AN: Thanks for reading! And reviewing! Especially for reviewing, a glorious practice which studs a writer's life with giddy inspiration to drive ever onward toward climactic awesomeness. ^.^

"What did you do?"

That was the question Katara was in the process of asking when she choked on a piece of some kind of leafy vegetable. She gulped from her water cup, shooting the firebender a glare that should, if there was any justice in the world, have singed.

But he just went on peering down his nose at her, his face a little crinkled in distaste. "I said, I think they know who you are. A guy from the Southern Water Tribe was talking to me today. Do you know him? Sokka?"

Katara threw back another gulp of water to give herself a second to think. The story that she and Sokka were cousins was widely known, but if she could keep Zuko from figuring out their connection for a little while, Sokka could be more helpful in getting rid of him. "No," she said at last. "He must be from one of the other villages." She looked down into her bowl as she said this. There were no other villages at the South Pole. All it would take was a glance at a map and Zuko would know she was lying.

But he only began picking through his bowl with the chopsticks he'd been given. His eyes were locked on someone across the room. When Katara followed his gaze, sure enough, there was Sokka. "He's up to something," Zuko said.

"Are you sure? Because, that guy doesn't really seem all that smart. I mean, look at him! Right?" Katara held out an arm toward where Sokka was twisting his pinky in his ear. He peered suspiciously at whatever had come out on his finger and then elbowed the guy next to him, apparently asking for a second opinion. Katara almost rolled her eyes. "Doesn't exactly scream mastermind."

"We still have to be careful. An idiot with a big mouth could do just as much damage."

"Who's this 'we' you're talking about? I'm not going to help you hide and spy on my own people."

"I'm not a spy," he said through his teeth. "And you'd better help me hide because the only thing I'm really going to want to do before they chop my head off is tell everyone I meet about you."

Katara glared at him and he glared right back. "Fine. You've expressed your concerns. Now would you go sit somewhere else? Sharing a room with you is more than enough together-time for me."

"You go sit somewhere else. There aren't any other empty tables."

"I was here first."

Zuko closed his chopsticks up in a fist and snatched up his meal. "Fine."

Katara watched him stalk across the room and sit abruptly at a table populated by a few Water Tribe guys. It was weird seeing how they reacted to him. Their eyes widened and they leaned away, like he was a bonfire and they suddenly found themselves sitting too close. At the same time, they nodded and offered him nervous smiles.

Katara scowled. Water Tribe guys never smiled at her. Letting out an annoyed little growl, she went back to eating and quickly emptied her bowl. If Zuko was here, maybe she could get a moment alone in the room. Maybe long enough to clean the last couple of days of grime off. She tried to make eye contact with Sokka, but he just kept goofing off with his little warrior buddies. Jeeka, however, caught her eye and made a gesture that she didn't understand. The confusion must have been evident on her face because he and his friends had a laugh as they watched her. Finally, Katara huffed and stalked out of the mess hall.

.

.

Zuko was hardly aware of the jittery boys at his table and their stilted conversation. He didn't notice how their eyes strayed toward him and then flitted away, or how they talked about inane, general topics. If he had noticed, he probably would have thought it was because of his intimidating skill in the training room. Even when he held back and used weird, unfamiliar weapons, he was still a stiff contender amongst these Water Tribe fighters. But he wasn't thinking about that now.

Katara was being totally unreasonable. She should be grateful that he wanted to help her avoid detection by that chuckley idiot, but instead she just brushed off his concerns. She seemed more preoccupied with keeping away from him than with the more immediate threat. It frustrated Zuko, because he needed her to trust him at least enough to let her guard down.

It also kind of hurt his feelings, but that was a response that Zuko would not even admit to himself.

So he ate his meal without saying a word and then followed the trickle of recruits down to the showers. There, his temper sluiced off with the hot spring water that earthbenders had redirected through ducts in the ceiling. It came down in a few well-spaced sprays through a wide room and drained off through a hole in the floor. An earthbending attendant waited at the doorway to open or close the spray openings as needed.

As he undressed in the adjoining cubby room and shoved his filthy clothes into one of the stone compartments, Zuko silently marveled at the ingenuity of these earthbenders. In the Fire Nation, things were done with steel pipes and coal power. There were showers like this, but they were entirely fabricated where this one relied almost entirely on manipulation of the natural world.

He had always been taught that the Fire Nation's way was the only reasonable way, but here was a perfectly viable alternative. The knowledge settled somewhere at the back of his mind as he shut his eyes under one of the sprays and let the water sting against him.

