he spent with her, he gave her more tools with which to help her comrades break him.

Every second, he himself put his head more firmly in the noose.

"'The Master said, To transmit but not to create, to be faithful in loving the old – in this I dare compare myself to Old Peng. The Master said, To stay silent and mark something in the mind, to study without tiring, to instruct others without fatigue – what difficulty are these things to me?" He paused, smoked, allowed his smile to broaden. "Shall I continue? My sister and I like to take turns on long plane rides, trading off verse-for-verse. Our father was a big fan of old school methods of education, right down to the bamboo switch across the back."

Just keep digging, Tazaki-san, she said, barely biting down on a predatory grin. Just keep on digging. That's how you all come to your ends, you foreign dogs. You come here, seeking to vaunt your greatness, and never notice the People as they whittle away at your ankles.

Making a note to come back to the subject of his father at a later date, she sighed. "You think you're quite the exemplar of intelligence, don't you?"

"Meh, not really. I'm just well educated. I leave being smart to my sister."

"Ah, right, your sister, your mysterious photographer whose existence no one can confirm. What was her name again?"

"Azula."

"Right. And your father's name?"

"Ozai. Ursa was my mother, Iroh was my uncle, Noriko his wife, my aunt, Hajime my eldest cousin, Natsumi my second eldest cousin, Kumiko my youngest cousin."

She raised a finger into the air. "Ah, but see, that's where you lose me. Ursa? Noriko? Hajime? Those all seem like fairly standard, fairly reasonable Japanese names. But Zuko? Azula? Ozai? That seems a bit far-fetched, almost as if they were…oh, I don't know…false."

If he was impressed by her reasoning, he didn't show it. "Whatever; believe what you want. Your country, your show."

"Fine, then how do you explain such…for lack of a better word…strange names?"

"I don't know, honestly. Weird-ass names are kind of a Tazaki family tradition. My grandfather was named Azulon, if you can believe it. That's why my uncle chose such normal names for his children; he was trying to break the cycle."

"And your father preferred tradition?"

The subject's face hardened, and his smile vanished. "The only thing my father was interested in breaking was my face with his fists."

She nodded, clucking her tongue as she flipped through her notes. "You do seem to enjoy harping on your father…"

She was expecting the shrug this time, though even she was a bit surprised by its nonchalance. "What can I say? He was a son-of-a-bitch. Got what was coming to him."

"I see…and what was that?"

It was only after the longest, most pregnant of pauses that the subject answered her question.

"When I was sixteen, he went tumbling down the stairs in our house and broke his neck. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. My sister danced a jig in my hospital room when the cops came and told us."

Katara would've been lying if she said she was not intrigued. "Is that so? And why were you in the hospital?"

He gestured at his scar. "Why do you think?"

She smiled. "I don't think anything. Why don't you answer my question?"

The calm, cool, collected air of superiority was gone, replaced by something vicious and cold. "Why don't you go fuck yourself with a brick?"

She allowed her smile to reach her eyes. "Now, I think, we're getting somewhere."

He rolled his eye. "Oh? Is that what this is called? I was under the impression that we were circling the toilet bowl and pretending that the turds were nuggets of gold."

She couldn't even get mad; if anything, she allowed herself a giggle. As much as she hated her subject, even she had to admit that he had a way with words. And the dry delivery? I can see why Sokka enjoys needling him so much. "I guess you're just not smart enough to see what I see."

He snorted in derision. "Either that, or I'm just not fucked enough in the head."

"You are," she admitted – graciously, she felt, "welcome to your opinion."

He popped his eyebrow. "What, so your goons have more to beat out of me?"

She slipped a hint of promise into her smile. "Perhaps. Now," she continued, flipping back a few pages in her notes, "why don't we return to the subject of your patently false name? I really am curious as to why you would choose such an obviously fake cover identity. Could it be that the names of the family members you're trying to cover up are, in fact, well-known oppressors, and that revealing their true identities would give the game away? I think we should explore this matter further…"

"Oh, for fuck's sake…"

---

Comrade Xin smiled at me as I was brought into his office. He was full of nothing but praise. You did well, Comrade, he said, patting me on the shoulder. A real breakthrough. You exposed the cracks in his cover story, and made clear to him that we see right through his lies; it's only a matter of time until it shatters completely. He led me out of his office and down into the cells, prattling on-and-on about how good the work I had done was, how I had proven correct every positive thing that had ever been said about me. Keep this up, he said with a wink, and one day, you'll be sitting where I am! I thanked him for his kind words, and reiterated my desire to nothing more than serve the Revolution. He seemed to approve.

What time it was, Katara didn't know. It was dark, and it was cold. The heater had broken again, and she shivered in the darkness, buried under a pile of thin and scratchy blankets. From the mat beside her came her brother's snores, his face calm and serene, snoring loud enough to wake the dead. She was desperately tired, desperately wanted to sleep, to nap, anything, but she couldn't. All she could do, was think about when Comrade Xin Fu, the chief of the Interrogation Section, took her deep into the cells after her second interview, to show her what her work had accomplished.

They stood me at a one-way window. The room I could see was bare. I'd never felt so cold, so alone, in my entire life. My brother was standing in the room, him and four or five other young men, shuffling their feet, smoking their cigarettes, exchanging their gossip. Everyone was full of smiles and laughter, as if we were at a country fair. Comrade Xin knocked on the glass. Sokka must've known I was there, because he turned, smiled, and waved.

She tossed. She turned. She buried her face in what passed for her pillow and hummed all the lullabies her mother used to put her to sleep with. None of it helped, not a single bit of it.

The smiles vanished the second the door to the room opened. My subject was brought in, pushed into the center of the room. Haru was there, in charge, it seemed. He stepped forward, waited for the door to be closed and locked once more. My subject drew himself up tall, standing at attention like a soldier. He smiled. So, he said, in Mandarin, I guess this is when the real fun begins, eh?

She couldn't get the look on his face out of her head. The resignation in the smile, the pride in his posture, the spite that blazed from every pore…

They stripped him, slowly and methodically, tore his clothes to pieces right before him. He didn't say a word, just stood there, humming a tune I didn't recognize. They manacled his hands, lifted him up, raised his arms, hung the chain of the cuffs from a hook that I hadn't noticed was firmly attached to the ceiling. Only the tips of his toes touched the cold concrete of the floor. The sound of one of his shoulders popping out of joint made me flinch, but no one noticed, because all eyes were on my subject.

There had been no defiance. That was something she just couldn't get over, the thing she couldn't get out of her head. There had been spite, yes, and pride, and a strange, mangled sort of something that could only be called dignity, but there was no defiance. His expression did not invite his tormenters to do their worst, did not proclaim a promise to laugh while they abused him. No, it wasn't that, wasn't that at all…

The last thing they took from him, before they got to work, were his glasses. Haru stepped forward, calmly, carefully, slid the glasses from my subject's face, dropped them to the floor, and ground them into dust with the heel of his boot. That done, the men, my brother included, took off their uniform jackets, rolled up their sleeves, and slowly, expertly, got to work. My subject knew what was coming. As soon as his glasses hit the floor, he closed his eye.

She bit back a groan of pain, and closed her own eyes, finally admitting what it was that her subject's expression had been trying to say.

He was telling us to hurry up and get it over with already.

He was telling us that he was bored.

She rolled over onto her stomach and buried her face into her pillow, why, she didn't know. She cried so silently that she didn't even know what she was doing until she felt the damp begin to spread through her pillow.

I hate him, hate everything about him, hate everything he represents. I should be glorying in his punishment, and regretting only that his masters cannot share his punishment with him.

So why am I crying?

Why?

She didn't know, and that night, she never would, just as she never would be able to get to sleep.

The only thing he said was right before I was dismissed to go get to work on my daily report. He chuckled, spit out a tooth, and snarled, You motherfuckers STILL don't hit as hard as my father. You should really get on that, you know; the reputation of the People's Republic is on the line here.

It would be a long time before she was able to get those words out of her head.

---

This time, two days passed before she sat down with him again.

She knew that in all those two days, he had not had a single bite to eat, and only the barest trickle of water, just enough to keep him alive, and so she brought him a big plate of food and a huge pitcher of water so cold that the comrade who delivered it carried the pitcher wrapped in a thick woolen rag. She gave him three packs of cheap, low-quality Chinese cigarettes that he sucked down one after the other, though she had to perform the lighting duties because his hands shook too much. When he suddenly dozed off halfway through the session, she waved off an interrogative knock at the door and let him nap for a good half-hour, because she knew that he was being subjected to concerted sleep deprivation. She told herself that all of this was because she needed him functional and coherent, not madly babbling like a starved, exhausted, half-crazed loon.

She told herself this, and occasionally, she almost believed it.

The changes that had come over him were startling, no matter how much she hardened her heart, no matter how much she insisted on thinking of him as Subject. Weight had continued to disappear, leaving his features sharp and drawn and his muscles wasting away. His facial hair had gone from a bit of stubble to straggly, unwashed, and increasingly thick. His face was covered in cuts and bruises, and exhaustion wafted from every pore. All he had for clothing was a simple, roughspun shift of thin cotton, and when she saw him shivering uncontrollably, she made a note to request he be given something more substantial, rationalizing this by deciding that the People needed him alive and talking, not dead from hypothermia.

And while she watched him eat and drink and smoke and shiver, she continued to ask him her questions, and so long as they stayed off the subject of his family and his childhood, he continued to answer them, for all that his speech was slurred by his swollen lips and he kept losing his train-of-thought. Today, she was walking him through what he claimed to have been nearly a decade of what he insisted had been a purely journalistic career. While he talked, she made her notes, marking down dates, story subjects and headlines, the magazines his so-called sister's photography had appeared in, the countries he had been to, anything that the Ministry of State Security's agents could run down and check, anything that could be used against him. At least, that was her purpose when they began.

Within an hour, though, she found that she was just interested.

He told about working for the student newspaper at Tokyo University, where he graduated with honors in 1962 through what he himself considered sheer spite, rather than any kind of skill or academic aptitude. He fell into a pit of nostalgia as he related how he was almost expelled in his third year, when he broke a story about grade-fixing and endemic corruption among the faculty and administration, a story that managed to find its way into the national newspapers. Against her own will, she found herself enthralled as he recounted spending his first year working for Asahi Shimbun creeping in and out of dingy nightclubs and flitting up and down back alleys in the Roppongi district of Tokyo, his sister – who had hated university – having ditched school to back up his words with pictures, until he had earned himself a death sentence by exposing rampant collusion between the Japanese authorities and Yakuza gangsters.

By his account, this death sentence ended in what he considered the start of his true career, flying all over the world, hopping in and out of every global hellhole that his editors could think to send him. He told her about a spent bullet bouncing off his helmet as he rode an American helicopter into the jungle in Vietnam, his sister making an American soldier hold her belt so she could hang out the open doors snapping pictures, while he bellowed his questions over the roar of the helicopter blades and never left whatever shithole he was sharing with his sister without at least thirty pencils, because pen ink had a tendency to dry up in the tropical heat and he kept losing his current pencil every time he dove for cover. He smiled as he described the battered, pitiful excuse for a motorcycle that he and his sister rode through Cambodia, as they discovered that the only difference between the Khmer Rouge and the government troops they fought was that government troops were cheaper to bribe. He chuckled as he recounted how his sister had to teach him gutter French on the long plane ride to the Congo, and how a few bottles of Johnny Walker could get you into any American military base, no matter how much the American brass hated you and tried to keep you away. Through him, she watched tracer rounds chew up the sky in the back-hills of Laos, felt the sting of the sea salt on his face as a hard-bitten South Korean smuggling cheap consumer goods into the North informed him that his sister was the craziest person this smuggler – who, the subject said, had breath that smelled like the rotting corpse of a rotting corpse – had ever met, choked on clouds of tear gas as riot police smashed the student protests that had rocked Japan in '68. He philosophized about his personal theory that, after seeing how well gangsters from all over the world got along, that maybe the key to world peace was to just let the criminals run the show, before cheerfully relating some of his favorites among the death threats he had received over the years.

"Why?" she asked him at one point. "Why do you do such things? How can you expect us to believe that any newspaper on the planet would continue to pay your salary, no matter how many scandals you break or how many powerful men you thumb your nose at? How is any of this remotely believable?"

He shrugged, looking for all the world like he had never heard a more idiotic, more boring question in his life. "My paper continues to pay me because no one else is stupid enough to go to the places I go and get the stories from them I get, because my stories move papers, and because the paper makes outrageous amounts of money selling my sister's pictures all over the world, and she refuses to work with anyone but me. There's journalists like me all over the world; we're like a club of morons, chugging booze by the gallon at night before hopping in some car older than our grandfathers in the morning because someone said they heard gunfire off to the west. And our papers print our stories because, elsewhere in the world, there's a thing called freedom of the press, no matter how much our parent governments wish that people like me would just hurry up and die, and, last but not least, the paper I work for has a long tradition of twisting the nose of Japan's ruling political elite, at least until the LDP finally gets its ass handed to it and the people my editors like get in, at which point I'll probably have to go whore myself out to the Neanderthals over at Yomiuri Shimbun, God help me."

She ignored the frightening number of things she had not understood from that diatribe, leaning forward and stabbing her pen at him. "But you still didn't answer why you do these things. At this point," she continued, leaning back and dropping her chin into the palm of her left hand, "you being a spy is the more logical of the possibilities on offer to explain the life you've led."

