A/N: So this will be my fourth year participating in Zutara Week!
The first two years, I did a series of unconnected drabbles (though I would argue that the first five of my 2012 entries existed within a shared universe). Last year, I did a full story, The Red Hydrangea.
This year, I've decided to mix the two together, so all of my entries this year will be a series of unconnected alternate universes told within a framing story, that being a babysitter telling bedtime stories to her two charges, who seem to have an odd interest in Zuko and Katara's many love stories.
I hope you all enjoy, and I'll see you tomorrow!
"Tell us a bedtime story!"
It was a surprisingly bold command coming from a four year old girl in a blue wool nightgown, with a stuffed turtleduck clutched to her chest like a lifeline. Her brother, a boy of six with a mop of black hair and a perpetual frown, shook his head. Over the past few hours he had proven himself to have all the surly sarcasm of a man six times his age.
"You're such a baby," he sneered at his sister. "Why can't you just go to sleep without having to hear some dumb story about magic princesses and stuff?"
The girl stuck her tongue out at him. It was the usual way she answered him as far as the baby-sitter could tell. She'd been watching them all day since their parents went out to run errands, and their grandparents enjoyed a much-needed vacation in the Earth Kingdom. She had never taken care of kids before, but having spent the day with these two, she'd learned quite a bit about what it was like to have a sibling.
Younger siblings drove you crazy and stole your ice cream when you weren't looking.
And older siblings tried to make a servant out of your and then pushed you into the mud when they found out you stole their ice cream.
She'd never been happier to be an only child.
Which wasn't to say the sitter didn't like the kids. They were cute and cooperative when they were actually… well, cooperating with her. Getting them to go to bed had been an exercise in patience at first (her old instructors would be so proud of her use of calming breathing techniques), but once the girl had taken her bath and dried her hair, and the boy had gotten to watch the sun set and spend some time in front of the fire, things had run pretty smoothly.
It was only now, as the girl stood up on her bed with her hands on her hips, like the Fire Lady on her throne leading her army to war that the sitter could feel that headache coming back on.
"Tell us a story," the girl repeated.
The sitter rubbed the back of her neck.
"I uh… I don't really know any stories," she said.
"Make one up," the girl answered.
The boy was sighed in annoyance, and the glare the sitter threw his way was only on principle. She kind of agreed with him at this point.
"Just ignore her," said the boy from his bed. "She'll quiet down eventually."
This time, he stuck out his tongue back at her, and they seemed to be having a competition of who could get theirs out the farthest. Mature as he tried to be, the boy really was still a kid at heart. The sitter quirked a smile.
"I'll help you get started," the girl said, sitting back down cross legged on her bed. "Once upon a time, there was a beautiful princess, and her name was Katara."
The sitter furrowed her brow, and somewhere off to the side, the brother was groaning.
"Katara? Are you sure about that?"
The girl nodded resolutely. "Yes I am, and Princess Katara loved a handsome prince named Zuko."
"Of course she did," the sitter said, and with a defeated slump of her shoulders, she eased herself into the chair next to the bed. There was no escaping now. "Okay, so there was a princess named Katara, and a prince named Zuko."
The boy grumbled something unintelligible about what a 'whiny baby' his sister was and rolled over to face the wall.
"And Princess Katara and Prince Zuko loved each other very much…"
They met for the first time at a party. It was a grand banquet the Water Tribe had thrown for their Chief, a brave and noble man called Hakoda. He was much loved by his people, and even his enemies had nothing but respect for him. He was just that kind of guy, the kind you want to slap on the back and buy a drink every time you saw him. Even though his tribe had been at war with the Fire Nation for years, Hakoda had hope that one day, a truce could be reached and peace would reign.
His oldest son was Sokka, a brash and proud warrior who didn't share his father's pacifistic views. His idea of ending the feud was to lock all the Fire Nation elites in cages and leave them there to gnaw on rat bones. Though Hakoda tried to teach his heir in the ways of diplomacy, Sokka's interests lay in hunting and training for war. He had no use for petty words.