It hurt a little - the reservoir above the shower room was nearly full so the water pressure was higher than was entirely comfortable - but it was a biting, enticing, teasing kind of pain. It beat against Zuko's shoulders and back and chest with a driving power that forced him to stop and just endure it for a moment. It almost remind him…

Guys laughed and chatted around him, though, and he soon scrubbed down with a sliver of the coarse soap that was provided and returned to the cubby room. The attendant handed him a stiff towel and the service seemed so familiar and normal that Zuko didn't so much as blink.

"Nice, right?"

At his cubby of dirty clothes, Zuko turned to find Sokka following him at a respectful distance with his own towel wrapped around his waist. Zuko didn't slow the quick motions of toweling the water from his skin. "Sure."

"What, you aren't impressed?"

"I didn't say that," Zuko said, frowning at the other guy.

Sokka met his gaze a little disbelievingly for a second, then shrugged and peered up at the ceiling as he started drying himself. "Man, when I got here, this was probably the most mind-blowing thing I had ever seen. All this hot water… and the genius system… I could never have imagined anything like this at the South Pole."

"I can see why," Zuko muttered, unthinkingly. He jerked straight. "I mean, I've never been there. I just mean it makes sense. That you would think that."

Sokka nodded good-naturedly and began wiping water off his own narrow chest and shoulders. "You're not thinking of putting those Earth Kingdom clothes back on, are you? They smell pretty ripe."

"I didn't exactly come here with luggage." He said it with some heat, hoping the guy would get lost again.

But Sokka was unfazed. "The attendants do our laundry, too. It's pretty great - and they don't complain like my sister does. There are clean clothes in that closet, right over there." He pointed, smiling a pleasant smile. "You can even get into your own blues."

"Oh." Zuko peered down and away. He felt oddly ashamed in the face of this apparent courtesy.

"So where are you from?" Sokka asked, still not going away.

"Uh," Zuko said, then bent forward to hide his face and dry his legs. "My family lived in a little village. On the sea, to the west of here. You wouldn't have heard of it."

"Got any siblings?"

Zuko heaved a sigh. "A sister. I'm gonna…" He turned toward the closet Sokka had indicated but before he could hurry off, the other guy was right there beside him.

"Oh man! Me too. Aren't they just… awful?"

"Yeah," Zuko said, even though Sokka's put-upon smile suggested that his definition of awful was totally different from his. Zuko's sister had traveled for days, maybe weeks to meet up with his ship in exile and smugly tell him about Mai's beautiful wedding. Somehow, he didn't imagine Sokka's sister was cut of the same cloth.

"Mine is sixteen. How old is yours?"

"The same." Zuko pulled the closet open and sifted through a few tidily-folded tunics, reading the writing on the bottoms of shelves that indicated general sizes. There were even some shoes and boots arranged neatly in the floor. Zuko picked out some stuff that would probably work and was back at his cubby, climbing into his new loincloth when Sokka caught up to him.

"You might keep that to yourself, about your sister," he said quietly as he threw his clothes on with a kind of reckless ease. "These Northern guys take strategic marriage pretty seriously. With your fighting skills, a lot of them would probably marry her just to have you for a brother-in-law so they could ask for favors later."

Zuko froze with one leg in his pants. "Marry her?"

"Yeah," Sokka said carelessly as he clawed his way into a new undershirt. "And they'll bug you about it, too. Ask you for permission for the honor of courting your sister like she's a-"

"She would kill me."

"Right?" Sokka tugged down the shirt and smiled at Zuko's genuinely horrified expression. "You seem like a sensible big brother, Li. I think we're going to get along just fine."

Zuko pulled on his shirt and rolled his eyes under the fabric. Sokka just kept talking. He went on and on about training and weapons and hunting. It was only when Zuko was tying Katara's necklace back around his wrist that a pause came in the jabbering.

"Nice betrothal necklace," Sokka said in an odd tone. "I didn't know you were married."

"What?"

Sokka pointed at the necklace. "That's the sort of carving a Northern guy gives the girl he's betrothed to." When Zuko's eyes widened, he went on. "Some wives send their husbands off to war with their betrothal necklaces for good luck. I thought that was why you had that one."

Zuko blinked. "Oh," he said. "No. It's my, um, mother's."

"Oh! Yeah," Sokka said, tilting his head. "It does have a real 'mom' vibe to it…." A really weird look came over his face. "Listen, I've gotta run, stuff to do, you know. Catch you later!"