He chuckled, though how what she had said was in any way amusing, she hadn't the faintest idea. "Maybe so…but, thing is, I'm not a spy. I'm just a crazy journalist who, for whatever reason, when combined with my sister and her camera, is really good at diving into the shit and coming out with a story people want to read."

"You're dodging the question," she pointed out.

He cracked the first smile of the session. "Am I?" He picked up the half-empty pitcher and poured water directly into his mouth, completely ignoring the nice, moderately clean glass that had been set out for him. "Because, to be brutally honest, I haven't the faintest idea why I do what I do. My sister does it because she's completely, utterly insane, but me?" He took another draught of water, and shuddered as the chill hit him. "I really don't know."

She sighed, and shook her head. "You're lying." And for the first time since she had met him, she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was right.

To her consternation, though, all he did was shrug and crack his usual pathetic attempt at a smile. "You know what, Katara-san? You just might be on to something there." He shook out another cigarette from the second pack, the first one having long since been consumed, and, after his habitual fruitless attempt to light it, muttered angrily as he leaned forward to let Katara do the honors. "Though, I have to ask, since when has lying to oneself been a crime?"

"When you're not lying to yourself, but pretending to in order to lie to me."

He groaned, running a trembling, badly abused hand down his face. "For the love of…why do you hate me so much?"

She blinked, confused, her next question vanishing completely from her mind. "Pardon?"

He stabbed the cigarette at her like a gun. "Why do you hate me so much? The fuck did I ever do to you?"

The rage came flooding back, boiling and bubbling through her veins and searing the deepest, darkest corners of her soul. The red dots began to dance in her eyes, and somewhere, from far, far away, she could hear her mother screaming at her and Sokka to run, run far away, don't ever look back, as the Kuomintang thug tied the rope around her neck and began dragging her towards the trees.

"Because," she snarled, her pen clasped so tightly in her fist that it shook like a leaf in a typhoon, "you're the embodiment of everything I despise in this world. The actual, real, perfect epitome of everything I've hated and fought against all my life."

He pursed his brutalized lips, taking a long drag from his cigarette as he slumped back into his chair. "Alright, fair enough. And what is it that I embody so perfectly well?"

The anger was hot, hot as the sun that had beat down on her family as they tramped down long, winding tracks, shuffling through clouds of dust thick enough to choke a water buffalo, so exhausted that no one even blinked when the passing columns of Japanese soldiers took random potshots into the endless rivers of refugees.

"Why," she asked, pain blossoming to life in her temples, so hard was the effort to not call in the guards to deliver a beating right there and then, "would you want to know? Why would you care?"

Zuko – no, the subject, her subject, the spy, the enemy, my enemy, my eternal enemy in my eternal war, not Zuko, never Zuko, never – shrugged and slumped back into his chair. "Because, after growing up the way I did, I derive a great amount of comfort from discovering what it's like to be despised for an actual reason. Plus, who knows? Maybe you'll break my heart with your story, and I'll crack and confess everything you people are so intent on beating out of me."

"So," she asked, cracking her own hideous smile, a smile she was glad she could not see, "you admit there are secrets to discover, deep in that brain of yours?"

He sighed, and for the love of the gods she no longer believed, she couldn't help but think that he looked unimaginably sad. "Not the secrets you want to know, but…yeah, we all have secrets."

She nodded, why, she didn't know, never would. And then, for equally mysterious reasons, she told him.

She told of him of a little village that didn't even have a name, a village where Manchus and Mongolians had been mixing for so long that nobody could tell the difference anymore, a village that she was born in, but had never seen, because, when she was only a year old, the soldiers of the Emperor of Manchukuo and their sneering Japanese officers burned it to the ground. She recounted her first memories, a swirling chaos of bent-backed peasants staggering down long dusty roads, and how for the longest time, she didn't know what being hungry meant, because that's all she ever was. She pulled his mind towards her, let him see through her eyes, see how big the snarling Japanese seemed, huge, monstrous, the officers with their cruel, curved swords and the soldiers with their bayonets as long as her arm. She spread her arms, to show just how small the shack was that was the only home she knew until she was ten-years-old and her father finally made his way home from the wars. She beamed as she recounted watching the big, strapping Russians with their red banners and their red stars who roared in on endless columns of tanks and let her and the other children throw rocks and insults at the Japanese prisoners huddling in their stockades. She told him how the Communists came, the Communists and the Chairman, and how they brought order, distributed food, let girls like her go to school, and promised that never again would their people bow and scrape to foreign dogs.

Then the civil war came back, and the Nationalists launched their final offensive, and her grandmother tried to cover her eyes so she wouldn't see her mother swinging from a tree for the crime of daring not to bow. But the Chairman won, and there was food again, and order. The wars ended, and no more was China the West's browbeaten slave.

There was silence for a long time after she finished. By the end, she was on her feet, one small step away from screaming, her anger and her rage threatening to tear her apart from inside-out, her mind so overwhelmed that she didn't even care anymore. She wanted him to see. She needed him to see, needed him to know, needed him to feel, to fully and truly understand why she hated him, and why he deserved that hate.

And when it was done, when she stood over him, quivering with anguish or rage, she had long since ceased to be able to tell the difference, he took a long drag from his cigarette, tapped the ash into the ashtray, looked her right in the eye, and asked, in a soft, gentle voice, of a kind she hadn't even known he was capable of, "You know how old I was when the War ended?"

She did some mental math, and nodded. "Five or so, I would imagine."

He looked away, so that all she could see was the scar and the sliver of white that was all that remained of his left eye. "I never even really knew who we were fighting. What's America to a five-year-old, when all he knows are the bombs and the sirens and the fires from the incendiaries? I…" He paused, took a deep breath, let it out, a breath that shook and rattled, as if he was about to cry, but she knew that couldn't be possible, human beings cry, not subjects, and definitely not Japanese imperialist pigs. "When I was born, my mother had a mother, a father, and one older brother. She used to have three, but the two eldest died in China, which was why she agreed to marry my father, because he had influence and connections and promised to use them to keep her one remaining brother out of the Army."

"And did he?" she asked, as if she cared about the answer, which she couldn't.

Could she?

He shook his head, took another drag from his cigarette. "He did, actually, though only because my uncle – his elder brother – shamed him into it. Father even went a step further, got a my mother's last brother a civil service job in her hometown, so he could take care of their parents."

"Sounds like the War went well for your family," she said, standing up and crossing her arms, feeling that her point had been made.

To that, he just scoffed, though it looked like it hurt him, whether physically or just spiritually, she couldn't tell. "Know what my mother's hometown was?"

She frowned. "What?"

Finally, he turned his face back, so that he could look her in the eye again. "Hiroshima." He took a final drag from his cigarette, stubbed it out in the ashtray, never once taking his eye from hers. "There weren't even ashes to put in an urn. That's what always hurt my mother the most. Even my aunt Noriko and her daughters got urns, when the Americans came with their napalm and incendiaries and they couldn't get to the shelters in time. But my mother's family…even her two other brothers, the ones who died in China, their urns were gone, along with their city. All gone…"

"And your other uncle?" she asked, her words flooding out, her hands opening and closing, as if she was desperately trying to gather to her the shreds of her fury. "And his son? Hajime, was it? Or so you claim."

Zuko – no, not Zuko, subject, not Zuko, subject – winced, looked away, and she watched in horror and despair as a tear trickled down the unmarred side of his face. "Hajime died on Guadalcanal, and Uncle was in Manchuria when the War ended, didn't get out of the gulag the Soviets tossed him in until I was thirteen. I only knew him from pictures, but I didn't recognize him. He was skin-and-bones, a shell of the man he once was. That's…that's when my father really went off the deep-end. He knew there was no one to stop him anymore." He turned back to Katara, and when he smiled, it almost seemed real. "Three years later, my father got sick of my defiance and slammed my face into a hot stove burner, and held it there until my mother pulled him off. The next night, while my sister held my hand in the hospital, Mother pushed him down the stairs, and pressed her foot into his throat to make sure it stuck."

She had nothing left to say, nothing left to do. She wanted to curl up in the corner of the room she shared with her brother, curl up in the dark and cry until she couldn't cry anymore, then cry some more. So, she did the only thing she could do:

She went to the door and called the guards. Zuko didn't even argue.

His last words, as the guards carried him through the door, were tossed over his shoulder, and came with a strange, ethereal sort of grin.

"I've accepted that you aren't who I thought you were, when we first met. Maybe, just maybe, you should think about accepting that I'm not who you think I am." And then he was through the door and the door was slamming and blood was filling her mouth as she bit her lip in an effort not to burst into tears.

She pleaded exhaustion afterwards, passed on watching the evening's interrogation session, walked home through a soft, silent snowfall after filing the day's report.

She hated herself every step of the way.

---

"Hey, Sis, you alright?"

Katara jerked, blinking as she turned to face her brother. He was in the seat next to hers at the conference table in the briefing room, leaning close and talking very, very low, eyes filled with concern. A sudden sense of panic seized her by the throat, and she found herself looking wildly about, wondering if anyone else had noticed whatever it was she was doing, forgetting all about her brother's question until Sokka poked her in the arm.

"Hey, earth to Katara? You there, kid?"

Katara gave a shaky nod, lifting up her cap and running a trembling hand through her hair. The heater was having one of its moodier days, and everyone present was bundled up in thick coats and scarves, and yet, her hand came away damp, and the sweat that was pouring off of her was making her clothes stick to her back and sending shivers up and down her spine. The world seemed dark, hazy, indistinct, as if she was living in a dream, and the mutters and chatter and gossip of her comrades had a tinny echo to it, as if it was coming to her from down a long, winding tunnel in the dead of night.

None of which answered her brother's question.

"Yeah," she said, giving a few more shaky nods as she carefully put her cap back on her head, "I'm fine. Just…didn't sleep well last night, I supposed."

Sokka frowned, looking decidedly unconvinced. "That's putting it mildly. You tossed and turned for hours."

She tossed him her best attempt at a lopsided grin. "Sorry about that…"

He waved the apology away. "Hey, don't worry about it. Everybody has difficulty with their first investigation."

She felt her eyes goggle in surprise. "Seriously? Did you?"

He shrugged, a hand floating up to absently rub the back of his neck. "Well, believe it or not, as close as I may be, I'm still not perfect. I had nightmares for a week after my first." He stopped, furrowed his brow, leaned in even closer, his voice dropping until it was almost a whisper. "I mean it, Sis, it's fine. Not everyone's cut out for this kind of work. No one will think less of you if you bow out."

"No," she snapped, jerking away from him as far as she could without moving to another seat, "I'm fine. I can do this." She could, she knew she could. She could, and she would. Zuko…no, the subject, he…she meant…it…the…the…the…

"I'm fine," she repeated, though whether she was trying to convince her brother or herself, even she didn't know for sure. "Really. I got this."

Sokka shrugged, slumping back into his habitual sprawl. "If you say so, Sis. Just let me or Haru know if you need any help." He paused, rolled his head from side-to-side, his jaw working as she watched him chew on his next words. He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, said, "In fact-"

She never did get to find out what would've come after that. At that moment, the door to the briefing room slammed open and Xin Fu himself stepped through. The entire Investigation Section leapt to its feet, clicking its heels and standing to attention until Comrade Xin motioned for them to sit. As everyone returned to their seats and got their things in order for the morning briefing, Comrade Xin's eyes wandered, his gaze settling first on one person, then the next, until, finally, after what seemed to her like an eternity, he settled on Katara.

"Comrade Katara?"

Katara snapped to attention in her chair, eyes front, back straight, jaw out. "Yes, Comrade?"

"Please stand."

Katara stood, or, at least, she thought she did. She didn't remember standing, once she was there, didn't remember much of anything, in the silence that followed Comrade Xin's request. She stood, spine ramrod straight, sweat trickling down her back, struggling desperately not to faint or pass out or run from the room in tears. She couldn't remember the last time she'd had a decent night's rest, couldn't remember the last decent meal she'd eaten. For days now, she had been living on gallons of tea and whatever scraps of food she could force herself to eat. She couldn't sleep, couldn't think. She walked in a haze, never-ending, a waking nightmare from which she could not wake up, an eternal horror, one she was beginning to suspect had been with her since the day she was born. Nothing made sense anymore, nothing seemed right. She didn't understand.

She wasn't entirely sure she wanted to. All she did know was that she needed to.

"Gentlemen," because Katara was the only woman there, she had never noticed that before, everywhere she went, she one of only a handful, no matter how much the Party proclaimed that equality for women was one of the primary goals of the Revolution, why did I never notice that before, "yesterday, your Comrade undertook a very risky maneuver. Prisoner #13188 asked her a personal question, and, after giving the matter careful thought and consideration – the transcript is very clear on that – she answered. This," Comrade Xin continued, jabbing a forefinger into the air, "is something they don't teach you when you start this glorious work. I'm sure you all had it drilled into you. Never reveal anything, never let the subject dictate the course of the interview, things like that. And yet…"

Comrade Xin paused, and suddenly, out of nowhere, Katara hated him. She hated his guts. For the first time, she noticed his beady eyes and his cruel, sneering little smirk.

For the first time in her adult life, she actually looked at the kind of man who was giving her orders, and wondered why she had suddenly decided to make such a terrible mistake.

"And yet," Comrade Xin continued, the smirk spreading across his face until it became what Katara could only call a sneer, "she answered the subject's questions, answered them fully, clearly, and honestly. And, in so doing, she was able to extract from the subject the first real actionable piece of information that we've gleaned thus far. In short, Comrade Katara took a grave risk, one I would normally reprimand a first-timer for even thinking about attempting, and managed to break the subject's cover story wide open. Gentlemen, a round of applause for Comrade Katara."

