AUTHOR'S NOTE With this piece, I've taken the artistic liberty to slightly alter the A:TLA universe with regard to its social and political structure. This slightly more complicated feudal system is not at all loosely based on George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. Not even remotely. Silly to even suggest that. Keep in mind that this is my first real stab at Zutara and please let me know what you think of the world I've created for our little loves.
SUMMARY In a land where the balance of feudal power has fallen to complete disarray, only two of the former four major strongholds stand, and one has nearly swallowed up the other. The Fire Nation has wiped out the Air Nomads, crippled the Water Tribes, and nearly taken over all the lands of the Earth Kingdom. The Avatar, bringer of balance and restorer of peace, is a century old legend, dead to the world. One girl's journey of survival cannot seem significant against the backdrop of her war torn world, but no one could have imagined that time would see her living as a farm hand of a seemingly insignificant Earth Kingdom lord – or who she would meet there. Slight AU, Zutara, roots in but made laughable by George R. R. Martin's ASOIAF series.
PREMISE When he and the other men of their tribe are forced to sail off on the few last remaining ships in the once great Water Tribe fleet in hopes of one day defeating the nation that oppresses nearly all of the world, Hakoda decides that instead of leaving his two children and only remaining family in the South Pole to die of starvation, exposure, or another raid from the Fire Nation, they must leave not only their home but their kin and go into hiding. The story focuses on Katara's journey.
A DANCE OF WATER AND FLAME
VOLUME 1 PROLOGUE
Katara had been taught all of her life never to venture out in the part of the tundra where the old steamboat laid waste in the ice, too frozen to fall apart the way she imagined the metal parts of a hundred year old vessel should. Her father told her that the old Fire Nation steamer was simply too far out in the landscape and probably made the ice weak with its weight, her brother told her that predator animals took shelter there and made the old ship their home, hiding in the bowels of the structure waiting to make little girls like her their dinner, but Gran-Gran told her that the spirits of the Fire Nation soldiers that had manned the vessel still resided in the frozen, empty quarters.
When Katara protested this idea, that anything in the Spirit World could be evil because that went against everything she learned about the gentle and loving spirits of the Ocean and Moon, Tui and La, Gran-Gran had merely shook her head gravely. "My child," she gently worked a comb through her granddaughter's long dark hair just as she had done hundreds of times, "Evil lives in our world, and when it dies, the Spirit World does not make it good."
These are the words that immediately echo in her mind while her father stands before the remaining members of her tribe, telling them that their only hope of survival is sea-readying the old Fire Nation steamer and setting sail on the long voyage to their sister tribe, entirely across the world at the North Pole.
The few elders who had survived long enough to become elders stand behind him resolutely, saying nothing. Katara knows that the council had met and debated and voted and this must have been the popular consensus, but all she thinks of is an image of the deck of the dilapidated boat alight with phantom flames while it sails away from her homeland, consuming the last of a once great people.
A ghostly ship sinks on the horizon in her mind while her father further explains this terrifying decision. Chieftain Hakoda announces that the time has come for the last warriors of the South to join the Earth Kingdom cities of Omashu and Ba Sing Se in their resistance of the Fire Nation.
"It has been lifetimes since the Fire Lord began his raids on us," Hakoda says at the beginning of his address, and Katara blankly observes her father's tall, broad stature, his tanned, weathered skin, his steely blue eyes – his air of a leader born in strife and forged in hardship. "Only our elders remember a time when the Southern Water Tribe lived without fear of foreign oppressors, a time when our men were great fishermen, warriors, traders and our women life-givers and healers – and even those memories are only from their childhood."
Katara doesn't know of much history, but she has always known that there were times in the South that weren't hungry, or cold, or fearful of warriors bred in fire and born in hatred. The last and only raid she can remember is the single worst memory she has. Before the raid, she has just turned 8 and her mother had still been alive. She recalls soot, tears, and metal but not much else. This does not lessen the horror of her nightmares.
"We are and have always been a strong people. Only the strongest could live in this climate, and only the strongest have survived the atrocities the Fire Nation has wrought upon them." Katara has always thought it rather odd that she fear an entire nation – something she cannot even begin to fathom – but the thought of metal and black and red cloaks and fire makes her shake in a way that betrays the heavy furs she dons. Fear, she has decided, is something that can be taught just as well as any skill. "But our time here is dwindling. Love of our home and respect for our ancestors have been the ropes tethering us here for quite some time, but survival now must take precedence.
"And that is why the tribe will sail for the stronghold in the North, carved into ice and protected by ice and still standing and safe regardless of the Fire Navy's unsuccessful attacks, where we will reunite with our kinsmen after centuries apart." Four hundred years. Gran-Gran told her that it was four hundred years ago when civil unrest caused the Northern Water Tribe to split into two, her earliest ancestors travelling and settling in the South Pole. "The elders, women, and children will take the fire nation vessel to sail undetected through Earth Kingdom and Fire Nation waters. While this course is dangerous, it will take half the duration of any other route and time is key," Hakoda finishes gravely, "The longer at sea, the longer vulnerable."