And with that, he grabbed his pants and dashed out of the cubby room, leaving Zuko to dispose of his old clothes and put on his new Water Tribe boots in peace.

.

.

Katara was squeezing the last of the soapy water out of her bindings when Sokka burst through the curtain, wide-eyed and breathing hard from running. "That guy. Li. Mom's necklace? What - he do?"

Katara frowned at him and bent clean water through the fabric to be sure she got all the soap. She had to hurry if she wanted to be done before Zuko got back. "His name isn't Li and he's exactly as Water Tribe as the Fire Lord."

She explained hurriedly about Zuko, how he'd come to the village and caught up to her in the islands and, apparently, followed her here. "I don't know how he's planning to get me out of here, but he's going to try sometime and we have to get rid of him before that happens," she said as she drew the last of the water from the long strip of fabric.

Sokka had come to kneel beside her and he kept an aching, desperate look locked on her. "Katara, tell me this guy hasn't been… you know… getting handsy or anything."

Katara huffed and dropped her hands hard in her lap. "That's it? I tell you he wants to abduct me and take me to the Fire Nation and you're worried that he's copping feels?"

"Well the abduction thing is easy to solve! Just tell him you're not the Avatar!"

"And just let him chase Aang? No, Sokka. Aang is way too important. It's better for the world if Zuko stays trapped here for now."

"Yeah, right here. With you. Every night." Sokka flailed at the two bedrolls, just feet apart. "Practically spooning!"

Katara took a breath for patience and put her hand on her brother's shoulder. "He's not… totally creepy, Sokka. He says he's not going to do anything to me. Except try to capture me and take me to the Fire Nation. It's a little crazy, but I actually kind of believe him. So we need to focus on the real problem here, alright?"

Sokka watched her a moment longer, then shut his eyes. "Alright. You know what's best for your own safety." He looked at her again, and his expression was grim. "Now, when you say 'get rid of him,' what do you mean exactly?"

Katara blinked, and frowned. "I don't want to resort to murder but I'm not sure what else we can do. He's too strong for us to hold captive and he'll tell everyone about me the first chance he gets. I was kind of hoping you'd have an idea."

Sokka only shook his head. "Just matching his combat skills is going to be nearly impossible, Katara. From what I saw in the training room today, we'll be lucky if we can subdue him with just the two of us. We might have to wait to make our move until Dad comes back."

"That's weeks from now, Sokka. What if he figures out his plan first?"

"I don't know."

They sat together for a moment, and then Sokka grabbed her hand from her lap.

"I should go. He'll be here any minute."

Katara squeezed his hand and then he was gone, leaving the curtain swaying in his wake. They were in big trouble. It felt better to have Sokka in on this situation with her, but the fact that he didn't have any better ideas about how they could deal with it was not reassuring.

Waiting for Hakoda to return was a big risk, and it meant living with Zuko for the better part of a month. And it also meant needing her father's help the minute he arrived, which she didn't like for a variety of reasons. Some of the problem was her pride, but more of it was the gnawing certainty that, whatever delusions Sokka still held, they would have to deal with this problem like they had dealt with all their problems over the last four years - without him.

It would be so much better if she and Sokka could just beat Zuko on their own and somehow get rid of him. There had to be some way they could get an edge on him, surprise him so that he wouldn't see the attack coming.

Katara drew a deep breath and bunched her fingers through the dry bindings in her lap.

.

.

Zuko liked Water Tribe boots a lot better than Earth Kingdom boots. They were more flexible than Fire Nation boots, too, so he was quieter than ever as he climbed the stairs and walked the stone walkways. He crossed paths with Sokka on the way to the barracks and raised a hand in grudging salute.

Sokka flung his arms wide. There was a weirdly intense smile on his face. "Li, buddy. You look just great in blue. Just… great."

Zuko made a mild, unhappy sound and continued on to his doorway. He pushed the curtain aside and stepped through.

And stopped.

And stared at the slim back of the girl kneeling at the far end of the room. There were a few loops of her bindings around her chest already, and the white cloth cut brightly across her back beneath her darker shoulder blades. Her neck stretched long and slender above, even as she bent her head to her task, and the back of her head was weirdly attractive where the short growth concealed almost nothing. Her strong, slender arms stretched and folded and twisted to reach as she spooled the bandage around her torso. Below, her sides cut in to a trim, hard waist and then thickened outward into a suggestion of her hips before disappearing beneath blue trousers.