This was it. This was the moment Katara had been waiting for all her life, the moment when she would be recognized by her peers, not as a beautiful woman, but as a colleague, a co-worker, a comrade, when her skills and intelligence and drive and loyalty would finally be given something more than a condescending wink and a pat on the head. She stood before her comrades that morning, not as a woman, but as a true daughter of the Revolution, a protector of the People, a servant of the Proletariat. It was what she had wanted since the day the Party won the Civil War and cast the Kuomintang gangsters down into the hell that they so richly deserved.

And yet, now that it had come, now that she was finally receiving the respectful applause she had dreamed of all her life, all she wanted to do was vomit. All she heard was the rushing in her ears, all she tasted was the bile at the back of her throat, all she felt was the burning in her heart.

When Comrade Xin bade her take her seat, she nearly wept with relief.

"Now," Comrade Xin continued, taking his own seat and lighting a cigarette, a lead that the rest of the men in the room quickly followed, "some of you may be wondering why this is so important. Well, I would like all of you to look at the folders in front of you."

Everyone did, including Katara. She opened her folder, looked at the first page, stared at the characters, watched them dance and fade and blur together through unshed tears that burned in her eyes, though why she should want to cry, she could not begin to guess.

"Before you," Comrade Xin was saying, "is a report from the Party archives in Beijing. As you are all no doubt aware, the Party has made it its mission in life to bring to justice as many of the imperialist war criminals who brutalized our glorious homeland during the disorders that the Chairman so brilliantly brought to a close."

Bodies floating down the Yangtze…skeletons begging along the side of the road…the purges…her grandmother dying of a broken heart as crazed students burned the temples to the ground…her brother denouncing their own father for reactionary, counter-revolutionary tendencies…the Chairman's Great Leap Forward…

And there, in the midst of it all, her, Katara, cheering it on…never questioning…

Never…

Not once…

"Sadly, many criminals remain out of our reach, protected by the capitalist pigs in Washington and, I'm sorry to say, the imperialist dogs in Moscow, where Marx's glorious dream of Revolution and the Worker's Paradise has been twisted until not even Marx himself would recognize it. When I saw the name of Prisoner #13188, something clicked, deep down inside. Thus, I sent a request down to Beijing, asking them if they could find anything attached to the name Tazaki."

Katara winced, and prayed to her grandmother's gods that Comrade Xin did not notice, because if he noticed, he would ask why, and she would have to find a way to explain just how badly he had butchered Zuko's name.

Not Zuko…never Zuko…you can't think of him as Zuko…

You cannot see a little boy clutching his baby sister, cowering as the bombs rain down from the heavens…

You can only see Prisoner #13188…

Only the subject…

Never, ever…

Zuko…

"If you turn to the second page, you will find a summary of the career of one Tazaki Iroh, a general in the imperialist Japanese armies that so brutally ravaged our beautiful homeland. As you can see, he had quite the career oppressing the Chinese people, right from the beginning, when he commanded a division during the Battle of Shanghai. Yes, Comrade Haru?"

Katara's eyes shot to Haru; she hadn't even noticed he was there, right across the table from her.

"You mean, if we accept the prisoner's recounting of his family background at face value, the Dragon of the East himself is his uncle?"

Comrade Xin gave a short, sharp nod. "This would seem to be the case, though, for what it's worth, despite the best efforts of our investigators, no serious war crimes could be attached to any unit while it was under this man's command. It seems that General Tazaki was the exception that proved the rule of Japanese monstrosity, which was why, when the Soviets repatriated him to Japan, the Party chose not to object, as you can see from the file."

My uncle was a soldier, a loyal servant of his Emperor. That was what Zuko said, that was what he told me. He believed in the glory of Japan, and did his best to serve his people and his Emperor with honor, dignity, courage, and respect. Then Zuko sighed, and shook his head. And for that, he returned home with a broken heart and a shattered spirit, filled with shame at the horrors his countrymen had inflicted upon the world.

"However," Comrade Xin said, turning a few pages in his folder, "if you turn to page five, you will see that General Tazaki's younger brother was anything but an exception to the rule."

The entire room gasped, and Katara nearly slapped herself across the face. Why didn't I put it together before? The face staring back at her from a grainy black-and-white photo was instantly recognizable as the father of the man known to her as Tazaki Zuko. Even through the medium of a low-quality copy of a low-quality copy of a low-quality photograph, evil and malevolence shone from every millimeter of the visage staring out at her. The eyes were hard and cold, and the mouth was twisted in a sneer that promised anyone who saw it nothing but pain and suffering.

Tazaki Ozai.

Ozai the Butcher.

A name the mothers of Manchuria frightened their children with before bed.

"Whether we accept the prisoner's story at face-value or not," Comrade Xin resumed, "I think we can all accept that this man is, undoubtedly, the father of Prisoner #13188. Does anyone dispute that?"

No one did, just as no one noticed the look on Katara's face, the one that all but screamed, No wonder he hates his father so much.

No wonder his sister danced a jig when they learned of his demise.

Comrade Xin cleared his throat and turned a page. "Now, Ozai was, as you may or may not have known, one of the senior commanders of the crime against humanity known as Unit 731. His name is soaked in the blood and the screams of the Chinese people. Naturally, we wanted his head. Unfortunately, it seems that this monster had the foresight to take every scrape of data and as many of his foul minions as he could find and turn himself and everything he had over to the Russians, who, in exchange for this bounty of horror, and in cooperation – there can be no doubt about this – with the Americans, was shielded from prosecution, and, by 1950, was Chief of Police for the City of Osaka. Which brings me to page six, which I will now give you all a moment to read."

Everyone else bent to the task, but Katara didn't. She didn't need to. She'd already heard it, already read it. Every word. Every line.

One more than any other.

…died in the summer of 1956, death ruled accidental by local authorities, case to be considered closed…

"But, Comrade Xin," someone was saying, Katara didn't know who, didn't care, didn't bother to look, "this means…"

Comrade Xin nodded, looking for all the world like a wolf about to leap for the final kill. "Exactly. Prisoner #13188 is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a spy. Whether for the Russians, the Americans, his own people, or all of the above, what is the difference in the end between the enemies of the Revolution, it doesn't matter. No doubt Prisoner #13188 himself pushed his father down those stairs, to prove his ruthlessness to his imperialist masters. Or maybe it was a final test put to the prisoner by his own father, to prove that the boy was ready and able to take on his bloodstained mantle? Nothing would be beyond a lineage and a family like this one. These are the only questions that face us now. What does he know? What was his mission? Who did he report to? What counter-revolutionary elements of society were aiding him in his foul crime? Anything else is no longer relevant, and, as I said, we have Comrade Katara to-"

"I'm not sure that's the way to go, Comrade."

Comrade Xin frowned, pursed his lips, tilted his head to one side, as if he was looking at someone who had just grown a second head. "What was that, Comrade Katara?"

Katara felt a chill seize hold of her heart, of her very soul. She hadn't known she was going to speak, hadn't even thought about it, and then she was.

And there was no turning back.

"The thing is," she said, taking a deep breath in a futile attempt to calm herself, "Zu…I mean, sorry, pardon the cough…ahem…Prisoner #13188 despises his father, loathes the very mention of his name."

"And that has what to do with…what, exactly?" someone said, in a voice that dripped with the words, you silly little girl.

Katara didn't look, didn't falter, didn't wince. In fact, she didn't even care, about anything or anyone. All she cared about was the truth.

Because I definitely don't care about Tazaki Zuko.

Right…?

"I think," she continued, ignoring the room, concentrating on Comrade Xin, "that everything we learn about…Prisoner #13188…has to be filtered through the lens of his hatred for his father. For example, the most likely side for said father to have worked for would've been the Russians who saved his bacon. However, the…the subject…very much seems to have a deep-seated antipathy for the Americans. But, if his father worked for one side, the…the subject's loyalties might very well have gone to the other, purely out of spite."

Beside her, Sokka chuckled. "Guy does have a spiteful streak a kilometer wide, I'll give him that."

Comrade Xin nodded, slowly, his eyes narrow, his expression dark. "Do you agree with your sister's analysis, Comrade Sokka?"

Sokka blanched, his eyes googling. "Um…well…uh…" He tugged at his collar, took a long time to stub out his most recent cigarette, began fumbling for his pack. "Well…uh…as regards the…um…the prisoner's personality? Definitely. Beyond that? A bit above my pay grade, to be honest."

Comrade Xin's eyes narrowed even further. "I see. Comrade Katara?"

"Yes, Comrade?"

"Do you, or do you not, believe that Prisoner #13188 is a spy?"

Katara didn't have to even think about it.

"As an interrogator, I try to keep my mind open to all possibilities, so that I am best able to serve the Revolution and protect the People. That said, the prisoner's status as a spy is definitely by far the most likely scenario. I was only registering my opinion that we should be wary of jumping to conclusions based off of what we know about his father."

Comrade Xin glowered for another moment, and then the moment had passed. "Excellent. Pay attention, boys; if you don't watch out, you'll be reporting to her someday."

Everyone laughed, and Katara breathed a very subtle sigh of relief.

For the first time since she had pledged her heart and soul to the Revolution, she had told an out-and-out, bald-faced lie, because, see?

She no longer truly believed that the man named Zuko was a spy.

---

The next day, her scheduled interview with Zuko did not take place. Contrary to her orders, while he had been given warmer clothes, they were still inadequate, and the blanket he had been given was little more than a glorified dish towel. As a result, what she had feared would happen had, in fact, occurred: Zuko came down with a fever and had to be rushed to a hospital, least he expire before spilling the secrets most of his tormentors were convinced he possessed. When Katara was informed, she flew off the handle, almost referring to Zuko by his proper name a dozen times before she finally calmed herself. Even when the men in charge of the cells explained it wasn't their fault, that the office simply could not afford good woolen blankets with the funds that were available (the words bad harvest and famine were never uttered, and Katara was pretty sure she was the only one who thought them), she continued to roar and to rage. She was angry, furious, hurt, lost, alone…

Confused…

Nothing made sense anymore…

Zuko was in the hospital for five days until the doctors (good ones; the Ministry of Public Security was not about to risk losing such a valuable prisoner) cleared him to return to his cell. On the third day, Katara went to see him. She ordered the nurses and doctors from the room, closed and locked the door, and sat at his bedside.

Was it like this, she thought, as she watched him shiver and shake, listened to his breath rattle in his chest, when your father burned you? Was it in a room like this, that your sister held your hand and that your mother made her decision? How long did you sleep? Did the pain ever really stop? Were you angry? Upset? Sad? Furious?

Or were you relieved that you would only have to live with half-a-face inherited from your father?

She took a deep breath, let it out, wiped the tears from her eyes. She reached out, interlaced her fingers with his, held on to him like he was a piece of driftwood in the middle of a raging typhoon, like he was the only thing tethering her to reality.

She never did not know how long she sat there, crying as silently as she possibly could.

"Zula…?"

The word was so soft, so airy, that for a moment, Katara wasn't entirely sure it was anything more than a figment of her imagination. She blinked, wiped her eyes, sniffled, looked around. Was the room bugged? She didn't know. Probably.

Do I care?

She didn't know that, either.

"Zula…is that you, Sis…?"

She wiped her nose on her sleeve, scooted closer to the bed, leaned down until wisps of her hair were brushing against his face and she could feel his weak breath on her skin.

"It's me, Zuko…it's me…"

He smiled. She had never seen him smile like this before, had never seen anyone smile like this. He smiled, as if he was kid getting a long-awaited puppy for their birthday, and it was one of the most wonderful smiles she had ever seen.

"Thought so…thought I was dreaming…it's…Zula…hold my hand…"

"I'm holding it, Zuko…I'm here…"

"I…listen, don't get mad at yourself…it…it wasn't your fault…you were right…that was a shit horse…should've demanded Aang get me a better one, for what we were paying…I…it was never your fault…don't blame yourself…just…I…Zula…?"

"I'm here, Zuko, I'm here…what is it…?"

"Tell…Noriko…tell her I'm sorry…tell her…tell her that…that her…her fa…no…don't…just tell her I'm sorry…sorry I couldn't make it for her birthday…"

"Okay, Zuko, I'll tell her…"

Coughs wracked his body, hard, damp, shuddering coughs. Katara panicked, almost called for the doctors, but Zuko wouldn't let go of her hand, wouldn't let her step away, and she didn't want to, didn't want him to survive, didn't want him going back into that cell, because…because…

Because he's innocent…

I always knew he was innocent…

"Zula…I…I love you, kid…"

She hesitated, but she knew she needed him to hear a response, so she kissed his forehead, ignored the salty taste of the sweat that covered him, that shined from every inch of exposed skin, and did her best to put a smile into the lie.

"I…I love you, too, Zuko…"

Another round of coughs, and then he was fading into unconsciousness again. His last words were almost complete and utter gibberish.

Or, at least, that's what Katara tried to tell herself.

"Don't…don't hate that Katara girl…she's…she's a good person…most of them are…but…she's the best…so…try not to hate her…try not to…hate…her…"

She didn't leave until the doctors made her.

She was waiting for him when they returned him to his cell.

---

"That was…that was you, wasn't it…?"

For a moment, she pondered pretending she didn't know what he was talking about. She looked around the room, stared at the spots where she knew the bugs were likely to be, wondered who was manning the recording room today. This time of night…probably Suki…I can rely on her…she'll come and talk to me before she makes the report…she's solid like that…

Then, she wondered why she even cared anymore.

