We don't talk if I can help it. Some rice for breakfast, soup for lunch, tea if I feel up to making it. I leave these things by the two firebenders, and silence sees me off. One day, two days, and on the third Aang and I lounge on Appa's saddle to discuss it. We sit on the edge and sway our feet just so, making little pushes off the saddle with our legs.
I look straight ahead. My companion looks down at Zuko's edge of camp like the firebender were some mystery to puzzle out.
"See? He won't take our help," I say. "We should make him leave."
"His uncle's getting worse."
"Really? I don't know that. Maybe I would if I could take off the bandage for ten seconds!"
"Zuko didn't sleep last night."
Aang turns his eyes on me, his big, glowing eyes with the gray sky inside them. Sometimes I wish I could look out at the world through them, even just one time.
"Did he tell you?"
"No," he says. "I heard crying and thought maybe it was you."
I have a desire to jump straight off the saddle, grab Zuko by the shoulders, and rattle him around. Can I help you now? I'd yell, but that would only be returned with a fire to my face. I'd like to keep my hair loopies in one piece, too.
"I've never seen him cry," Aang says. His voice comes out as barely a whisper.
"Did he attack you?"
"I don't think he saw me. I just watched from a distance, but I don't think it would've mattered. He was trying to light a few fires and not really paying attention.
Clouds slide across the sun and blanket us in an unwelcome shade. "It's going to be even colder tonight," I say.
"I think so."
"Hey, Twinkletoes. Are you coming or what?" Toph calls. Earthbending training time, I guess. Aang's favorite.
"If we're sleeping together on Appa's tail again, they could have two sleeping bags. Or we could give them the blanket and use the bags ourselves."
I open my mouth to reply, but a rock sailing out of the sky at my head sends me toppling off the side of the saddle.
"Oops, sorry Sugar Queen. You were supposed to catch that!" Toph yells up.
I pick myself up off the dirt and suck on a scratch across my arm. Zuko ignores us. Very good at that, isn't he?
For the rest of the afternoon the sun glows behind a bank of clouds. They gather more tightly as evening approaches and bruise purple with the promise of rain. We decide on sleeping bags just in case it storms.
We all gather around the fire. Orange light paints the bags and our faces. Aang starts up snoring almost immediately, joined soon by Sokka and Toph and even Momo from his place on Appa. I snuggle into the bag and lie staring at the flat surface of the black sky. Then I roll over and watch ants march single-file past the fire. Their shadows stretch out across the dirt. Tired of that, I hold my arm across my eyes. Sleep, Katara, I tell myself. But still I can't.
What I can do is feel the force of Zuko's hate radiating towards me. It rolls in waves off his body because here I am warm and there he is somewhere far off, freezing. His fault, not mine. It's not like we're keeping him around here.
I push my head out of the sleeping back and sit up so I can see. They're lying there together in the dirt a good ways off. Two firebenders. Two men injured in different ways. I wonder how much hurt I don't see, the kind of hurt I can't heal with my bending. The past few nights brought moonlight which thinks it lights up everything, but maybe there's a secret place inside Zuko's heart that can't be touched.
Suddenly he sits up, too.
He's gathered up his own piles of wood. Now he sets them up in five stacks around his uncle and sets fire to them. Wind gusts one of the fires out, but he's quick to light it again. He stares at the fires and doesn't lie back down. A night wind flaps his one layer of clothing. Even from here, I can tell he's shaking.
I give myself a pep talk. Don't worry about him. He doesn't need your help. His uncle will be just fine. But that doesn't stop the reality that is Zuko freezing, and Iroh freezing, and me trembling even in the warmth of my sleeping bag because I think there's a secret curse on me. I can't turn my back on someone who needs help, even if they don't realize it themselves.
"I guess I'll just take Appa's tail," I mutter to the air as I drag my sleeping bag over. It scratches across the ground with the sound of claws digging into dirt. Our level of reluctance must be right about equal.
"Hey," I say to the hunched figure by the fires. "Get in this. You'll be warm."
Zuko crosses his arms over his chest. "I'm fine."
"Oh, that's nice. So you can say something other than 'leave, leave!'"
"We're both fine," he says, his voice low because of anger or the cold.
But they're not. Iroh's breathing is slow and shallow, unusually so even for sleep. He's shivering in his outfit and under the one blanket we had for the two firebenders to share. Older people are more susceptible to temperature shifts, especially to the cold. Without asking for permission, I squat and finger for Iroh's heartbeat on his wrist. There's barely anything, just some slow and prolonged beats that pulse against my skin.
"It could be hypothermia."
Zuko's hand brings fire up to my face. "He's fine! I can take care of us."
"You call this fine?" His eyes flash but I don't even care about the flames threatening to leap from his hand into my hair. "He's already sick! Listen—burn me, hurt me, I'm not leaving until he's warm."
Turning my back, I rub my hands back and forth, back and forth across Iroh's chest.