But it was the channel down the center of her back that really drew the eye. Zuko found himself wanting to run his thumb along it, just to feel if it would be as smooth and cool as he imagined.

Katara glanced over her shoulder suddenly and gave a tiny yelp. "Shut that!"

Realizing he had been holding the curtain open, Zuko shoved it back into order. And then stood across the tiny room from the only shirtless girl he had ever encountered.

She was still watching him, frowning. "You're still here," she said, almost like a question, but more scathing.

"I, uh… Right." Of course he was supposed to leave. He knew that. He had known that. He turned to go. "I'll be outside."

"Fine. Go there."

Scowling again, Zuko went. He crossed the walkway and stood with his hands fisted around the rail, peering across the cylindrical atrium. Men were milling about everywhere with the weary saunter of evening. From this vantage point, Zuko could see down to the lower levels where the servants were carting the last dishes from the mess hall to the kitchens, and some tousled recruits came and went from the showers.

He had pointedly not thought about Katara in the showers, though the water had brought her to mind. (The stinging, battering quality of it, really.) It hadn't occurred to him that she couldn't use that facility, but it occurred to him now, along with a mental image of soap bubbles trailing down her spine.

Zuko shut his eyes hard and then opened them again to glare across the atrium some more. He needed to stay focused if he was going to gain the Avatar's trust and somehow get her out of here. And gaining her trust meant not doing anything she would find 'creepy,' like lingering in the room while she was trying to put her clothes on or staring at her skin.

Or thinking about how, if he had left the showers just a few minutes earlier, he might have walked in before she had even started putting those bandages back on.

This was no good. He had to do something. A day of training with the Water Tribe recruits was not enough to tire him like a day of firebending practice. Maybe he could sneak down to visit Iroh tonight. He would have to wait until things quieted. There were too many people now.

At just that moment, Zuko spotted Jeeka and his friends emerging from the showers. It was a long distance, but Jeeka had a particularly aggressive stride that was easy to recognize and his friend, Attuk, was especially big. From sparring that day, Zuko had also learned that Jeeka tended to strike at perceived weak points with special ferocity. It had only taken a few vicious stabs at Zuko's left side to prove that his scarred eye was undamaged, and the third strike had ended with the toothy guy on the floor.

Striking weak points was a tactic that Azula had always used with a lot more finesse, but where she did it to ensure efficient victory, Jeeka seemed to take an inordinate amount of satisfaction. If he was targeting Katara, it was because he thought she was weak.

Figuring she had probably had enough time now, Zuko peeked back into the room before ducking inside. She lay on her pallet, facing the wall. Was she pretending to be asleep? Zuko rolled his eyes and tried not to feel guilty.

"You have to fight Jeeka," he said. It was the safest thing to say, and he had to say something.

Katara sat up on her elbows so she could fix him with her glare. "What?"

Zuko sat on his pallet across from her and she sat up to face him at his level. "He's a bully, and he's paying way too much attention to you. It would be too easy for him to figure this out."

She crossed her arms over her chest. "Look, I know you think you're helping to keep my secret or whatever, but I'm not going to just take the Fire Nation solution and pick a fight with someone I should really be getting along with."

"It's not the Fire Nation solution," Zuko said, gritting his teeth. "It's a guy thing." Katara barked out a laugh but he only kept going. "Look, for girls, maybe making friends is as easy as being nice to people, but for guys, it's more complicated. There's a pecking order. If you aren't fighting for a place in it, other guys think it's because you aren't strong enough to win."

Katara stared at him for a moment, mouth tugging down in distaste. "That's moronic."

"Yeah, it is. But if you want to keep this up, you're going to have to play along."

She narrowed her eyes at him and Zuko braced himself for the argument he felt coming on. Finally, she tipped her head back, scrutinizing him. "How did you learn about any of this stuff?"

Zuko jerked back, then glowered. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Katara only shrugged, impassive. "I just thought a prince would be above jockeying with other boys for position and wrestling in schoolyards."

"I was! I am!"

She only blinked at him, a dry look on her face. Zuko could just envision the ugly picture she was composing behind those chilly blue eyes, a spoiled prince who thought he was better than everyone but was really no more than a coward hiding under a crown. It struck too close to his own fears, the shame of his banishment. Maybe that was why he said what he said next.

"I went to an academy as a kid so I saw it happening, but I was never included in any of that stuff - and yeah, it was partly because of who I was, but it was also because my mother taught me that instilling fear and conflict was the wrong way to gain respect."