"Yes," she said, eyes locked on the notepad balanced on her lap, the notepad she had given up writing anything on. "That was…yes." She took a deep breath, let it out. "I hope you don't mind…"

He wheezed and coughed from deep in the corner he was curled into, in what she could only presume was an attempt at a laugh. "Don't…don't worry about it…I appreciate it, I really do…thinking I was talking to my sister was what got me through that night."

She smiled at her notepad, reached up and began twisting the knot of her Red Guard scarf around her fingers. "Well, in that case, I don't apologize at all."

Another wheeze, another cough, a stirring in the darkness of his corner. "That…that's my girl. Don't ever let them see you bleed, that's what my mother always used to say. Don't ever let them think they've got the best of you. Even when they have? my sister and I would ask her. Especially then, she'd always reply. That…that was my mother…"

Katara nodded. Somehow, she'd untied her scarf, pulled it off, was twisting it into tight knots around and around her trembling fingers. "That…what happened to her…?"

"She…" Another round of coughs. A hand, shaking like a leaf in the wind, came inching out of the darkness, and Katara poured a glass of water and pressed it into his palm. The glass disappeared, and she listened, listened to as much water slop onto the ice-cold floor as managed to dribble into his mouth. The glass came back, and she took it. "Arigato." Another round of coughs, a few more wheezes. "Holy fucking fuck, have you guys done a number on me…"

She felt a smirk tickler at the corner of her mouth. "Finally start hitting harder than your father?"

That got her an actual chuckle, even if was almost swallowed by the wheezing. "Yeah…you guys sure showed me. That'll teach me to doubt the abilities of the Ministry of Public Security. But…my mother…she killed herself."

Katara flinched. She saw her own mother, swinging in the breeze, the Nationalist soldiers laughing and whistling, and somehow, deep down in the depths of her soul, knew that the end of Zuko's mother had not been much different. "Why…?"

She felt the shrug, but didn't see it; she still hadn't looked up from her lap.

"It's…it's hard to explain, if you're not Japanese. Just our usual…I don't know…our usual bullshit about shame and honor and whatever-the-fuck-you-want-to-call-it."

"Oh…I'm…for what's it worth, I'm sorry…"

A long sigh, a sigh that hurt him so much she felt it. "Yeah…me, too…" The sound of shifting, more coughing, more audible winces and groans. "So…any questions for me today?"

"Um…yes…um…who's Noriko?"

"Oh…my…it's…basically, she's my daughter, only it's not confirmed, and she doesn't know."

"Oh…are you…are you married?"

"Why, you looking?"

She giggled. She shouldn't have, she was basically signing her own death warrant now, she could already hear the speech the prosecutor would make, could practically taste the disdain wafting off of Jet, could…could…

Who cares?

"No, but…it is something that we can try to check…"

"Ah, right…well…I…I had a…a girlfriend, one of my sister's school friends, and she…she loved me, you know? I…I wanted to love her, but…it just wasn't right. She's a nice person, dreamed of a nice apartment in a nice part of town where she'd raise two-to-three kids and I'd go to work and come back and it would all be nice and cozy and good and...this, just, wonderful dream that I just...I didn't...I couldn't...and my job...I would never willingly give up my job, and my job just…it's not very family friendly, as you can imagine…"

"So I would assume."

"Right…well…I…we spent a weekend together, and then the next week, I was off to…oh, fuck, where did we go…Nigeria, I think…or it might've been Katanga…it was Africa, I know that. The paper kept my sister and I jumping around for a full year before we finally got around to spending more than a few days in Japan, and…"

She knew the story already, could piece it together from the pain and the anguish in his voice. "Your…girlfriend, for lack of a better term, was married, with a daughter who would've had to have been conceived about a year before."

"…yeah, that's about the long and short of it…she…Mai, Noriko's mother, she…we never talked about it, never confirmed it, never addressed it, the usual stoic bullshit we Japanese are so fond of. Her husband is a nice guy, a solid guy, the perfect guy for her, no idea why she wasted so much time on me…she's happy, she has a good life, Noriko couldn't have asked for a better father…"

"She…I mean, Mai, she…named her after your aunt…?"

"Yeah…that's how I knew, beyond a shadow-of-a-doubt…"

"Why…why didn't Mai tell you?"

"Because she knew I needed to be out there, doing my job, my sister and me, that…we'd shrivel up and die if we didn't, and…she also knew me well enough to know that I'd insist on trying to do the right thing, you know, out of honor, no matter how much it would've killed me, so…she…she didn't let me make that mistake."

"That…" Katara sniffed, wiped her nose, wiped her eyes. "That…was very kind of her…"

"Yes…yes it was…I'll never be able to…to repay her…"

"Do you love her?"

"Mai?"

"Yes…"

"I…no, I don't…I would've tried, but…I knew I was nothing but bad news for her…she's well rid of me…"

"And…and Noriko…?"

The smile she heard in his voice could've brightened the darkest night.

"Madly. She's the most beautiful little girl I've ever seen. Thank God she doesn't have to deal with having me for a father." More coughing, more wheezing, more desperate shifting, endless searching for some kind of comfort, for anything, anything at all.

Katara would've happily gouged her own eyes out, just to get him a decent mattress.

"So…Comrade Katara…what about you? Any nice boys in your life?"

She shook her head, not entirely sure why she was smiling. She was sitting in a darkened cell, in what might as well have been the hell her grandmother swore was real, and slowly, carefully, methodically digging her own grave all the while, and yet…

And yet…

I've never felt so free…

It doesn't matter…

Maybe it never did…

"No," she said, closing her notepad and setting it on the floor, then stuffing her red scarf into her pants pocket, "I'm afraid not. Between the War and the Revolution and…well…everything…I just never had the time or the opportunity or…or even the inclination, really…"

Another chuckle, buried amidst the wheeze. "That…that's a shame, though…in that case…I'm the closest you've ever come to a boyfriend…"

She couldn't help but laugh at that, couldn't help but wonder if they were laughing in the recording booth, too. "Sad to say, but you're on to something there…"

"Yeah…you know who you would've liked? Aang. He was nice a kid. Way too young for you, but…I dunno…I think a little brother-figure would do you good."

She frowned. "Aang? Who was Aang?"

"Our guide, spoke the local dialects and all that, was always able to get us…you know…food, shelter, transportation…crazy kid, always smiling, treated everything like a game…"

"Oh…I didn't…he's not in any of the files…"

"…he wouldn't be. He should've run…but…stupid…stupid fucking kid…always trying to be a hero…he…I told him to run, go with Azula, she was going to go get help, work on busting me out...but…he refused, tried to get me out from under my dead horse, get me on his…he'd almost managed it when they caught up to us…"

"Oh…what…what happened to him?"

She never should've asked. She would know that, for the rest of her life. She never should've asked.

Or, at the very least, never should've taken so long to do so.

"…on the day they put me on the road down here, they frog-marched him into my cell and, without even saying a word, shot him in the back of the head…told me it was to make sure I'd know what was waiting for me, at the end of the road…poor, dumb, stupid, idiotic kid…smiled right up to the end…even winked at me when they cocked the hammer on the pistol, the cheeky little bastard…"

She didn't have a thing to say to that, couldn't think of anything to do but cry, so she just pushed the pitcher of water and the glass to within his reach, stood up, and left the room.

She tossed her red scarf in the trashcan in the bathroom.

---

She drained the cup of baiju before her, picked the half-empty bottle off the table, poured herself another cup. She wondered why she hadn't just started drinking directly from the bottle, wondered if they'd kick her out if she did that. She supposed it didn't matter, but she needed to think, and shivering as she staggered her way home wouldn't help her do that, so she stayed in her isolated corner booth, drinking her baiju, doing her best to ignore the roar of the crowded bar.

The People are the Party, and the Party is the Chairman. Therefore, the Chairman is the Party and the Party is the People. Therefore, the Chairman is the People, and the People are the Chairman.

She pulled her copy of the Chairman's Book of Quotations, the infamous Little Red Book, laid it on the table, began idly flipping through the thin rice-paper pages. At some point, she spilled some booze on the pristine, well-thumped little book, and at some later point, decided she didn't care.

The People are never wrong. Thus, the Party is never wrong. Because the People are the Party and the Chairman is the People, if the People are never wrong, then the Chairman can never be wrong.

She waved a barmaid over, asked if they sold cigarettes. They did. She slapped some yuan on the table and asked for as many packs and books of matches as that would buy. She got two packs of cigarettes and two books of matches. She supposed it would do. She lit up right away.

Is someone is accused of Crimes against the People, and the People can never be wrong, then that means that anyone accused of Crimes against the People must be guilty. It is impossible to be innocent, because the Party is the People and the Chairman is the Party, and the People can never be wrong, which means that the Party and the Chairman can never be wrong, which means that no one is innocent, because if they were innocent, they would not stand accused.

Time had passed. The bottle on the table was still half-full, which meant either that she was drinking less than she thought, or she had, at some point, ordered another bottle. Either way, the baiju was good. It tasted like gasoline, a taste she knew from when she was a little girl, helping her brother siphon gasoline from Nationalist tanks, giggling at how the Nationalist soldiers were too high on opium to notice or, if they did notice, to care.

Therefore, if even one person is actually, demonstrably innocent, then the entire system is false. Every single bit of it is a lie. The Chairman is a lie, the Party is a lie, the People are a lie.

I am a lie.

I have always been a lie.

She drained her cup, refilled it. She stubbed out a cigarette, lit a new one. She closed her eyes, and wondered what it would've been like, if they had made it to Hong Kong. That was where Mother wanted to go, because it was said that the Japanese were not in Hong Kong, and that if you could make it there, you would be safe. They never made it much past Harbin, though; Grandfather died and Gran-Gran got sick, and by the time they could move on again, word reached them that Japan was at war with Britain and Hong Kong wasn't safe anymore, had stopped being safe before they even left their village.

I don't want to be a lie anymore. How do I stop being a lie?

You know exactly how to do that.

Do I?

You do. You know exactly what to do, and the only excuse for not doing it is because you're a dirty little coward.

But…I won't succeed.

Since when did that ever stop you?

When she finally staggered out of the bar and headed home – which wasn't hard, the bar was actually half of the ground floor of her apartment building – she left her Little Red Book behind.

She never did look back.

That night, she slept like the dead.

---

"Sis…? The fuck are you doing up so early?"

"…oh, it's nothing, just…I have some things to do this morning…hey, did you move the money can?"

"Um…I don't think so…hey, am I still dreaming, or are you speaking Manchu?"

"…you're dreaming. Go back to bed."

"Ah…figured…well…I think I'll do that…love you, Dream Katara…"

"…love you, too, Sokka…"

She found the money can about ten minutes later. Sure enough, it was sitting on the counter, hidden behind a pile of dirty dishes that Sokka had neglected to clean, no doubt left there and forgotten on some random morning earlier in the week. Inside, she found a thick wad of renminbi, easily more than most people in China made in a year. Without hesitating, she took out every last fen, shoved it all deep in the pockets of her coat, snatched the car keys off the counter, and slipped quietly out the door.

She never looked back.

---

The old woman's eyes flared wide with terror the second she saw Katara walk in through the front door. The woman began visibly shaking, her few remaining teeth clacking as she fell to her knees, hands clasped, begging for mercy in a dialect Katara didn't fully understand. For a moment, all Katara could do was stare, jaw hanging open, tears burning in her eyes, as an elderly woman crawled on her hands and knees up across the floor until she was bowing, over and over again, pressing her forehead to the floor and planting loud, wet kisses on Katara's boots.

While guilty of participating in reactionary, counter-revolutionary activities, most of them of a severely backwards, superstitious sort, the report had read, the subject can only be considered completely harmless. Repeated visits by Public Security personnel are recommended, least the subject begin to think that they are no longer under threat of immediate arrest…subject has agreed to document who comes to her for her services…all documentation to be checked against surveillance reports…

Katara had never been here, had thought she had forgotten the report the moment she put it in its proper drawer. If she had come here before this day, she would've seen what those who had visited had seen: Superstition, religion, a shameless huckster sucking the life out of a People too long held back by ignorance and lack of education. What was it the Chairman said? These four authorities - political, family, religious and masculine - are the embodiment of the whole feudal-patriarchal ideology and system, and are the four thick ropes binding the Chinese people, particularly the peasants.

She shook her head, and it was hard not to laugh as she pushed these words from her mind and reached down to pull the old woman to her feet. And how are we different? she thought, as she wiped the tears from the old woman's eyes and pushed the freshly purchased box of joss paper into her gnarled, wizened hands. What did we actually change? What was that phrase my English tutor taught us? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. The old woman clutched at the box of joss paper, eyes uncomprehending, looking completely lost, her gaze flitting down, then up to Katara, down, and up again, over and over, while Katara smiled and nodded and desperately tried not to burst into tears.

Katara tried to speak, tried again and again, but she couldn't. Her throat felt hot and dry, and her tongue felt like it was going to choke the very life from her bones. But, in the end, the old woman understood. The old woman sniffled, nodded, and, taking Katara by the hand, led her to the back, to a heavy door locked with a heavy bolt. The old woman gestured at the door, still babbling incoherently, maybe it was just an old, obscure dialect, maybe it was because the woman only had half her teeth, maybe all, maybe none, it didn't matter. What mattered was what Katara was going to do that day.

What mattered was that she was finally doing what she should've done, long, long ago.

Katara opened the door, and the old woman led her down a creaking staircase into a dark, dank space lit by scattered candles that flickered as the air rushed in from above. Votive offerings glittered in the darkness, scraps and shreds of a China the Chairman had ordered exterminated, had demanded be pulled out root-and-stem, no matter what suffering it brought. Clouds of incense thick enough to feel hung in the air, stinging Katara's eyes until tears were flowing down her cheeks.

