Blood

"Good bye Suki! I love you! I'll see you in a week when you get there!" Sokka called off the edge of the boat. It had taken Katara almost twenty minutes to pull Suki away from her brother's octopus-like grip. She was fed up with his clingy-ness, and she wasn't even in a relationship with him.

"SOKKA! Someone has to steer this boat!" she shouted. He snapped out of his reverie and in three enormous leaps, stood at the tiller.

"Hoist the mainsail! Tighten the jibe! We're going south!" Sokka roared. Several sailors hopped to his commands. Katara smiled, and a warm arm draped over her shoulders.

"Well, hello there, stranger," she said, looking up at the young Fire Lord. Dressed in all charcoal-black, with a sheath for his double swords strapped over his hips, he looked the part of the dark hero.

"Ah, I have the pleasure of meeting the most beautiful young woman in the Southern Water Tribe," he said, tossing his hair back.

"One of the only young women in the Southern Water Tribe," she corrected him, "Or at least I was a few years ago. We'll have to see when we get there."

"Indeed."

If Katara thought that it took a long time to get from the South Pole to Kyoshi on Appa, she was wrong. It was almost a three-week journey to the South Pole from Kyoshi, and Sokka, who, in her opinion, was an expert sailor, said the wind was in their favor.

"Where's the last air-bender when you need him!" Zuko shouted one day, after heaving the contents of his stomach over the side of the ship (Sokka had decided to cook that evening).

"In an air-temple, meditating!" Katara shot back at him. Grouchiness had overcome her, having been the only female aboard the ship, and having a bad case of cabin fever.

The air began to cool in the coming week, and she found herself feeling more relaxed as she pulled out a newly-altered parka to put on. It felt familiar and safe, like home. Sokka even looked more relaxed in some of his old clothes.

Only Zuko looked nervous, she noted, always shivering despite the parka she'd made for him. She summed it up to the frigid air that he'd never spent much time in, memories of who he used to be, and the fact that he was essentially meeting her extended family for the first time. She grinned, thinking about the people who'd helped raise her as a child when her mother died and then when her father left to fight.

The blue waters of the ocean soon turned icy. Glaciers replaced sandbars, and the sea filled with tiger-seals instead of dolphins and elephant koi. She was coming home.

A few days later, and the glaciers got thicker, and a smudge of white with gray swirling above it got came into the horizon.

"We're coming up to our old village!" Sokka shouted joyously. "We're coming home, little sister!" The siblings hugged in joy as the smoke from cook fires got closer.

"I can smell the sea prunes cooking, Sokka!" Katara cried. Zuko looked like he was about ready to throw up again.

"Why so nervous, Zuko?" she asked him later, as the boat eased into the peninsula for docking.

"I, well, um, I dunno." She strongly suspected that he was lying, but she stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek anyways.

The plank was thrown down and people swarmed as the passengers came down. Katara found herself in a many-armed embrace from the tribeswomen that had raised her.

"Biyu! Pamuya! Hurit! Aiyana!" she said, looking around at her aunts, Hakoda's sisters

"Little Katara! We've missed you. It's been much too long," said stocky and plump Aunt Biyu.

"We agree!" said slender and tall Aunt Pamuya and petite Aunt Aiyana together. Aunt Hurit's wrinkled little nut of a face crinkled up in a big smile. Katara looked over to see her brother engulfed in a hug with his "little warriors" who weren't so little anymore. Boys he'd attempted to train as toddlers were tall teens now. Her uncles puttered around in the back, looking suspiciously at the tall, dark stranger that looked strangely familiar.

Yikes! I forgot to introduce Zuko!

"Everybody! Um, we should consider ourselves blessed to have the new Fire Lord in our humble tribe!" she shouted, leaving the group and grabbing Zuko's arm.

"Is he the one that broke the old watchtower all those years ago!?" asked a voice from the back.

Oh no…I knew this would come up.

"Uh, well, yes, but he's good now! Now let's go to the village! I can't wait to see Dad!" she said.

"They hate me already, don't they?" Zuko asked softly as they walked off the peninsula and onto the tundra. She took his arm in hers.