A weird look came over her face, and Zuko stiffened, raising his chin. He hadn't meant to say that. He hadn't even thought about it in the past five years, largely because he had unconsciously abandoned that philosophy when he left the Fire Nation. His father, after all, was living proof of the power to be gained through fear and domination, while his mother…

But Zuko didn't want to think about that. He couldn't. He forged on instead, the way he always did. "The point is that you don't have a position of power to fall back on. For whatever reason, Jeeka's taken an interest in you and he's going to keep pushing until he finds some way to break you, so you need to strike first."

Katara was still watching him, but the weird look had faded. "If your mother taught you that," she said, like she didn't believe him and hadn't even been listening to the rest of what he'd said, "why do you put so much energy into being intimidating all the time?"

Many feelings were building up in Zuko's chest; frustration that she pushed him back to this topic he couldn't bear to think about, and hurt that she wouldn't listen to him when he was trying to help her, and confusion, because he certainly did not put energy into being intimidating. It just happened. In the world his father had created, all the complex feelings rumbling through Zuko had only one viable form of expression. Helplessness and sorrow and uncertainty were weak, but rage… rage was strong.

Zuko unthinkingly leaned toward the waterbender, fisting his hands on his thighs. His glare was murderous, though he didn't really know it. Katara leaned back, eyes widening as he neared.

"She was wrong," he said.

He held her stare for a moment, then rose easily to his feet and stalked out of the room.

.

.

Katara drew a deep breath as the curtain stilled and let it out in a rush.

She wasn't totally sure what had just happened there, why Zuko had shifted from what she was starting to think was base-level anger into maximum overdrive, but she wasn't going to let his emotional problems upset her. She wasn't going to let his angst wreck her calm. It was like Pakku had said; a master waterbender let thoughts and feelings come and then allowed them to go.

So Katara shut her eyes and let the outrage and fear and fury come for a moment. He had no right to stare her down like that. He had no right to tell her what to do. And he certainly didn't have any right to make her wonder if he was actually a decent human being somewhere under all the snarling and mixed messages. She let these thoughts come, and then she let them go. Gritted her teeth, and just… really let them go.

But an image was in her head now, and it was hard to let that go as quickly as it came - because Katara believed on a basic level that everyone loved their mother the way that she loved hers. She pictured a kid-Zuko listening to a wise queen in some red palace. Only the kid-Zuko was so hard to fathom. In her mind, he was a tiny adult, scarred and furious and commanding.

Then she remembered how he had stood so dumb-struck in the doorway when he walked in on her before, how he had stuttered, so obviously nervous. She remembered his face, split between the permanent glower of his scar and the up-tilted brow, the wide eye, his mouth open just a little. Maybe he had been a shy kid.

Gran-gran had always told her that you could tell a lot about a man by how he reacts to a pretty girl. Since Katara hadn't had any men around to observe (Sokka didn't count, obviously) when she started getting interested in men, she had gulped down Gran-gran's stories and guidelines. A man who seemed confident when faced with a pretty girl, Gran-gran had said, was probably used to pretty girls and should be dealt with carefully. A man who seemed afraid was probably hiding something. A man who seemed stupid probably hadn't spent a lot of time around girls. Or he might just be stupid.

Katara knew that Zuko was not stupid, but she was pretty sure from all his blushing and stammering and awkwardness that he wasn't used to being around girls. Letting him catch her rewrapping her bindings had been a sort of test. She could have done it under an open shirt instead of letting him get an eyeful, but then she wouldn't have been certain. Now she was certain.

Zuko wasn't just uncomfortable that she was a girl. He thought she was a pretty girl. And that was a mighty weapon in her favor.

A sort of plan was forming in Katara's mind, an idea that might distract Zuko enough to keep him from figuring out how to get her out of the rebel base and maybe even enough for her and Sokka to get rid of him altogether. Whatever that meant, exactly.

It was so dangerous, though. He seemed to be pretty respectful of the boundaries she drew now, but if she pushed him, would that restraint last? Or would he have one of these furious moments and do something awful?

Katara drew another breath and let it wash away her fear and worry as it passed out her lips. They returned again, like foam riding waves up the sand, but she knew what she had to do. She couldn't beat him in combat, not yet, but she was growing stronger every day. Until she achieved mastery of her element, she would find another way to do what needed to be done.

Katara lay back on her pallet and stared at the shadows on the ceiling, trying to make sense of the jagged shapes as she waited for Zuko to return.