Accomplished
an Avatar fic by Tobu Ishi
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"And this was the reading room," Zuko says, guiding her over the high wooden threshold with one hand lightly on her wrist. Playful shouts echo faintly from some other courtyard--the Avatar is teaching a ball game to their companions, and presumably the blind girl--no, Toph--is trouncing everyone as usual, but Katara declared an emphatic lack of interest in kicking a ball around and asked for a tour instead. She's never had free rein in a palace before, even a mere royal summer home.
Sooner or later, Zuko hopes he'll feel comfortable with denying her smaller whims. At the moment, he would willingly keep atoning for the rest of their respective lives, and so the winding vermilion staircases and intricately painted galleries of his childhood have become the waterbender's playthings for the day.
"Ohh," Katara whispers, and moves past him into the shadowy archives, stretching out a hand to the racks upon racks of bright brocade-bound scrolls. Zuko lingers in the doorway, shoved to the background in the wake of her wonder.
"I, uh, used to have to study here," he says, not sure how to communicate the summer months of frustration and boredom, forced to watch the glorious seaside mornings pass away while trapped in this dark and camphor-smelling place at the mercy of a sequence of bone-dry, camphor-smelling tutors. His sister went to the Academy and came home to pure leisure; the princess might easily spend her summers eating candied shanzha berries and ordering the servants around, but the heir to the throne had certain expectations to which he must and would adhere. Three entire racks of those scrolls are marred from end to end with his cackhanded early compositions, like wormeaten tunnels through deceptively appetizing fruit, and Zuko stares uneasily at Katara's back, willing her with all his might to pluck a scroll from any shelf but those.
Surprisingly, she touches nothing--just stands and looks, overawed. "Wan Shi Tong would have a field day here," she murmurs, and Zuko blinks, puzzled. Before he can ask, she turns and unleashes that moon-bright smile on him. "All this was yours?"
"Not really," he mutters, ducking his chin at the smooth stone floor. Generations of princes before him wasted their summers in this musty room. But Katara has already knelt by his old writing desk, touching the mother-of-pearl dragon inlays with avid curiosity, then rifling through the brushstand and exclaiming over brushes and inkstones of pure jade and jasper and gold, picking them up reverently to turn them over in her hands. He feels an unexpected, almost electrical shock at the sight of her slim brown fingers touching the relics of his childhood, as if she is stitching her own personal loop of his present to the coils of his past. Zuko flinches and looks away. Katara is not even footnoted in that chapter of his life--it's just one of the wonderful things about her.
At last she stands and goes after the scrolls; he holds his breath, but she chooses one bound in green and gold silk, a harmless calligraphy manual. Unrolling it, she gives a little exclamation of delight, eyes widening. Zuko forgets his determination to malinger in the doorway and hurries to look over her shoulder, wondering what marvel she's discovered that escaped his boyhood notice; but what greets his eyes is the Book of One Hundred, the most elementary of the writing manuals.
"It's got all the brushstrokes noted in order!" Katara enthuses, and Zuko wrinkles his nose, wondering if she's being mocking, and if so, of what and why. "And look at the pictures!"
"It's just a learning scroll," he points out, a little sourly. "Everybody uses them."
Katara looks at him for a beat, then laughs out loud. "Sokka and I learned from Gran-gran," she explains with a grin. "She used to write the characters in the snow with her boot. We had to copy them all the way across the village."
Zuko, stunned, finds himself with nothing to say. In the span of the resulting awkward silence, Katara has plenty of time to notice and thoroughly misread his dropped jaw. Her eyes narrow, innocent confidence slipping into defensiveness.
"There wasn't exactly a lot of paper lying around," she snaps, and thumps the scroll back in its gilded notch, then turns and strides out of the room.
Zuko stays where he is, watching one of the wisest, most eloquent young women he knows walk away. In his mind's eye, a curly-headed little girl in furs sits at the feet of an old woman he remembers mostly as a parka ruff gripped harshly in his fist; the child is painstakingly scraping her name into the white crust of snow with one small mitten. Hundreds of miles away, the memory of a little boy in red silk and leather stops staring out the window at swooping sparrowkeets and puts down his jade-handled brush in retrospective shame.
As Katara's indignant shadow passes from the doorway, Zuko stirs himself back to sense and hurries after her into the sunlit corridor. There are plenty of wonders left to be seen when she cools down, but he is already seeing the lionturtle's share.
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a/n: This story was written after a visit to the Summer Palace in Beijing, last New Year's. (I suspect that it shows.) Therefore it's dedicated in part to my "cousin" M., though as a nonfan he'll probably never know.