"No, no, they don't. I promise. These people are my blood, my family, and my friends. They won't hurt you. They're just as nervous as you are," she assured him. She was about to comfort him further, but the words got stuck in her throat when she passed through the ice wall into the "village".

It was not the village of her youth. It was a prosperous city again. It bustled with life. She spotted a small water-bending class, trading booths, shops…it was wonderful.

"Magnificent, isn't it?" said her uncle Kosumi, stroking his great beard. He looked nothing like his brother, Hakoda.

"It is! I can't believe it!" she said in awe, tightening her grip on Zuko's arm. "I don't even recognize it!" She looked back at her brother; his jaw was close to scraping the ice. The young men surrounding him laughed.

"It was incredible!" said another uncle, Biyu's husband Pachua, "Once our cousins from the Northern Tribe came, and our own warriors returned, the great city was restored within two years! And there were lots of babies." Her other uncles chuckled. Zuko's face went from pale to beet-red.

"And your father returned, and all was well," added Aunt Hurit. Katara smiled. She followed her family up to an igloo that was at least three times the size of the one she'd been born in.

"Katara, we're definitely not in the South Pole anymore. Are you sure that we didn't misread the compass?" Sokka asked.

Once inside, stripped of parkas and heavy boots, Katara found herself forced onto a hide cushion and a bowl of stew shoved into her hands. It almost dropped out of her hands when a flap opened and her father came out of it.

"Dad!" she and her brother shouted at once. They jumped and rushed to him, in a many-armed embrace. She felt young, much younger.

As the days passed, Katara found herself spending more and more time with her young cousins, both old and new, and neglecting Zuko. He mostly seemed to spend his time in Hakoda's igloo, writing reports. Getting fed up, and realizing that it wasn't very economical to have him do that, she went to her brother.

"Okay, okay, let me get this straight!" Sokka said to her after she proposed her plan, "You want me to take Zuko hunting with our uncles!?"

"That would be it," she said. Sokka looked a little torn.

"I highly doubt that Zuko's ever been hunting in his life!"

"So? Doesn't mean that he couldn't carry equipment or other stuff."

"But this is a time-honored tradition of the warriors of the Southern Water Tribe!"

"He's fought in a time-honored tradition of the Fire Nation."

Sokka seemed to think on it for a moment, and then relented.

"Well, alright. But only 'cos you love him and stuff."

"You're the best, Sokka!" she cried, squeezing him tight.

Two days later, Zuko found himself bundled up in all the artic gear he'd collected, a spear shoved in his hand and a pack on his back.

"We're going tiger-seal hunting!" Sokka said to him, brimming with excitement. Zuko smiled weakly as Sokka's six intimidating uncles walked by, each armed to the teeth with spears, knives, and pikes. Yahto, Katara's mother's brother, alone carried a bow and arrows. He seemed about as possessive and obsessive over them as Sokka was over his boomerang.

"Come along, Fire Lord. We've got to go early, when they're sleepy. They're not called tiger-seals just because of their stripes," chided Wayra, who, Zuko gleaned, was Auntie Hurit's husband. Zuko had only seen him once, and that was with his young daughter, Chepi; at the time he'd seemed like a gentle giant. Now, he felt like a young boy, skinny and limp and helpless, before the huge, towering man instead of the great and mighty Fire Lord that he was. He gulped, braced himself, and followed his friend out into the blinding white tundra.

"Sokka, we have to see Etchemen first before we leave. He was patching a canoe for us," said Pachua.

"Etchemen!? I haven't seen him since my first canoe was built!" Sokka said excitedly. At the current moment, Zuko wasn't entirely sure if his friend was twenty-two or twelve. After a brief visit to the tribe canoe-maker, Zuko was positive that the hunt was underway. He watched Sokka stick his knife in the ice and listen for vibrations. He conferred briefly with his uncles and they all set off in an easterly direction.

"There's one! Look! A bull!" Sokka breathed out, pointing to it. A single tiger-seal, presumably male, stood on the ice. The uncles surrounded the snow bank and observed it. It was at this point that Zuko, forcibly reminded of the turtle ducks living in the pond at home, looked away. Later there was a fresh kill and much stamping around and back-slapping that he missed out on.