He allows a brief period of silence. Eyes that hold age far beyond his years scan the small gathering of Southerners – the women clutching their children, wide eyed, the men standing tall, jaws clenched, the children small, malnourished, confused as to why everyone is standing outside and not performing their usual chores. No one dissents. No one but Katara.
"This… this plan of yours is crazy!" She proclaims after the melancholy silence of her resigned kinsmen becomes too much for her to bear and she has always had a way of letting her temper get the better of her, "Why are you taking the well-bodied men, the few we have, on a suicide mission while the rest of us fumble on an old haunted ship we have no business sailing?"
Her father sighs, but his grave expression no more wavers than does the sternness of his words, "Katara, see reason and curb your tongue. We can no longer live here. This is not a choice I want to make, but a necessary attempt to continue the survival of our people."
Her brother interjects before she can fire back the retort on her tongue, "But she has a point," Sokka is far more respectful – at least to his father, never to her – than his little sister and far more reasonable, which is why she is surprised by his agreement, "Why would you let them sail without us? They need us more than any earthbender city." Sokka is sixteen, and has long since decided that he is just as much a man as any of the warriors of his people.
Hakoda is now frowning. An elder speaks before he does. "The warriors of the Southern Water Tribe will not cowardly abandon the resistance of the Fire Lord and will certainly not leave the world's freedom entirely to the merits of the Earth Kingdom. We are not a weak people and the world will know this when they meet our fleet in battle. And you, child, will be sailing with your sister and the rest of the tribe."
All Katara hears is talk of pride coming from the old man, while all Sokka hears is an insult. "What? I'm not a child or a woman! I'm going with the warriors!" She knows she has lost the support of her brother to his own pride, as well.
"Sokka, Katara, it has already been decided. The tribe will sail for the North and you will not be sailing with the warriors." Katara watches Sokka's expression, only fleetingly, convey confusion and when he is silent, she decides it best she also be. Her brother is far more clever than she is, though she'd sooner eat the toes of a walrus yak than admit it, and following his lead has benefitted her a few times before. Katara hopes that his expression means he is planning something and that this is one of those times.
It is the moon before the tribe is intended to leave and Katara has nearly lost her mind with anxiety. She doesn't know for how many days they have been readying the fleet and the vessel and constructing supplies for the long journey but she does know that Sokka has not done a single thing to stop any of it. She regrets her silence the day of her father's announcement and is angry with Sokka for folding so easily when they both knew this was all crazy.
After her father and the council had finished making their announcement what seemed like so long ago, Katara returned to the tent she shared with her grandmother. Katara had expected to be scolded for her outburst and public disrespect of her father, but upon seeing her enter the tent, Gran-Gran just eyed her from where she was stitching a pair of pants, "Your passion has always overcome your reason, child."
Huffing, Katara made for her sleeping furs and allowed her legs to fold beneath her, "I'm perfectly reasonable when I say that this whole thing is a suicide mission and there's no reason to leave the South Pole and go fumbling all over the world with a war going on!"
Gran-Gran had paused in her sewing to stare at her young granddaughter. The girl of fourteen, lanky and growing into her maturing body, but still slight with a childlike roundness to her cheeks, knows nothing of war. War is a distant concept to the youth of the South Pole, a word meaning violence they have never seen and pain they could never imagine. Her granddaughter knows of survival, difficult and taxing, but not of war. Being isolated at the tip of the world had that effect. She continued as if Katara's outburst had not occurred, "You must learn to quell one in way of the other. When the time for passion comes, you must let the swells of your heart push against the tides reason. However, when the time to be reasonable comes, the swells of passion must recede and give way to the tides of reason. After you learn how to focus on one, my child, knowing when to use which will be your greatest struggle in life."
Chores for the day finally done, the moon high in the sky and the hour to leave her home rapidly approaching, Katara lays back in her bed as she still pictures, so many nights later, passion being a swell of icy water and reason as a tide lapping against the side of an iceberg. Always, Gran-Gran bestows wisdom on her and always, it takes a lot of pondering until Katara feels like she's even close to understanding it. It isn't until Gran-Gran is nearly done making supper that Katara decides she is the swell and Sokka is the tide. She is always forming in random places and in different sizes and shapes because of all sorts of pressures in the water, while he is the constant movement of water, uniform and steady. While they are very different, they are both aspects of the same whole. She cannot imagine herself ever being both.
Soon after, Katara sits sipping the stew Gran-Gran had prepared in attempt to ignore the uncharacteristic silence hanging over her family at meal time. In less than twelve hours, they are to be on ships sailing away from the tent they sat in, the makeshift village they lived in, and the home Katara grew up in.