Finally, the old woman brought their journey to an end. Deep in the bowels of the cellar, covering most of an entire wall, was a ramshackle shrine, dimly lit, looking as if it was put together with bits and pieces scrounged from long-destroyed temples. Katara fell to her knees before the shrine, tried not to think of the look in Gran-Gran's eyes as the she watched the Red Guards, crazed on revolutionary zeal, roar through Harbin, burning temples and smashing Buddhas and tossing old and ancient gods into bonfires. Katara pushed it all out of her mind. She breathed deep, let the incense seep into her nostrils, let the eons of time and prayer flow through her blood, opened her ears and her heart to the words of the gods, to the wisdom of her ancestors, just as her mother and her Gran-Gran had taught her to do.

The old woman began to pray, slowly, rhythmically, her voice becoming a thin, wailing chant, rising and falling with the tides of history. For a moment, Katara panicked. What if she didn't know the words anymore, didn't know the prayers, didn't know what to say, or how to say it? Would her mother still hear her? Her father? Her grandparents? All the friends and loved ones she had lost, through a lifetime of war and trial and suffering…

What if I don't remember?

What if they can't hear me, because I was blind and deaf and dumb and forgot what my mother taught me…?

But then she was pressing her forehead to the ground, rising and falling alongside the old woman, and the words came, first hesitant, halting, her tongue twisting and turning and stumbling over things barely remembered, but never forgotten. Then, the words began to flow, and her heart grew and she smiled and the tears came, fast and heavy as the words tumbling from her mouth, because it was then that she realized that she had never forgotten, never, not once.

She had stopped listening, but she had never forgotten.

Mother, hear my prayer, and lend me your wisdom and guidance…

Father, hear my prayer, forgive me my disrespect, and lend me your wisdom and guidance…

Grandmother…

Grandfather…

Friends…

Relatives…

Ancestors…

I realize today that I never forgot, that I always knew you were there…

Please, forgive me, and please, let me do one thing right, only one…

And never let me forget, ever again, that I promise, from now until the end of my life, to never abandon those who need me…

When the old woman laid a thick clay bowl before her, Katara knew what to do. She opened the box of joss paper, took out half, folded it just as her mother had taught her, oh so many years ago. The other half she gave to the old woman, to be given to anyone who needed it, but lacked the money or ability to buy.

Then, for the next half-hour, she burned her paper, and prayed like the bright-eyed young girl she once was, a long time ago.

---

She timed her arrival at the cells very carefully, walking up to the duty desk right at the shift change, when the actual officers are still sipping tea in the canteen, leaving only a bare handful of fresh-faced conscripts on loan from the local PLA base to man the fort, yawning into their hands, minds occupied with wondering who they had pissed off to draw such a lousy posting. In fact, she only had to deal with two guards when she walked up, two stringy boys who couldn't have been older than sixteen or seventeen, both looking bored to the brink of tears. They didn't question her presence at all, didn't ask to look through the satchel hanging from her shoulder, didn't even think to protest when she informed them that an escort was not needed.

They just looked at her uniform, looked at her rank insignia, unlocked the door and waved her through.

She walked briskly down the corridor, head up, shoulders back, looking neither left nor right. Nobody questioned her, nobody challenged her. The first few cells past the door were filled to overflowing, the stink of unwashed bodies making her eyes water, her world for a few moments a cacophony of moans and whimpers and muffled sobs. For a moment, her stride faltered, and she wondered why she didn't try to save them, too. She tried to think of the reality of her situation, that she only had charge of one prisoner, only had the key to one cell, could only hope to walk one man. Anything more, and she would be challenged, asked questions, she wouldn't even make it back down the hall. To attempt to help more than this one man would spell her doom, would render this last grasp for humanity little more than the feeble, futile flailing that she couldn't help but suspect it really was.

All of this was true, all of this was real.

It didn't make her feel any better, though.

For all that the first half-dozen or so cells were packed to the brim, nearly all the rest were empty, the prisoners pushed as far back as possible from the spy at the end of the hall. She was grateful for this, thanked the gods for it, even as she felt ashamed for doing so.

But she still thanked them, because she hadn't been sure how many more terrified faces she could've walked past before she snapped.

Zuko was sound asleep when she got to his cell, curled up on a cot with no mattress, no padding, huddled under blankets that might as well have not existed for all the good they did him, the air thick with the smell of excrement and urine from the overflowing bucket in the corner. She paused when she got to the door, confused. Why is he asleep? He shouldn't be allowed to sleep this much…

But then she remembered that Comrade Xin's orders were for the interrogators to go easy on Zuko for a few days, until they could be sure he wouldn't try and die on them again. She thought of that, latched on to that, used the feeble lifeline to push her worries and forebodings away, and, after taking a deep breath, pulled out her key and unlocked the door.

She tossed the satchel on the ground, leaned down and began shaking him awake. At first, he didn't respond, beyond a few feeble coughs and wheezes and groans, so she shook harder, and began whispering his name in a strident, angry tone. Still, he barely stirred, doing little more than mumbling, "Fuck off, Zula, and make your own goddamn breakfast," until, finally, irritation banishing her fear into the dark, distant corner where it belonged, she grabbed him by the shoulders and hurled his body to the floor.

That got him up. She would have been lying if she tried to say she didn't find the very human look of annoyance on his face to be quite satisfying.

"Oh, for the love of…" With great care and a lot of wincing and groaning, he pushed himself up until he was resting his back against the cot, running a trembling hand over his face and through his hair. He looked up, blinking over and over again, his eye still half-glazed by sleep and exhaustion and anger, unfocused and confused. "The fuck do you assholes want now?" he growled in Mandarin.

She scoffed, crossed her arms, put on a pose. It was ridiculous. She felt like she was kicking a lazy husband out of bed on a Sunday morning. It was all so normal and domestic that it bordered on the absurd.

It would've been another lie to say that she was not, in some bizarre way even she didn't understand, kind of enjoying it.

"That's a nice way to speak to your girlfriend," she snarked in Japanese.

He blinked a few more times, and then the light blossomed in his eyes, both of them, the living and the dead, and his face lit up and, through a round of coughing, he came as close to bursting out laughing as he possibly could. "Katara?!" He shook his head, his expression filled with wonder and amazement. "The hell are you doing here?" he asked, lapsing back into Japanese. "Surely it's a bit early to trade depressing childhood stories."

She shrugged, disdainful and nonchalant, as if she had not a care in the world, because she didn't. She had already passed the point of no return; why worry? It would only slow her down. "It's never too early for us to make each other feel bad about ourselves, Zuko." She paused, looked in the corners, wondered if anyone was manning the recording room this morning. "Oh, and while we're at it, English from now on," she finished, slipping into that language.

That sent a shock through him, his mouth dropping open in surprise. "I…wait…" He paused, took a breath, let it out, switched to English. "Did you…did you just called me Zuko?"

She popped an eyebrow, and did her best to not be annoyed at how his English was just as polished and perfect as his Mandarin had been. "Well, that is your name, isn't it? Unless you really are some kind of heinous, diabolical Western imperialist spy?"

He raised a shaking finger. "Ahem. That's Western imperialist pig, thank you very much. That's what we journalists prefer."

She giggled. "Well, you certainly smell like one…"

He grimaced. "Ugh, don't remind me. My mother's going to give me such a beating when I get up to meet her, daring to die without clean underwear and smelling like a sewer."

"Yeah, about that…" Without any more dallying, because she knew the clock was ticking, she kicked the satchel into his lap. "Get dressed. Fast. We haven't got much time."

He frowned, opening the satchel, taking out and holding the clothes she'd stuffed within, turning each item this way and that as if he had never seen pants or socks before. "I…the hell are you doing, Katara?"

"Taking a page out of your book, and doing something unimaginably stupid and insane for reasons I don't fully understand."

He flashed her another smile. She could no longer remember why she had found his smiles to be so ugly before. "Aw, you really do love me."

She rolled her eyes and flipped him the bird. "Shut up and get dressed. Like I said, the clock is ticking, and it's only a matter of time until my brother realizes that I stole all of our money and puts two-and-two together."

He gave a short, sharp nod, grunted in affirmation, and got dressed. When he was finished, he once more looked more-or-less like a human being. Everything hung off him, sure, but Katara was pleased to see that she had done a good job of getting his size right, and once she got him outside the building, she would wrap a thick scarf around his face and pull the wool cap he was sliding onto his head down over his eyes and they just might make it out.

Her favorite part, though, was when he lifted up a foot (though he had to throw an arm around her and grip her shoulder hard to manage it) and smiled. "Are these the boots I came in with?"

Katara nodded, leaning him up against the wall and turning to pick up the satchel and shove it under his blankets, pushing and packing and poking until it almost looked like someone was there, so long as no one looked to closely. "They are, actually; turns out my brother took them for himself, so I just took them back this morning."

"Before or after you robbed him?"

She shot him a look, scoffed, and flipped her hair, regretting, for the first time in years, the moment of ideological fervor that had inspired her to cut it to the Red Guard-approved chin-length. "I didn't rob him. One cannot rob a true proletarian. By using such words as rob, you imply personal ownership of property, and thus betray your outdated capitalist imperialist thinking."

Zuko chuckled, and raised his now-gloved hands in surrender. "Consider me corrected, my lady. In fact-" She never did get to find out where he was going with that, because, as he lowered his hands back to his waist, he took a single, shaky step, and then another, and then his eye flickered and he groaned and he was falling into her arms. Katara never did remember much of the next few minutes, could recall little beyond the way her heart swelled up to the size of a melon, turned the temperature of the sun, grew spikes, and lodged itself in the back of her throat. By the time she came back into the world, she was covered in ice-cold sweat, and her hands were shaking almost as badly as Zuko's.

She took a deep breath, let it out. Somehow, she had kept him on his feet. He had a good fifteen centimeters on her, but somehow, someway, she was holding him up, one of his arms draped over her shoulders, his head lolling against her shoulder, his body trembling, she could feel each twitch through the arm she had tight around his waist, the smell of sweat and grime and pain almost nauseatingly thick in her nostrils.

She didn't know how she'd done it, but she had. In the end, she supposed that was what really mattered.

She swallowed hard, desperate to dislodge whatever it was that was stuck in her throat, her heart or her fear, she didn't know, didn't care. "Are you…" She frowned, swallowed, licked her suddenly dry lips, tried again. "How're you feeling?"

From the corner of her eye, she watched a thin, almost amused smile bend his cracked lips, saw a hint of life and humor color the pale skin that was drawn taut over his cheek bones. "Oh, just fantastic. Never been better."

She nodded, pushed away her fears, and started hobbling with him towards the door. "Glad to hear it. Don't ask questions, follow my lead, and do your best to look as close to death as possible."

That got her a snort, buried in a fresh round of coughs. "I'll do my best…no promises, though. My drama teacher in secondary school called me the worst actor she'd ever seen."

She took him out the door and started working her way down the hall, doing her best to ignore the question of why, as she committed high treason, she was smiling from ear-to-ear.

---

Once, about two years before a man named Zuko was dragged into her life, Katara had a dream. In the dream, she was playing the part of Wu Qinghua, the lead in the ballet The Red Detachment of Women. Only…she wasn't. She was on a stage, in full costume, going through all her lines and her dance moves, but nobody else, despite also being on stage and in costume, seemed to be aware that they were in one of the most popular ballets in the People's Republic of China. Instead, they were going about their daily lives…while also performing ballet moves, exhibiting great choreography. Also, all the other performers were people from Katara's life. Oh, and the band was playing American jazz tunes that were popular before the Civil War ended and such music was banned, and playing them quite badly…on traditional Chinese instruments. Nobody seemed aware of the fact that they were on a stage, nor did they seem to notice Katara performing her part beautifully, in addition to which Katara seemed utterly incapable of doing anything that was not outlined by the script. And the audience was full of monkeys. Drunk monkeys. How Katara knew they were drunk, she didn't know, because none of them so much as twitched a muscle during her performance, but she knew that all the monkeys were drunk just as she knew her name was Katara. And she was pretty sure she had a tail and donkey ears, too, but this didn't seem strange to her in the dream, which meant that she never checked, which, in turn, meant that she woke up having never found out for sure.

It was, in short, the single strangest, most outrageous, most unbelievable dream that Katara had ever had, and yet, in her mind, it still seemed more real than her journey to the back door of the Harbin branch of the Ministry of Public Security.

Nothing seemed real. Time stretched and compacted, bent and snapped. Her heart thudded in her chest, so loud that she was certain it could be heard in Shanghai. Beside her, Zuko quivered and shook and limped, but she never heard him make a sound, never heard him utter a whisper, until she found herself resisting an overwhelming urge to pinch him to make sure he was still alive. When she spoke, her voice seemed thin, flat, soft as a whisper, and when others spoke, their words came to her in trembling echoes, as if from down a long tunnel whose end she could only guess at, and would never see.

Events unfolded before her eyes as if from behind a muslin screen, hazy and indistinct, lodging in her memory in tiny snatches, incomplete and fragmented. She clearly remembered that the bleary-eyed conscripts who had checked her in had been replaced by actual MPS agents, could distinctly recall explaining her cover story, how she was taking Prisoner #13188 to the hospital, he says he's sick again, but I don't believe him, so I'm going to make him walk there to teach him a lesson, but she would never be able to remember who she talked to, or what they said, or why they seemed to accept her lie so easily.