"Oh man! That was so exciting! I gotta take a leak now!" Sokka exclaimed, blue eyes filled with tears of laughter. Though Zuko could not imagine exposing himself in this sort of temperatures, his friend trundled off to relieve himself.

The silence was awkward. Zuko absently tried to dig hole in the snow, but didn't have much luck. He could here the uncles murmuring in a huddle. He ignored them.

"Hey, um, Fire Lord Zuko!" said Askook, Aunt Pamuya's husband, out of the blue. Zuko's head jerked up; really none of the uncles had spoken to him at all since he'd arrived.

"You can just call me Zuko!" he said, a spark of excitement and acceptance flaring through him.

"Well, Zuko, c'mere," said Kosumi. Zuko eagerly went to the huddle. "You see, it's tradition that on your first hunt here, you take a dip in the ocean. I think that it would also give you a bit of an initiation into the tribe."

"Really? Just a dunk in the water? That's it?"

The uncles exchanged glances.

"Well, you have to do it naked," said Tokala, who had just recently married Katara's Aunt Aiyana. He was weedy-looking man, Zuko thought, and seemed to snivel and whine at his wife constantly.

Zuko's eyes widened considerably. With some clothes on, he wouldn't have been concerned, but naked would take a considerable amount of energy to use his breath of fire to warm up. But tradition was tradition, and he didn't want to seem like a spoiled weakling here of all places, and in front of these people. He slowly began to strip off his clothes.

Once his loin-wrap was lying on top of the neat pile of clothes, he shook out, loosening up, and stared at the hole in the ice that Wayra had hacked open. The water might as well have been ice already.

Well, staring at it won't do anything, Zuko.

He jumped, just as he heard Sokka's yell. He looked upward, but he sank a little further down. There was an undertow.

Shit.

Quickly, he reached up, pulling himself up through the icy water. He guessed at being perhaps twelve feet underwater, a bit more than twice his own height. Kicking, splashing, twisting, he pulled, feeling his toes and fingers go completely numb. He was running out of air, he was sure. He tilted his head up, searching for the hole. Seeing Sokka's waver-y face, he reached up as far as he could under someone grasped his wrists. He gasped as pain shot down to his aching shoulders. Salty water flooded his mouth. He was dragged out onto a hide by Sokka, coughing and trying to catch his breath.

"Seriously! What were you guys playing at!? He's the Fire Lord, for the love of Tui and La!" Zuko heard Sokka shouting at his relatives. With his blood running so sluggishly, his skin a mottled blue, shivering with the cold that felt almost white-hot, he wasn't sure if he was conscious or not.

"Zuko!"

Ah, the voice of an angel. He cracked his eyes open to seen Katara's eyes, puddles that had leaked down from the sky, watching him. He vaguely registered that she was dressing him. Her hands felt somewhat stinging as they traversed his hips, pulling his two shirts over his head, and his leggings onto his legs.

He hacked out a few coughs, attempting to speak.

"Shush, dear heart, just use your breath of fire right now. We've got to get you inside," she said, placing a light kiss on his cheek that he only barely felt. "Auntie Ooljee, what else do you think we should do here?"

One of Katara's many aunts said, "I think we've done the best we can here. Let's get going. Yahto! If you had anything to do with this…!" Katara pulled his parka over his head as her aunt twisted the ear of her husband.

Sokka scooped Zuko up under the knees and around the back to carry him back to the village. Katara stayed near his head, wringing out his hair and rubbing his scalp to warm him. He burped up a small flame and felt immediately better.

Later that evening, in a small, super-heated igloo, Zuko allowed Katara to spoon feed him soup from under his cocoon of blankets and furs.

"Your relatives are as crazy as you are," he said, swallowing the soup, which was bitter and hot.

"Well, you were the one that jumped in. Just thank the spirits that you didn't get frostbitten and we didn't have to cut…anything off." She smiled somewhat suggestively.

"You'd still like me anyways. Jeez, I still don't think it's hot enough in here," he said, sitting up.

"Well, I'll put some more fuel in the fire," Katara said, leaning over to grab some fuel from the basket near the grate.

"Oh no, not like that. I'll bring the heat," he murmured, reaching forward, grabbing her around the waist and beginning to nibble at her neck.

"Puns are not sexy!" she cried, but her tone said something else.