Katara was the younger child of Hakoda. She was a waterbender, and a kind, loving young woman who shared her father's desire for peace. Together, they went on missions of peace all over the world, making friends in all four nations. She was well-known for her beauty, and she had many suitors, but Princess Katara was waiting for something more than a rich man with a handsome face. She was waiting for love.
Meanwhile, in the Fire Nation, Fire Lord Ozai's firstborn and heir, Prince Zuko, felt much the same as Hakoda and Katara. He was a little better off than them. Someday, he would take over for his tyrannical father, and be free to usher in the period of peace he'd been dreaming of. His father, however, felt his son too weak to inherit the throne. Perhaps this was why Ozai favored Azula, Zuko's younger sister, who was just as bloodthirsty as her father, and who loved to start battles with Prince Sokka for a laugh. Their minor war was interspersed with one even greater than their petty squabbling, and it was the reason Zuko, along with Azula and her two friends, Mai and Tylee, had to sneak under cover into the party. It had been Azula's idea to go, obstinately for a night away from their stuffy palace, but really she just wanted to find a way to make a mess of the party and anger Prince Sokka, her most favorite target for mischief.
That may or may not have come about, but the real story begins with Zuko on the dance floor, watching through the crowd as a gaggle of waterbenders preformed their haunting dance by the light of the moon. At the center was Princess Katara, and the moment Prince Zuko laid eyes on her, he knew that there would never be another woman in his heart.
She was beautiful as she danced: one step left, two steps right, one step back. All measured movements as she guided a stream of water through the air, making whips and waves and glowing orbs that sat over the people's heads like a moon. In her flowing blue gowns, with her hair long and loose, she was like a goddess to Zuko, who felt as though the whole room melted away, and it was just they two existing together in a world of their own.
What he would not find out until much later was that Princess Katara had seen him watching her from the crowd, and she was entranced by the handsome prince, whom until then she had only known by name. When she saw his face, it was all she wanted to see for the rest of her life. She went to find him when the dance was done, only to be distracted by her father and a nice young Air Nomad he'd been trying to set her up with. After sharing a dance with the boy as a courtesy, Katara left again to find her prince, and it was on a field by a pool of water with the moon, large and full, at their backs that Prince Zuko and Princess Katara met for the first time. By the end of the night, it would be the place of their first time laughing together, their first time holding hands, and when they had to part, their first time sharing a kiss.
They met frequently after that, always under the cover of night, when Sokka would be off on a midnight hunt, and Azula would be safely away from them in her chambers. Though the lovers became closer and more in love by the day, both knew that their families would never accept them. The battles between Sokka's friends and Azula's were getting worse by the day. It was only a matter of time before they would be drawn into the chaos and forced apart.
One day, Azula caught Zuko returning from a meeting with Katara. Though Zuko refused to tell her where he'd been, Azula was sneaky, and she'd do anything to discredit her brother and get her hands on the throne. She sent a spy to follow Zuko the next time he snuck out. He reported back all the details of Zuko and Katara's meeting, how they professed their love to one another, first softly and then with rising passion. Azula gleefully divulged it to her father, who was outraged to hear that his son had fallen for the daughter of his sworn enemy.
At length, Zuko was called to court, where Ozai laid down the charges against him. He ordered his son to stop seeing the Water Tribe princess, or else risk being disowned and banished forever from the Fire Nation.
And now, Prince Zuko faced a terrible dilemma. He knew he would fall into despair without the woman he loved by his side, but to give up the throne and his chance to end the violence between the nations once and for all was something he could hardly think to risk. His father was in perfect health as well, so there was no hope of waiting for him to die off. So long as Ozai had had that and Azula, he had no use for Zuko.
But then, tragedy struck. An incensed Sokka, who had intercepted the spy and forced him to explain his purpose, planned to kill Zuko to keep his nemesis away from his sister. No matter how much Katara begged him, Sokka would not be moved. He had Katara restrained and then went out to hunt down his prey. On the way, he was found by Azula, and the ensuing battle was the most terrible and deadly of all time. By the end of it, both Sokka and Azula were dead by each other's hands. It was the first time the feud between nations had drawn blood, and with the loss of the Water Tribe Prince and the Fire Nation Princess, the people of both nations screamed out for blood. Hakoda tried to ease the tensions, but his grief for his son had weakened him, and he was overthrown by radicals who established a new leader to take on the Fire Nation.