Before she can break the silence, her father does. He speaks, but she doesn't quite understand until he repeats it. Slower this time. Hakoda looks concerned. Sokka looks away. Katara understands that the people of the North live differently than their cousins in the South. She has always understood that this was the reason they had gone their separate ways centuries ago. She understands that in the North, marriage is used as a political means to unite households. She understands that in the North, there is a social hierarchy and everyone is always trying to climb up it. She understands how marriage is used to do so.
Katara understands that in the South, her people look to her father for leadership not because of bloodline or politics but because he has proven time and time again that he is the strongest, wisest, and bravest warrior of the clan. She understands that, during her lifetime, he has always made the military decisions for her people and she has been told that, in better times, he voted on most informal legislature with a council of elders that, when their tribe was not a dying one, deliberated matters of law and leisure. She understands that her people look to her father to guide them through survival while still seeking the balance in their lives that Tui and La bring to the earth.
She understands that, in the South, people marry for love. She understands – when her father says that the day he married the love of his life her mother was the single best day of his existence – that he says it because he wants her to understand how he feels because she too has felt it.
Katara does not understand why Sokka does not at all look surprised – or seems to be experiencing sort of reaction at all – when her father tells her that she will not sail for the North with her tribe, nor will she sail for the Earth Kingdom strongholds with the warriors. She does not understand why her father has plans for her and Sokka to take the small row boat from the haunted old Fire Nation ship when the vessel is passing a place called Kyoshi Island and travel to the Fire Nation colonies.
She does not address her father after he has repeated his plan for them for a third time. Katara looks directly at Sokka. "Did you know?"
Sokka does not look at her when he answers, "I had a suspicion."
She is silent, but the stew in the pot at the center of them sloshes unnaturally. He stares at it and continues, "Dad specifically said that the tribe would go north and we wouldn't be going with the warriors, but he didn't say where we were going."
The only victory she finds here is that she had not been wrong when she thought that Sokka is more clever than she could ever hope to be.
"I didn't know his reasoning or our destination, though," he brother finishes quietly, finally meeting her eyes.
There is a beat and Katara still has not spoken and Hakoda takes this opportunity to continue informing his children of their rapidly approaching destiny. "Kyoshi Island is one of the few remaining Earth Kingdom lands to resist the Fire Nation rule. They are not a stronghold and they have kept out of the war so far, so they are likely not a target for the Fire Nation who are focused on the strongholds of Omashu and Ba Sing Se. You will take the boat to the Island and from there you will travel to one of the Fire Nation colonies and live as you see everyone else living."
Katara understands what it feels like to be betrayed. She has never felt this feeling before, but as she silently removes herself from where her family sat before rapidly cooling stew and climbs into her sleeping furs, she decides that it feels like this.
The snows are heavy the next day. Winter storms are not uncommon in the South Pole, but they are very hard to predict and once they are howling at the full extent of their power, it is best to stay somewhere safe and warm until they pass.
However, on this day, in this storm, the straggly people of the Southern Water Tribe are without a place that is safe and warm. They are without any place at all, really. Their makeshift tents, made of animal skins that are far too thin and furs that are far too ragged, have been folded up and are being stored in the bowels of the remnants of an enemy ship. The people who made this ship have taken away their freedom, their livelihood, and now their home.
Katara looks through the flurries of snow at the steamer, recently broken free of its icy grave and now floating in the icy waters, and decides that it has finally won. The Southern Water Tribe is finally no more.
The steamer is nearly fully packed with the laughable supplies of her people and their meagre belongings. The few ships of the once great Southern Water Tribe fleet are stocked with whatever makeshift weapons the warriors have managed to forge and maintain. Katara stands in the vast tundra between the two, quickly getting coated with thick snowflakes, nearly numb to the cold. A howl of the wind almost conceals her father and brother's approach.
Katara has thought on it all night long and cannot pinpoint what kept her from fighting her father last night like she did when he announced the move of the tribe to the North. She thought perhaps it were her Gran-Gran's words about passion and reason, or perhaps the resigned, tired expression in her father's eyes when he spoke of political marriages, or perhaps it was the mention of her mother and his powerful love for her. Maybe she even understands what it's like to want to protect something so much that even if it means letting them go, you do it.
Laying his heavy hand on her shoulder, her father informs her that it is time to go.
She doesn't move.
Hakoda grips her glove clad hand and crouches before her like he had done when she was a child, when she was small enough so that she looked him directly in the eye when he knelt before her. She looks down at him now, but only slightly. Sokka wraps an arm around his sister's shoulders.
"One day, we will all meet again in the North. Once the fighting between the last Earth Kingdom rebels and the Fire Nation armies dies down." Katara wonders why her father seems to think that the war that has lasted one hundred years will end in their lifetimes. "Only when the fighting is over may you two make the voyage to the North – by that time, you will be old enough to refuse marriage proposals on your own without the insult it would be for a Northerner's proposal to be rejected by the sister tribe's chieftain."
