A/N: I'm not a Zutara shipper, to be honest, but I wanted to challenge myself and see if I could exit my comfort zone by writing a couple I wouldn't normally. Plus, I'm a sucker for challenges.
She cannot keep her eyes off of his scar.
Of course, she knows that it's impolite to stare, to let your gaze linger upon somebody's physical deformities. She spent her childhood in the arctic, for Senna's sake; she's used to seeing missing digits and gnarled legs.
But it's so brutally conspicuous, stark crimson relief against ivory skin, like a grotesque, unfurled flower stretching out to his shriveled ear, tracing his left cheekbone. Who, she wonders, managed to inflict such an injury on a boy? (And that is what he is, she's reminded; a boy, barely a year older than Sokka.)
(He'd let her touch it once, back in the catacombs. She remembers how it had felt - waxy and cold and dead, a foreign body attached to the rest of his face- and how close she'd been to erasing it.)
"Katara! Did you see? I just shot that thing twenty feet!"
Watching firebending practice. That's what she's supposed to be doing, because Zuko is an evil, monstrous firebender who betrayed them all at Ba Sing Se and won't hesitate to do it again if she isn't around to supervise.
"Keep it up!" she calls at Aang's already retreating back, and notices the livid starburst imprinted onto it. Her blood runs cold.