Then, there came the stairs. The stairs were an agony, a never-ending horror of sweat and wheezing and coughing and Zuko tripping over every third or fourth one. Every time he stumbled, her heart crawled up her throat and tried to climb out her mouth on a river of bile that stung so bad that she had to blink back tears. It went on and on, and she was sure they passed her former comrades, she was sure of it, it was impossible not to, the elevator was broken again, so they had to be there, but she could never remember seeing a single soul. The remnants of those souls lingered, in tea cups forgotten on window sills and muffled coughs and sneezes that cracked up and down the concrete tunnel and the clouds of cigarette smoke that swirled through the air. People had been there, but they seemed to be there no longer, like the home of a family who had been arrested in the night, all the traces of humanity lingering in the silence that followed the fall.

Through it all, she marched. She pressed on, never looked back, only forward, towards her goal. Everything faded into insignificance next to the door that would lead her to a world of truth. All she had to do was get there. All she had to do was navigate through a floor of offices and desks and chattering agents and whimpering victims. If she could only get through the right door, then around those desks, across that floor, through another door, into the car, through the checkpoints, out into the countryside, she could…

She could…

She found it hard not to curl on the floor and burst into tears. Who am I kidding? I'll never make it out of the country. Even if she did, where would she go? She honestly didn't know. Between her and the Soviet Union were millions of troops prepared for war, between her and Mongolia more troops, more checkpoints, and the endless expanse of the Gobi Desert. To try to cross North Korea to the South was impossible to the point of hilarious absurdity, and she would never have been able to afford the bribe necessary to smuggle herself to Japan, or even Taiwan, for that matter, not without selling her body on the street, and that, she would never do.

She spared herself a quick look at Zuko, at the bruised and battered and scarred face, and allowed herself a smile. He would never let me, anyways. He'd rather die first.

She set her shoulders and pressed on. A wish that may very well be granted, sooner rather than later.

The final horror was the door, the door between the stairwell and the floor she needed to cross. Compared to getting through that door, nothing else that had ever happened to her in her life seemed to be all that bad. Watching her mother dangle from a tree? Listening to her grandmother's stomach growl through the night, knowing that Gran-Gran had been lying when she told Katara that she had already eaten? The shells that rained down upon Harbin through the Soviet conquest and the Nationalist offensives? Watching the jeering Red Guards hurl human refuse and rotten vegetables at her father, and knowing that if she wanted to live, she had better throw the most filth and scream the loudest insults? It was all nothing, nothing, compared to getting through that door.

Which was why, when they were through, and she noticed that both she and Zuko were smiling and quivering with barely suppressed giggles, that she began to suspect that maybe, just maybe, they had both gone mad.

Everything seemed easy after that. Down a hallway, turn left, march right across the middle of the work floor, frog-marching Zuko before her, head high, shoulders back, bluffing a firearm off someone she didn't recognize and would never remember, the cold of the gun barrel against her sweat-soaked skin as she shoved it into the back of her trousers, all of it, easy, the easiest thing she had ever done. Why shouldn't it be? She had already been through hell. All her life had been a hell, a hell of believing in promises that she had known all along, deep down inside, were empty and hollow and meaningless. Now that she thought about it, in the clarity provided by the light of a world just a few more minutes ahead of her, she had always known that the Chairman was insane. He had to be. Nothing else made any sense. Communism may have been a Truth, but Maoism was nothing but horror compounded by unimaginable tragedy. And I was a part of it, from my childhood on. I marched in lockstep with everyone else, fist pumped into the sky, waving my Little Red Book.

I was a part of the lie, the lie that has slaughtered millions.

No more.

And with that, she crossed the floor, stepped into a hallway, turned a final corner, and nearly burst into tears as she caught sight of her destination. She had never been happier, never felt more relieved. She had done it. She had made it. She had walked a suspected spy right out from under the noses of all of the agents of Harbin's Ministry of Public Security.

So happy was she, in fact, that it was a good half-minute before she noticed the three armed soldiers lined up, shoulder-to-shoulder, between her and the door.

---

They took Zuko away from her. She would always remember that. Everything else was shrouded in fog, distant, far away, happening to someone else. She was dozing in the back of a theater, barely watching a play she had never seen being performed in a language she didn't understand. She would find out later that she was walked back across the office floor, flanked by two silent men in uniforms bearing the insignia of the Ministry of State Security, striding tall and proud, eyes up, shoulders back, wrists being slowly chaffed by handcuffs that had been clasped far too tightly, but she remembered none of it.

All she remembered was the two other men, also wearing the insignia of the Ministry of State Security, prying Zuko from her grasp and dragging him away. He groaned and sighed when they took him, she remembered that, would remember it until the day she died. One tear trembled at the edge of his one good eye, the eye that was buried in a puffy bruise, a tear that trembled and shook and finally fell as he looked over his shoulder and gave her one last smile. Then, he shook his head, turned away, and all the fight went out of him, and the MSS agents had to drag him down the hall and out of her sight. Her whole body shuddered, and she felt like she was dying as she wiped tears from her eyes and held out her wrists. She didn't even feel the cuffs snap on. Someone asked her if the cuffs were too tight, which was odd, strange, but she could never remember if she gave any sort of answer.

Everything else was little more than a blur after that.

---

"Hello, Comrade Katara. Do you know who I am?"

She nodded. Of course she knew who the man was. Everyone in the various security services of the People's Republic knew who he was. He stood behind Jet's desk in Jet's office, one hand behind his back, the other resting at his waist, firmly clasping an unlit pipe. He was average height, bald, with long, sharp features and the eyes of a starving hawk swooping down for the kill. He wore the uniform of a senior officer of the Ministry of State Security, and when he spoke, his voice was flat and cold and sharp, grating at her ears like a knife being scraped across a stone.

She tore her gaze from the floor and looked the man right in his dead, cold eyes, into the murky depths that held not a tenth of the life as the milky white orb that blazed from the left side of Zuko's face. "You're Long Feng," she said, with a strength and confidence she did not in the slightest feel. "You're the Commander of the Ministry of State Security."

Long Feng nodded, a short, sharp twitch up and down, and his mouth curled into something that could technically be called a smile, but only because Katara could think of no other word for it. "I am," he admitted, the hand clasped behind his back coming out into the light and reaching down for the top of the desk, where his fingers flicked through a folder that Katara could not see, but that he was giving a disinterested glance. "And you, I believe, are Lieutenant Xianyu Katara, normally of the Records Section, but, for the past three weeks or so, on temporary assignment to the Investigation and Interrogation Section." He looked back up from the folder, and his lips seemed to have quirked into what Katara could only call a smirk. "Unless I'm mistaken…?"

Katara shook her head. Her back was beginning to ache. The pistol she had borrowed was still stuck in the band of her trousers, the cold metal digging into the small of her back. She could not comprehend why it hadn't been taken from her, couldn't even remember if she had been frisked. Nothing was making sense, though, to be honest, that didn't trouble her too much.

She was quite used to her world not making a lick of sense at this point.

"No, Comrade, you are not mistaken."

He chuckled, or, at least, what passed for a chuckle with him. "We can dispense with the comrades, Lieutenant. Sir will do just fine."

She felt a frown prick at her lips. No comrades? It shouldn't have caught her off guard, shouldn't have been able to fight its way through the fog of defeat that deadened every fiber of her being, but it did. She had heard the rumors, just like everyone else, of how Long Feng and his Ministry of State Security resisted the march of the Cultural Revolution, ignored comradeship and proletarianism, modeled themselves after the Russians and their foul KGB, but to see it firsthand, hear it herself, right there, in Jet's office…

Jet's office…

It was only then that she noticed the dark red splatter across the wall, just behind Long Feng's shoulder, the streaks of red and shimmering black and pale flecks of pink and fragments of white sprayed across the wall, across Jet's commendations, across his treasured pictures of meetings with the Chairman, with the great Lin Biao, and always the women and their red scarves, scores and scores of women in red scarves…

She followed the trail, followed it with her eyes, down the wall, big, heavy boot-prints framing a long, half-dried streak of blood in the shape of boot-heels, around the desk, across the floor, and out the door.

It was only with great difficulty that she tore her gaze away and fixed it back on Long Feng. "I…uh…um…sir…"

Long Feng shrugged. "I was wondering when you would notice, though I can't help but feel that you don't seem too terribly upset about the circumstances."

Katara didn't move so much as a muscle. "I…Comrade…I mean…Major Jet was…he was…"

Long Feng scoffed. "He was an idiot and a pig, and he got what he deserved. Weasel-faced little boy, daring to challenge me on my loyalty to the Party and the Revolution." He shook his head and rolled his eyes, looking for all the world like a schoolmaster complaining about a troublesome pupil. "I reminded him that I was slitting Nationalist throats in the back alleys of Shanghai before he was so much as a tickle in his father's balls. Naturally, he took offence."

Katara blinked. It was all she would allow herself to do. "And then you shot him."

Long Feng laughed, or, at least, that's what Katara thought he was doing, she couldn't be entirely sure. "Me, shoot him? Of course not. That's what I have lackeys for. Now," he continued, slowly, carefully, gracefully settling himself into what was once Jet's chair, sticking the stem of his pipe in his mouth and calmly lighting it, as if he had not a care in the world, "on to the matter of your attempt to spirit a prisoner of the People's Republic of China out of his cell…" He paused, took a few deep, measured puffs, and his eyes narrowed until they were almost closed, though not closed enough for Katara to miss the glint of amusement buried deep within. "Or should we first address the loaded firearm tucked into the back of your trousers?"

Katara didn't so much as flinch; to be honest, she wasn't even surprised. I'm pretty sure I'm past the point of being surprised by anything that happens today. "What gun?" she asked, deadpan, flat, looking Long Feng right in the eye.

Long Feng chuckled, taking a long, slow drag from his pipe before he replied. "Calm and cool under pressure, intelligent, and cheeky to boot." He leaned back in the chair, head moving up and down in a sedate, approving nod. "I knew I liked you for a reason."

She couldn't help but frown. "Sir…?"

Long Feng popped an eyebrow. "Don't worry about it. Now, I need to prove how intelligent you really are by giving you the change to ask the most important question right now."

She didn't even have to think about it. She held up her shackled hands and gave the cuffs a shake. "Am I being arrested?"

That won her what could only be called a smile if one wished to stretch the term to its absolute breaking point. "Excellent, Lieutenant, most excellent…and in answer to your question, no, you're not being arrested, not at all." He made a strange, pained sort of expression, rolling his head from side to side. "Now, as for the rest of your comrades…I'm afraid that, over the next year or so, most of them are going to be purged, but, alas, you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs, now, can you?"

Katara shrugged; she wasn't entirely sure what an omelet even was. "If you say so, sir."

"I do, Lieutenant, I do." Suddenly, he was up, extracting a key from his pocket and setting his pipe down on the desk as he started to come around the desk and walk towards her. "Now, I'm going to do away with these handcuffs, because I don't think we need them, now, do we?"

She shook her head. "No, sir. I'm not suicidal."

He chuckled as he unlocked the cuffs and tossed them onto the desk. "So I had already assumed. Now," he continued, reaching back to snatch up a folder she had not noticed before, "I'm going to tell you a story, and you're going to stand there and listen very carefully to it. Can you do that?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good." He began pacing around the room, slowly, carefully, stopping now and then to examine something or other, completely oblivious to the dull red marks his boots made because he steadfastly refused to avoid walking through the blood stains on the floor. As he walked, he kept his hands behind his back, one hand gripping a wrist, the other tapping a few fingers against the folder.

"You see, as you are no doubt aware, my headquarters is in Beijing. At this very moment, in that gods-forsaken cloud of dust and smog, there is a Japanese trade delegation, because the Chairman and the Party have finally bowed to reason and realized that we cannot hope to stand against the Soviet Union unless we restore relations with the West and start upgrading our technology. I mean…were you aware of the fact that many of our soldiers are carrying weapons older than they are?"

"No, sir, I was not."

Long Feng laughed. "Of course you didn't; such information is kept tightly under wraps. Now, by establishing trade and relations with our East Asian neighbors, we start to clear the way for re-opening relations with the Americans, because without that, it's only a matter of time until the Soviet hordes are pouring across the Amur. In other words, we need this trade agreement with Japan. Desperately. The Chairman has made very clear that nothing, and I mean nothing, is to be allowed to disturb these negotiations. So…imagine my surprise, when I was informed that a young Japanese woman had walked right up to one of our agents watching the delegation's hotel and demanded to speak to me personally." He paused in his wanderings, turned to Katara, arched an eyebrow. "Any guesses about who this young woman would happen to be…?"

Katara looked up from her chaffed wrists, tried desperately not to think about the loaded gun, about the way its malevolent promise seemed alive, hungry, cold. "She wouldn't happen to be named Tazaki Azula, would she?"

Long Feng bowed his head with what Katara could only call respect. "You, young lady, would be absolutely correct." He turned away, started walking once more. "As you can imagine, I was equal parts alarmed and intrigued, though not as stunned as when I had her brought before me and learned that she was a world-famous photographer whose award-winning journalist of a brother was being held by the Ministry of Public Security."

"And you believed her?" Katara asked, not quite able to believe her own ears, barely even capable of hearing her own thoughts over the exultant roar in her mind. I was right! she screamed to herself. I was right, I was right, I WAS RIGHT!

"Why should that be so surprising? After all, you believe her brother."

"Not at first, I didn't," Katara admitted, biting down on the shame.