Katara decides that she despises politics and all that accompany it.
He stands and embraces his children. His son who is a brave warrior to be, as cunning as a winter fox and his daughter who is a passionate, water wielding incarnation of his beautiful wife Kya.
"You are children of the South. The blood of brave warriors run in your veins and the spirits of Tui and La are a part of your souls. You both know how to survive and how to take care of one another. You will not forget your home but you will adapt to a different life and you will conquer adversity. There is no force on this earth or in the world beyond that can break men of the South, and I will see you again sooner than you think."
"I love you, Dad."
"I love you too, to the moon and across all of the oceans, my little waterbender."
Sokka and Katara are standing on the deck of the haunted old Fire Nation ship, which made the ice weak, was full of predator animals waiting to make little girls like her dinner, and was haunted by the tortured ghosts of the soldiers that manned it. They are watching the remnants of the great warriors of the South sail in the opposite direction that they are setting course for. They are watching the retreating figure of their father, the last they will see of him for a long, long time.
Katara looks up at her brother, only two years her senior but decades smarter, more strategic, cunning, sexist, uncoordinated, immature, her very closest friend and one of her rapidly dwindling allies. "Do you really think we will all reunite in the North?"
"If we don't hope for that, we've got nothing to hope for, little sister."
She considers his words, but wonders how much more grown up must she become to no longer be considered little.
In the vast lands beyond the South Pole, more civilized people live in a feudal society, based on wealth and bloodlines, constructed of peasants, servants, soldiers, warriors, Lords, Sages, and finally, the royal family and Fire Lord, who reigns over all civilization. Peasants are those who toil fields owned by a Lord, allowed their simple huts only because they maintain the land on which it stands. Servants, however, are slightly different as they usually have some sort of special training or skill and are personally employed by a Lord and receive actual pay – either in wages or, often, housing like peasants, but with the benefit of living more comfortably and closer to their Lord. While there is honor in being a trusted servant, there is little honor in peasant life. Soldiers are men who are usually aspiring to achieve the acknowledgment and rank of warriors – they are armed, serve the Fire Lord's armed forces but lack the skill and reputation of a formidable warrior. As most warriors are benders – fire and earthbenders, as the other two elements have essentially been wiped out of existence – a non-bender who achieves warrior status is considered an especially notable opponent. Unlike soldiers, who are paid to join a given army, warriors generally fight for the houses from which they hail, but some are hired by Lords of other houses. Lords are those landowners who oversee a significant amount of lands, often serving as the governor of several small towns, who operate with their own small militia usually constructed of the wide branches of their kinsmen and men who hail from the towns under their control. Sages are men of the cloth and medicine, hailing from the heart of the Fire Nation but spread out in every corner which touches Fire Nation influence. They are the most capable healers beside the waterbending healers of the North, of whom very few people know, nevermind speak.
The royal family is comprised of the wife of the Fire Lord, the Fire Lady, and their children. The Fire Lord is the ultimate Lord of his realm, living in the Fire Nation Capitol and presiding over the many Lords who are spread across the world, although those who he actually knows personally are only those who either he appointed to reign over a certain area or who preside over a vast or significant portion of land important enough to warrant their occasional presence in the Capitol. The Fire Lord commands the Fire Nation's naval and army forces, ruling over the Fire Nation, whose people love him, and the conquered portions of the Earth Kingdom, whose people fear him.
A hundred years at war sees Fire Lord Ozai as nearly finished conquering all of the Earth Kingdom's lands – after he and his predecessors wiped out the Air Nomads and permanently crippled the Water Tribes. While his grandfather actively decimated the airbenders and their temples, he chose to isolate the North and South Poles and let them die off on their own to save the Fire Nation the resources it would take to sail the icy waters of the tundra and actively eradicate them. The Earth Kingdom, and subsequently earthbenders, still stand in existence due to, mostly, the strongholds of Omashu and Ba Sing Se, the amount of land belonging formerly to the Earth King and because it is in those lands that more than three quarters of goods for the Fire Nation are produced.
This is a society which has no interest in the barren wastelands at the southernmost tip of the earth. To most people, the common folk too poor for a proper education, the South Pole does not even exist. The great Southern Water Tribe has been irrelevant for mostly everyone's life time, and anyone who remembers its existence knows only of nighttime stories of spirits and the extinct waterbenders who once reigned in the icy lands.
When Katara's people free the old vessel from its icy grave, they cause a slight shift in the formation of that piece of ice and the smaller ones surrounding it. As the tides change in their push and pull against the iceberg, it finally cracks. By the time the Avatar emerges, the South Pole is empty of human life.
I love you too, to the moon and back, my little waterbender.