In the middle of the bloodshed, Zuko and Katara could only hope to meet in the quiet after each battle. By then, so many lives on both sides had been lost. The former king Hakoda was wasting away in anguish, looking more like a frail old man than the powerful leader he had been. Though Katara worried for her father and for her people, her love for Zuko never faded. What neither of them knew was that they were in more danger than they could have realized.
With the loss of what he considered the true heir to his throne, Ozai resigned himself to grooming his son to be a proper, ruthless Fire Lord like him. The first step was doing away with the princess who softened his heart. He knew that, in spite of his stern objections, Zuko continued to see the princess regularly. He therefore conspired to lure her into the open, and then have one of his assassins take her out. He sent Katara a letter in his son's hand, asking her to meet him at a certain time and place to discuss running away together. Katara received the letter and, thinking it was her beloved Zuko, went to the appointed location to let him know that, though she loved him with all that she had, she could not abandon her father or her people when they needed her most. It was with a heavy heart that she refused what could be their final chance at happiness, but her mind was made up, and she knew that her prince would understand her decision.
The sitter trailed off into silence, leaving the little girl to stare, with her searching blue eyes.
"Well, what happens?" she asked, her already high-pitched voice becoming like a squeak. "Do Prince Zuko and Princess Katara get to be happy together? Do they stop all the fighting? Does mean old Ozai go away? Do-"
A hundred different questions with a hundred different scenarios, ranging from the Prince and Princess running away to the jungle to Ozai having a change of heart and letting them be together. She was highly creative, this one. She would've been better off telling the story than her sitter.
Luckily- or really not so luckily- the brother was as happy as he'd even been to help out in his own, unhelpful way.
"I'll tell you what happens," he said, sitting up in bed with his hands on his hips. "What happens is that the princess gets killed by the assassin, then the Fire Lord has him make it look like Water Tribe rebels did it, which drives the prince to forget about all that peace stuff and completely destroy the Water Tribe as revenge. Then, when the Water Tribe has been burnt to the ground, he finds out it was really his father who did it, kills him, and then throws himself off a cliff and drowns. The End."
The sitter didn't know which was louder, the silence that followed, the sister's bawling her eyes out that came next, or the internal raging she was doing at the smarmy faced brother, who looked far too pleased with himself for his own good.
"You think just 'cause I'm a kid, I wouldn't know you stole that whole stupid story from some dumb opera? She may be too young to know about that stuff, but I'm not. That story sounded way too smart for you anyway."
'Insufferable brat,' the sitter thought to herself. True, she may not have been all that well read (she may have read a book once about ten years ago), but she thought she did okay with the story. She'd changed all the names and locations, and the part about the dancing hadn't even been in the opera. She'd made that bit up all by herself. So there!
The sitter turned away from the boy for now to deal with his sister. The little girl was clutching at her shirt, soaking it in the fat tears rolling down her cheeks.
"Don't listen to him, honey," said the sitter as she rubbed the girl's head soothingly. "He's just a big dummy. What really happens is that the… uh…" she racked her brains for an idea. "Uh… the… whole thing turns out to be a bad dream."
"What?" the boy shouted.
"And it turns out there wasn't really a war and no one is dead, and Prince Zuko and Princess Katara got married and lived happily ever after, and that's how it ends."
She directed the last bit the brother's way, as he pretended to gag until it looked like he really would.
The tiny girl sniffled. "R-really?"
"Yes, really," the sitter said, before the brother could step in again, not that it looked like he was going to.
The girl instantly brightened up, all sadness forgotten at the promise of a happy ending to her fairy tale. In retrospect, the sitter had to kick herself for choosing an opera of all things to lift a story from. Hadn't she grown up on that old fairy tale radio show? Filled with sugary sweet stories of beautiful princesses and handsome princes and happy endings for all who deserved them?
It just goes to show, she really wasn't cut out for this baby-sitting thing.
She tucked the little girl into bed, the turtle duck's head poking out from above her arm as she snuggled into the mattress and closed her eyes.
"Tell us another story tomorrow, kay?"
The sitter smiled and brushed the hair from her face.
"We'll see."