Long Feng threw her a sly grin. "Sure, we'll go with that. Anyways, as I said before, this trade delegation and the attendant negotiations are of the utmost importance to the People's Republic, so the idea that a Japanese citizen was currently being worked over by the goons of the MPS was…shall we say…disturbing. I suspected conspiracy, a move by the radicals and the MPS to topple me, kill the negotiations, protect the Revolution, no matter that their own insanity is what's brought us to this impasse. That said, I was a bit incredulous."

He stopped, right in front of her. She looked down, and there was the file, held out to her.

"Then that young lady gave me this. You read Japanese, do you not?"

Katara took the folder, handling it like it was a dangerous animal that might, at any moment, tear out her throat. "I do, sir."

"Excellent. Read."

She opened the folder and she read.

It was all there, at least a hundred news clippings from papers and magazines, stories filed from all over the world, pictures snapped with a care and grace that bordered on high art. It was all there, every little scrap of proof, the final nail in the coffin of a lifetime of believing in a lie.

There before her, resting in her hands, was the proof that everything Zuko had ever told her was true.

Everything.

How she didn't die of shame, right then and there, she would never quite understand.

---

"You never told me why I'm not being arrested."

For what felt like an extremely long time, ever since Long Feng had given her that earth-shattering, faith-affirming folder, she hadn't said a single word. She had merely sat in one of the chairs in that fateful office, flipping through the folder from cover-to-cover, reading each character of each story, carefully examining each picture, while Long Feng went about his business, issuing a steady stream of orders and receiving a steady stream of reports. At some point, a group of men trooped in and began cleaning and clearing out the office, but Katara ignored them. She didn't even have the strength to acknowledge when two MSS agents appeared and beckoned her through the door, escorting her at a clipped military pace through the building and out into the blindingly white winter day, where a car idled, smoke billowing from the exhaust pipe while a soldier stamped his feet and held a door open for her. She bowed her head and slipped inside, and was not in the least bit surprised to find Long Feng, relaxed and calm, sitting at the other end of the back seat.

Long Feng nodded at her, and she nodded back. He reached forward and rapped his knuckles on the driver's headrest, and almost immediately, the car lurched into life and began to drive. Katara barely noticed any of it, couldn't quite make herself care. She looked out the window, and focused all of her energy on trying to resist the urge to leap from the car and go running down the street, screaming at the top of her lungs for joy.

So, when she suddenly tore her gaze from the window and focused it on Long Feng, asking her question in a voice that sounded far older than her thirty years, even she was a bit surprised.

Long Feng, to her chagrin, did not seem the least bit perplexed, as he popped an eyebrow and closed the folder he had had open in his lap. "I was wondering when you would return to the land of the living, Lieutenant."

Katara felt her own eyebrow pop in bemusement. "With respect, sir, but that still doesn't sound like an answer to my question."

Long Feng chuckled, shifting around as he handed the folder up to the agent perched in the front passenger seat. "As it happens," he replied, settling back into a comfortable position, as if he was her favorite doting uncle, rather than one of the most ruthless and powerful men in the country, "that, right there? What you just now did? That is exactly the reason I'm not arresting you."

Katara did her best to wrap her mind around that statement, but in the end, could only frown at her own confusion. "I'm…not entirely sure I follow, sir…"

Long Feng's chuckling turned into a smirk as he pulled out his pipe, cracked his window, and set to preparing for a smoke. "I can imagine. Your entire world has been turned upside-down; you'd have to be quite the extraordinary human being to not be a bit befuddled by that." He paused, struck a match, got his pipe going. "The important thing to know is that the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is done for. Lin Biao and his madmen have finally gone too far. The nation is broken and bleeding, tottering on the edge of an abyss. It's time for sanity to return to the land, just like we promised when we sent Chiang Kai-Shak and his gangsters cowering off to Taiwan with their tails between their legs."

Katara allowed herself a nod; anything more seemed beyond her capabilities at that moment. "Oh…but what about the Chairman…uh…sir…"

Long Feng shrugged. "The Chairman, I'm sorry to say, has just about hit the end of his rope. His health is failing, and, with the clarity we sometimes receive when the end is rearing its ugly head, he has begun to realize the follies he has allowed to cripple the People's Republic."

Katara, for all of her confusion, didn't have to be a genius to read between those lines. The Chairman's failing health is creating a power vacuum. Without the Chairman's constant support, Lin Biao and his Red Guards are crumbling under the pressure from those they've spent the past decade abusing.

"But," she began, still frowning, choosing her words with care, "what does that have to do with me?"

Long Feng raised the stem of his pipe like an extended finger. "Ah, that's the question, isn't it? What it has to do with you, is that, if this nation is going to turn itself around, it's going to need people who not only have brains, but aren't afraid to use them. In other words, the People are going to be in need of someone who saw a gross case of negligence and incompetence, along with an actual threat to the safety of the People's Republic, and acted – on her own initiative – to right a wrong in the making. In fact," he concluded, clamping the stem of his pipe between his teeth once more, "as it turns out, you were working for me all along, working to expose the corruption and misconduct in the Harbin Ministry of Public Security."

Katara opened her mouth to speak, just barely managing to swallow the words, But, that's not true. She would've had to have been blind, deaf, and an absolutely idiot to not see that a lifeline was being thrown to her, and a fool not to grasp it, and least until the trapdoor opened and she was allowed to see the yawning chasm the lifeline was dangling her over.

And I am anything but a fool.

Not anymore.

"I see, sir. And what of Zuko, and his sister?"

Long Feng smiled, settling back into the seat and closing his eyes, a wistful smile spreading across his face. "A most unfortunate story, that. You see, young Tazaki Zuko and his sister, who were, of course, conducting their journalism with the full approval and cooperation of the Ministry of State Security, were waylaid by reactionary bandits, no doubt at the behest of the Soviet dogs who control those fools. Fortunately, through the actions of a brave young Lieutenant of the previously mentioned Ministry, young Zuko was saved, a nest of reactionary sedition was stamped out, and, after being treated for his wounds, that brave young man and his sister will return to Japan, thus proving that the People's Republic of China is trustworthy and not at all the dangerous den of madmen that the imperialist pigs in Moscow have sought for so long to paint us as."

Katara nodded, turned away, laid her forehead against the cool glass of her window. "That's…very neat, sir."

"Yes," came the reply, dripping with self-satisfaction, "I rather thought so."

"…and the Ministry of Public Security?"

"Sadly, it appears that said Ministry is simply rife with counter-revolutionary traitors. How else to explain how such an unfortunate turn of events was allowed to happen? The only thing to do is begin an investigation, and definitely the Ministry of Public Security will have to give up a great deal of power and authority to…ahem…other, more capable organizations."

In other words, a purge, and because he thinks you're useful, he's going to keep you around, parroting the party line, and standing silent while your friends and colleagues disappear into the night.

Katara closed her eyes, and couldn't decide how she felt about her inability to cry.

"Very impressive, sir. Almost perfectly so, as if you'd planned it this way all along."

She didn't have to open her eyes and turn to see the grotesque parody of a smile that accompanied the reply.

"Yes, it is, isn't it? Of course, that's absurd, don't you think?"

She nodded, her skin squeaking up and down the glass.

"Yes, sir."

They drove the rest of the way to the hospital in silence.

---

Later, Katara would learn the whole story, collected in bits and pieces from nurses and doctors and guards. She would learn how, when he realized he wasn't being taken back down to his cell, Zuko began to giggle, and the men who were carrying him began to worry that he'd gone mad. By the time they arrived at the hospital, all the strength had gone out of his body, and the MSS agents had to call over a few nurses to help them carry him up to the private suite that had been cleared out for him, because no one could find a clean stretcher. She would always remember the tears in the eyes of one of the nurses, a girl named Song, who struggled against her sobs as she described the opening of the door, the revelation of a beautiful young woman who gasped when she saw her brother, the way Zuko burst into tears and hurled himself into his sister's arms, or the strange sight of armed MSS agents fleeing from a litany of hideous curses screeched in a half-dozen languages.

But Katara didn't know any of that, not when she was led up to the floor and told which room to go to, which she thought was strange, because she knew exactly where to go.

All she had to do was follow the singing.

Nenneko shasshari mase,
Neta ko no kawaisa.
Okite naku ko no
Nekororo, tsura nikusa.
Nenkororon, nekororon…

It was a beautiful voice, thin and strained and cracked with worry and fear and a thrumming vein of hate that sent shivers up and down Katara's spine. That walk, down the hall, to the door, the cracked door resting half-open, was the worst few minutes of her entire life. Every step was an exertion, every breath she took shattered her very soul. By the time she was pushing open the door, tears were rolling down her face, the sobs hitching in her throat, and she didn't care, did nothing to stop it. It was over, all over, everything she had ever believed in, her entire adult life revealed to her as nothing more than a hideous, murderous farce.

And the door swung open, and she watched, silent, sobbing, as a beautiful young woman with long, jet-black hair piled up in a sloppy bun high on her head, rocked back and forth on the floor, clutching her brother like a sailor adrift at sea clutches a piece of driftwood, and then Katara was falling, falling down to the floor, burying her face in the palm of her hand, her body shuddering with pain as her last illusions broke and shattered into shreds and tatters that could never be counted, never, ever, be put back together again.

---

It was a week before Azula spoke to her. It happened out of nowhere, as Katara sat in a chair in the corner of Zuko's hospital room, staring off into space, trying to look anywhere but into the bottomless pits of hatred and rage that were Azula's eyes. It was always like that, every time Katara went into that room. Sometimes, Zuko was awake, and occasionally, especially as the dosage of the pain meds was reduced, he was actually lucid. He ate like a horse and smoked like a chimney, and grilled Katara on the events of the outside world like the reporter she now knew he had been all along. Azula, though, would not say a word. She would sit in her chair by Zuko's bed, the chair she never moved from, holding her brother's hand, and if looks could kill, the one she generally gave Katara would've done the job in five seconds flat.

It was worse when Zuko was asleep, though. Then, Azula would just sit, clutching her brother's hand, singing her lullabies, all the while fixing Katara with a glare that haunted Katara's fitful dreams every night.

It was on a night like that, that Azula spoke. The words came out of nowhere, and were uttered in a voice cold as ice and terrible as the coming storm. They cracked like a whip, and Katara flinched every time she ran them through her memories.

"My brother says that you're a good person. He says that you tried to save him, and that you did your best to help him. Thus, he says that I'm forbidden to hate you. That said, I've never listened to my brother, and besides, he's a monumental idiot, which is why I've decided that, as far as I'm concerned, you and your entire, gods-forsaken country can go burn in Hell."

Her anger given voice, Azula went right back to ignoring Katara, resumed her songs, held her brother's hand.

Katara didn't say a word. She couldn't think of an even halfway decent response, and besides, she wasn't entirely sure that Azula was wrong.

---

Through it all, through the long days and the longer nights, a month passed, and then another, and slowly, gradually, change came to China. Rumors filtered out to Harbin, of titanic clashes in the halls of power in Beijing, factions jostling for any advantage, no matter how slight. Party leaders who had been purged and exiled to the provinces began to reappear at official functions, trading places with those who had banished them. The Japanese trade delegation was feted and lauded to the heavens, and soon, other trade delegations began to join them. Foreigners began to prowl the streets of Beijing, shadowed by glowering MSS agents, purchasing land and building embassies and consulates. Collectivization of the land was slowed; whispers said it would soon stop altogether. The banners of revolution began to furl, and in the distance, the standards of accommodation and so-called "progress" were dusted off and brought out into the light of day.

For Katara, though, it often felt as if very little had changed at all. Every day, she flitted about, feeling like a shadow, from Zuko's hospital room to her office and back again, only going home to shower and change her clothes. The Ministry of State Security was flexing its muscles, and every day more of her old colleagues disappeared, every day, new faces took their places. Long Feng went back to Beijing, whistling a happy tune as she walked him to his car, bowing his head and tapping a finger to the brim of his cap as he pulled away. In his place came a big, glowering man with a thick beard and war scars covering his arms named Fong, and with Fong came more agents, more soldiers, and before she knew it, the purges had started in earnest.

Every once in a while, a young man would tap her shoulder, and she would be shoved into a car and driven to a nondescript building that didn't even seem to have an address. A script would be pushed into her hands, and she would be marched out into what looked like a courtroom, where she would shuffle her feet and read out her lines in a voice that sounded, even to herself, half-dead. Most of the time, she didn't know who was in the dock, could barely bring herself to even look. Zuko was right, when Azula left to use the bathroom and Katara seized the chance to pour her heart out to him. He reached out, took her hand, smiled up at her, her heart aching, her body wincing, as if each of the blows that had been rained down on him had, in fact, been rained down on her.

There's nothing you can do, Katara-chan. If you refuse, then they'll find someone else, and then you'll be the one in the dock, and what will that accomplish?

But what am I accomplishing now? she had asked him, and at that, he could only shrug, because he never pretended to have all the answers, or any of them, really.

In the end, she decided, he was just a boy, trying to do the right thing in a wrong world.

So what am I? she would ask herself.

She didn't yet have an answer to that.

---

On the last day of March, Xin Fu vanished. He reappeared a week later, covered in bruises, his lip busted, pointing fingers, singing like a canary. Watching from the gallery, where she was flanked by two MSS agents, Katara couldn't help but be disappointed. Rumor said that it had taken less than forty-eight hours to break him.

Zuko did better, she thought, closing her eyes, letting the roar of the denunciations flow over her. My father did better.

Even Mother never bent, never bowed, never broke, even as the soldiers began to pull on the rope and her feet left the earth, never to return. She screamed her defiance, right up to the end.