"Off!" Zuko brings his fist, the fire extinguished, across my face. I expect a light smack, the kind that would make me draw one stunned breath of warning. But his is a full-force blow that sends a slash of pain from my ear to my mouth. His foot comes at me, but I throw the full weight of my body at him. We roll in the dust and he grabs a handful of my hair. I kick, a grunt of exertion ripping from my lips. My foot catches him right in the chest. Zuko lets go and I run to Iroh's side, back to running his chest again for the warmth of friction.
Zuko's eyes burn with all the hatred he holds for me inside his whole body. "Get off my uncle!" he shouts.
I don't think of the metal taste of blood inside my mouth. I don't worry about the pain cutting at my face or wonder if Zuko would dare grab me by the feet and drag me off Iroh. My hands just go on rubbing. Right now, at this moment, there's no one in the world but this hurt man and me.
Zuko stands over me. "Katara," I hear him growl.
I press my hands hard against Iroh's chest. Back and forth. Back and forth.
"Get up!"
There'll be calluses on my fingers in the morning if I keep this up. Already my palms are tingling from rubbing against fabric.
"Get up."
I keep one hand on Iroh's chest but move the other between his sides and stomach and arms. "Heat some water," I instruct, opening up my water skin and handing it off.
A pause. I tense up, certain he's about to hit me again. But then there's the sound of water filling up a cup and bubbling with heat. "Here," Zuko says, passing me a teacup from dinner. I bend the water through Iroh's slightly open lips and make sure it hits the right passage in his throat. An involuntary swallow and the water's gone.
"It won't be enough," I say.
Zuko's hand on his uncle's arm. "There's the creek," he says, and I think I understand. You aren't usually supposed to get a freezing person wet, but I think there's one exception to the rule.
"Can you carry him?"
"Hurry up, go!"
I run ahead while Zuko follows at a jog, his uncle slung over one shoulder. There's a part of the creek where the skinny stream widens into a pool of water stretching several feet. I dam either end with a wall of ice. The creek bloats upstream and runs shallow on the other side. Zuko rests his uncle on the bank. His hands plunge into the pool I've sealed off and fill it with heat. Lazy bubbles surface up, popping at the interface of air and water.
I splash in. Without the moon I can't see clear down to the bottom, but my toes remind me there's a carpet of pebbles down there. Zuko wades in after me, the water up to his knees. We slide his uncle in slowly, down from the cold night into the warm pool until his whole body, except for his head, lies just beneath the surface. I focus on keeping the sides of the pool frozen despite the heat.
The air feels too thick to breathe until Iroh's cheeks start to lighten with pink.
"He's warming up."
Zuko nods. He's sitting in the water right in his clothing, making sure his uncle's face stays above water. I step over beside him and we don't speak, just wait there and soak in the long moments as the heat from the water rushes into all of us.
"I think he's fine. And I can't keep the ice up," I say.
He pushes Iroh out of the water and back onto the bank. I bend the water out of our clothes and off our bodies. His uncle shifts slightly, a more restless sleep.
I squat by Zuko and let the creek surge through the ice walls. "He might wake up tomorrow."
A nod. Not exactly 'thank-you,' but it's a start.
I touch his hand. "You're still freezing."
"I'm—"
"Get in the water. I can hold the ice for another minute."
He stares at my shoulder with his eyes narrowed almost to a closed position, but then he splashes back in. I reseal the ice along the sides of the pool. He lies down on his back in the two feet of warm water. Bubbles crack open across the surface all around him, sending ripples against his face and arms and legs. His hands open up to cup the night air in his palms.
From the shore he looks almost harmless, but I know about the dark place hidden inside his heart where even the moon can't touch him. It is the place he went to when he attacked me by the Spirit Oasis. It is the place that urged him to follow us all the way from the South Pole to capture the Avatar, the black scar that probably is concocting a plan in his mind right now to somehow spirit Aang out of this camp. Just as soon as his uncle is well, I bet. That's the plan. That has to be it, the only reason he's staying.
I slip a hand into the creek. The warm water laps against my fingers. He shouldn't be here. He shouldn't get confused and think that our hospitality in light of his uncle's injuries is some kind of invitation to stay.
My fingers come together into a fist. Ice crackles across the water to freeze the pool. A cry rips out of Zuko's throat, a yelp more feral than human and more extreme than the situation merits. He turns his eyes on me. He turns his eyes, bleeding with hate, on mine. But it is more than hate, I suddenly see. The fire coming down as a curtain between us holds more than anger. I leap away from the creek and the force of Zuko's fear comes at me in two fireballs. One catches the sleeve of my shirt and I slap it out with water. He grabs his uncle up and sends that glare at me again, the kind that warns me to stay away. Because if I was just some enemy of his before, now I am the enemy. The one who can make him afraid.
Could a little cold water do all that?
"Stay away from us," he says, turning to look at me one more time. And this time I see something else I don't understand at all.
In life there are moments you can never get over no matter how hard you try, like an image that gets inside your head and only becomes clearer instead of more obscure as time passes along. Zuko's eyes fastened on me, and nothing in them but an ocean of hurt, is one of them.