Would I?

Even that, she didn't know.

A few days later, she ran into her brother in their apartment. He was all smiles and happiness. Apparently, he had been promoted, and he wore a new uniform, the uniform of the MSS.

For reasons that were only now beginning to become clear, that brought her a great deal of relief. That night, she slept straight through until morning, for the first time since the day she decided to try and bust Zuko out of his cell.

---

Towards the end of April, the doctors finally cleared Zuko to go home. Katara was ecstatic, and even Azula cracked a smile, though her eyes still held nothing but hatred and contempt for Katara.

But she still smiled, and for some reason, that made all the difference in the world to Katara.

---

The next day, she was summoned to work, and ushered into the office that once belonged to Jet, and now belonged to Colonel Fong. She was not the least bit surprised to find Long Feng waiting for her, tapping the stem of his pipe against his bottom teeth, eyes glittering with darkness and death and just the barest hint of amusement. She didn't hesitate when she came in, didn't so much as blink, just snapped off her salute and took the chair that Long Feng motioned her towards.

"Good morning, Lieutenant," he opened, settling back into his chair and smiling like the snake she was now certain he was. "How are you faring today?"

Katara shrugged, taking a moment to smooth out the creases in her uniform. "As well as can be expected, sir."

Long Feng nodded. "I'm glad to hear that. And how are our Japanese guests?"

Zuko's finally beginning to look human again, and Azula actually said a somewhat civil word to me before I left the hospital last night. Sure, it came in the form of observing that, while she still hated my guts, she supposed I was somewhat decent in the end, but I'm willing to accept that.

Out loud, all she said was, "Ready and eager to return to their homeland, sir."

Long Feng chuckled. "I can imagine. And how're you feeling about the future?"

Her face remained as it had since she walked in, hard and blank as a slab of stone. It wasn't the least bit difficult. Not here. Never here. "Ready and willing to serve the People's Republic, sir."

"I'm glad to hear that, because I'm afraid I have a somewhat difficult assignment for you."

Of course you do. "I live to serve, sir."

"I'm sure you do." He glanced around the desk, popped an eyebrow, picked up a folder, tossed it into Katara's lap. She didn't open it, merely laid it flat across her knees and kept looking him right in the eye.

"In there," he said, pointing with his pipe, "you'll find transit papers and train tickets to get yourself and both of our Japanese friends to Dalian. There, you are to escort them onto a boat that will return them to Japan. A private suite on this boat has already been set aside, and though a security and medical detail will accompany you all to Dalian, for reasons of state I'm afraid we can't put the same on a boat, not if we want to keep this under the radar. Thus, you will also board this boat, posing as a civilian; you'll find a voucher for the purchase of the appropriate clothes in that folder, along with a passport and the like."

Katara looked down, opened the folder, took out the passport. She had never had a passport, never even dreamed of having one. She opened it, and found the picture from her service file glowering back at her. She read the details, looked at the name, and popped an eyebrow.

"Wu Qinghua, sir?"

Long Feng chuckled. "I thought you'd appreciate the choice."

Katara nodded, put the passport back, closed the folder, folded her hands primly on the top. "It's more appropriate than you could ever know, sir."

Long Feng accepted this with his usual imperturbability. "As can only be expected; even I don't presume to know everything." Which, Katara couldn't help but feel, was probably the biggest lie the man had ever told in a lifetime of outrageous lies. "That said…I'm sure you're curious as to your purpose on this voyage."

"The question had crossed my mind, sir," she admitted.

Long Feng laughed, jabbing his pipe at her like an accusing finger. "Oh, you…every time I meet you, Lieutenant, I find new reasons to like you. Keep it up; you'll go far."

That's when Katara knew, in that moment, right there. That's when it all became clear.

Her days were numbered.

The end was just around the corner.

She was going to be purged.

The reasons why didn't matter, the exact details didn't matter. What mattered was that she was going to end her days, maybe next month, maybe next year, maybe next decade, the timeline was irrelevant, but someday, Long Feng would decide she had outlived her usefulness, and then she would be marched into an empty field and a bullet would crash into the back of her skull and that would be the end of everything she had ever hoped or dreamed.

She didn't say any of that, of course. Didn't even twitch.

"I'll do my best to not let you down, sir."

"Of that, I have no doubt. Now, as to your assignment…it's simple. You're to spend the journey impressing upon our guests the importance of sticking to the deal the young lady struck with me. Go about it however you like, I trust in your judgment and your abilities, but by the end of that journey, I want you to make sure they understand what we expect of them, and then, when you arrive in Nagasaki, to make absolutely certain – on your life – that they get off that boat and understand to never, ever, set foot in China, ever again."

And when they tell me to get bent, and their paper plasters their story all over the front page, you'll shrug and make some apologies and toss me to the wolves. What can I say? Can't get good help these days, can you? Or something like that.

And in Japan? The trade deal's been struck; the clock can't be unwound. The capitalists are already dreaming of the money to be made, the profits to be piled into the banks, and the politicians will shake their heads and shrug and offer their apologies, but will always remember what side their bread is buttered on, and when the overtures are finally made to America? Well…

Zuko's family history is proof of how little the Americans will care.

All so very neat, all so very tidy…

Katara had to give Long Feng credit, in that moment. It really was impressive.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Always the same, here and everywhere else…

She allowed herself a smile.

Only we, the little people, can bend the needle and make the difference. Why?

Because we choose to.

We always have a choice.

Always.

She stood, snapped to attention, fired off a salute.

"I will do you proud, sir. I can assure you that your faith is not in the least misplaced."

Long Feng stood, bowed his head, and smiled from ear-to-ear.

"Of that, Lieutenant, I can assure you, I have no doubts."

Her lines delivered, her script finally turned to the last page, she turned on her heel, marched out, and went off to tell Zuko and Azula.

---

It was, quite possibly, the most beautiful thing Katara had ever seen. The Huang Hai stretched off into the distance, eternal, never-ending, glittering in the sun like an endless bed of quivering diamonds. The breeze was cool upon her skin, the spray of the sea leaving a faint taste of salt upon her lips. Even the smell, somehow, was beautiful, a smell of eternity, of fathomless depths beneath her feet, stretching down, down, beneath the ever-trembling deck of the ship. She tore her gaze from the horizon, looked up at the brilliant, bright blue bowl of the sky, watched long shreds of clouds inching across eternity. She looked at it all, drank it in, pulled it close and wrapped her arms around it, never wanting to let it go.

All her life, she had dreamed of seeing the ocean, and now that she had, it was more wonderful than she could ever have imagined. This, she began to feel, was her true home, where she had always belonged. Out here, in the wide open world, a world she had never even allowed herself to truly think about, to even imagine. For as long as she could remember, she had known only war and chaos, betrayal and fear, suspicion and the quiet terror of following the rules, dreaming of the sea, but never allowing herself to think of what lay beyond.

But now, she was here, upon the vastness of the ocean, water as far as the eye could see, the world at her fingertips, just beyond her reach…

But only if I don't reach out and take it…

The only question was, would she have the courage to do it?

She didn't quite know yet.

"Hey, you."

The question floated out and over her shoulder, muttered in quiet Japanese. She tilted her head, looked back over that same shoulder, watched the boy come shuffling up to take a place beside her at the railing. He coughed into his hand, pulled his jacket tight about his body, shook a cigarette out of a pack from his pocket and cupped his hands around the match as he got it alight. He took several long, deep drags, before silently passing it to her to do the same.

"Hey yourself," she said, smirking as she took her puffs and passed the cigarette back, not entirely sure why she was smirking, only knowing that it felt like the most natural thing in the world. "Bored?"

A rustle of fabric as he shrugged; she didn't see it, because she had turned her eyes back to the horizon. "I guess…now that I don't spend most of my days doped out of my mind, I'm starting to remember why I do the job that I do."

She nodded, pursing her lips in thought. "True…hey, Zuko?"

"Hmm?"

"Why do you do the job that you do?"

A long pause, the crinkle of the paper as it burned its way to the filter, a sigh and a shuffle as he draped himself over the railing.

"Honestly? I think…I just…I've been thinking about that a lot, ever since you asked me. Out of all the bullshit you hurled at me in those early days, that's the one diamond in the rough that's stuck with me."

She winced at the memories, at the flashing vision of the Katara she used to know, the confused young woman who didn't even realize how confused she was. "I see…did you…did you come up with anything?"

A chuckle, soft and low. It came out free and clear, no coughing, no wheezing, no wincing or doubling over in pain. It was hard for her to put into words just what that meant to her.

"Well, as a matter of fact…I was talking it over with Zula, and basically, the best I could come up with was…well…in Japan, we have this real problem with not wanting to talk about uncomfortable things. Like, your life may suck, your father may be a horrible piece-of-shit who beats the shit out of you and your mother and your sister every damn day, but, you know, you just don't talk about it…and…I just…" A sigh, more rustling as he rubbed the back of his neck, while she marveled at how well she had come to know him.

It's like he said: He's the closest I've ever come to having a boyfriend.

She giggled, reached up to tuck some stray hairs behind her ear, the hair that was slowly but surely growing down towards her shoulders.

There are worse fates to suffer in this world…

"You just…?" she prompted, giving him a nudge with her elbow.

He laughed, high and thin and awkward, and all the jokes Azula (who still hated her, quite vehemently, but had recently decided Katara could be spoken to from time-to-time) made about how Zuko was the Prince of Awkwardness started to make sense.

"Well…I guess…I went to the Journalism School at Tokyo University, and I…I started to see all this…all of this shit, all over the place, and nobody talked ever about it, because that's just not what you do, and I guess…"

"You started turning over rocks," she finished, turning to look at him, a smile on her face even she didn't comprehend, "and once you started, you just couldn't stop."

He just gave her another of his famous shrugs, though they didn't bother her anymore. "I guess so." He turned his face from the horizon, looked at her, nodded. "I like you with longer hair. It suits you much better."

She giggled, why, she would never know, and struck a pose. What's wrong with me? Am I going crazy? Is this all just some strange dream?

Do I even want to know if it is?

"Well, ever since I saw how long your sister's hair is, I just had to meet the challenge."

Zuko laughed. "Fair enough." He turned back to the horizon, took a deep breath, let it out. He finished his cigarette, tossed it into the ocean, lit a new one, smoked that one, too. By the time he was halfway through a third one, she was seriously contemplating finding a stick to beat whatever it was he wanted to say out of him, or, at the very least, asking Azula to do it for her.

She probably would, too. Siblings are the same no matter where you go.

"Katara…"

This pause lasted for the rest of his current cigarette, until Katara was beginning to feel genuine anger. Just spit it out already!

"Yes…?" she prompted, with another nudge of her elbow, this one a bit more…forceful…than the last.

"Oh…I…just…" He took a deep breath, and then it all spilled out, like a river in flood.

"It's just that I don't think you should go back to China. I think you should just hop off the boat and come with us. There's not going to be much left for you there, and Azula and I will just have this huge fight, because if you go back, I won't write the story, they'll blame it on you, and Azula will be furious with me and all my friends will be furious with me and I owe you my life, I would've died down there if it wasn't for you, I was about to give up until you came into my cell that day and started shoving clothes at me, I owe you my life and the least I can do is try and give you a shot at one of your own, I'm not saying China's not a good place to have a life, but not the mainland, not for you right now, they'll make you a scapegoat whenever the story breaks, which it will, no matter what I do or don't do, you could go to Taiwan if you want, or Hong Kong, or, shit, Singapore if you really want, point is, I owe you everything and Azula owes you, too, she'll never admit it but she does, and…and…just…"

He stopped, out of breath, gasping, face bright red, and then, catching her completely off guard – and by the look on his face, surprising even himself – he turned to her and took her hands and looked her right in the eye.

"Just…come with us, don't go back, please, I could never forgive myself if I let you go back."

She nodded, pretended to think about it, held his gaze with one of her own, looking in both eyes, because they were both alive and worth looking at to her.

"Well…how will you get me into Japan? I don't exactly have a visa…"

Zuko rolled his eye. "You kidding? We're arriving in one of the busiest ports in the world, and trust me, you're not the first person we've smuggled into the country."

She giggled, and shot him a smirk. "That how you get all the girls, Zuko?"

He blushed bright red, but didn't look away. "No, of course not…it's just…people help us, and Azula and I take that trust and that debt very seriously. You helped me, and I owe every breath I take from here on out to you. That matters to me, and to Zula, too, whether she admits it or not, so…I just…come with us."

She made a big show, but truth be told, she didn't have to think about it. It all came down to one word.

"Okay."

Then she winked at him, just to see if his blush could get any worse.

It could.

She never looked back.

The End

---

For those of you who just can't live without my usual rambling AN (and if that's you, good God why, you're not my wife, you don't have to put up with my ranting), you can find a comprehensive AN over on my Tumblr, which you can find under the same SN I use here, that being, kangaroo2010. It'll be the entry right before this story, which I would link, but this site can be a bitch like that. Oh, and if you pop over to my Tumblr, please feel free to hang around and check out some of the original stuff I throw up on there, too. Also, because I love me some page views, feel free to pop over to An Archive of Our Own (or AO3), where this story also exists, and, you know, click the kudos button or something (and my SN there is also kangaroo2010, because I don't like having to work to remember my SNs).

For those still hanging around and playing the home game, the song Azula sings is an old Japanese lullaby, known as the Chugoku Region Lullaby, the full text of which - along with more information - can be found on Wikipedia.

Anyways, it was great to see you all again! I love you all, and I'm sure we'll be seeing each other soon!