Chapter 7: Descent

Zuko collapses.

A couple of people turn to catch him, including Hakoda, but most eyes remain trained on Katara. She turns to look around at the crowd, and then down at her trembling hands.

Did I just waterbend?

She takes a step towards Zuko to check on him, but Sokka is suddenly in front of her, wrapping his arm around her shoulders and ushering her away.

"I need to - "

"Later," he tells her urgently. He marches her away from the crowd, his body shielding them from her view - or rather, her from theirs. They make it halfway towards the cluster of huts where she and Sokka stay before she spins around to face him. The crowd is out of their sight and they stand by the shore. Distantly, the blinding light throbs in the sky.

"Sokka, I need you to do something," Katara says. She steps forward and peers up at his face urgently. "Something's wrong. Someone's in danger."

"I know," Sokka says. "You are. The Fire Nation is probably coming after you. You need to hide."

Katara grips his sleeve. "No, listen to me. Someone out there is in trouble, and I need you to find him."

"What are you talking about? Where the hell did you learn to waterbend? And like that?" He points to the glowing sky.

Katara recognises Sokka's steadily-mounting anger in the same way she does an imminent snowstorm, but the throbbing light illuminating his glowering face instills in her a different type of urgency to run. The precious few seconds she has cannot be dwindled away with justifications; she knows that someone will be after them soon enough. To this end, she opts for the truth, or as much as she can explain without appearing unhinged.

"There is someone at the bottom of that light who's probably waking up right now. You need to find him and hide him. There are people who will come after him, and you cannot let him be caught."

"Katara, you must be really sick - "

"I know I've been acting strangely recently, and there's a reason for that, and you'll see the reason at the bottom of the glowing light. I've not given you much reason to trust me, but... please. Trust me now."

Sokka stares at her, frowning, before gently putting his hand on top of her head, a gesture that rings with familiarity across her lifetimes. Katara smiles back at him, relieved.

"You need to go right now, and I'll come find you soon."

"You'll be okay?" her brother asks.

She nods, and he walks towards the shore to where a lone kayak and paddle await him. She watches as he hops on the kayak and paddles towards the waning light. By the time Hakoda comes up to Katara, the light has all but disappeared, and Sokka's silhouette is barely visible.

Zuko is hoisted on his back, and Hakoda gestures towards her hut with his head. "Come with me," he says.

She follows her father and watches as he lays Zuko down on her cot. They've regressed back to a couple of days ago, when Zuko was unconscious here and her parents were disappointed in her.

She swallows, unable to meet her father's eyes, and watches as Zuko sweats steadily under her furs. The silence stretches on, interrupted only by the sound of Zuko's hitched breathing. The lamp Hakoda has kept beside her cot flickers in harmony with Zuko's breaths, and the shadows on his scar grow and fade with each shuddering breath he takes. Hakoda finally addresses her.

"You need to explain what's going on. Now."

"There was a scroll. In the library at school, inside one of the shelves. It talks about how to waterbend quickly." Katara shrugs, still unable to look at her father. "I tried it."

"Why?" Hakoda asks her, and she doesn't know how to answer the question because she doesn't know the answer herself. She doesn't know why she risked everything - the trust of her tribe, the relatively peaceful quiescence they has sequestered themselves in, the respect of her own family - just to traipse around a library with the son of the Phoenix King. But despite not having any experiences with Azula's pink acrobat in this life, Katara remembers only all too well the feeling of an empty horror that threatened to immolate her when her bending was robbed from her. Maybe, in this life, she's never bent properly before, but Katara needs it now in the same way she needs to look in the mirror and see blue eyes.

Existentially, she doesn't know what makes Katara herself in this lifetime. Her relationships with her family are different and the path she's taken is nearly unrecognisable. But without her bending, Katara can never be herself; this much, she is sure of. Then, the answer to her father's question can only be answered in one way:

"I just need to bend."

Hakoda doesn't outright reject her answer, but Katara knows in the sudden shift from deliberate to tentative silence that he's not entirely convinced by her answer. He moves on, though.

"Why did Lee faint?"

"I don't know." She doesn't. They watch him for a bit longer.

"What was that white light?" Hakoda says finally, and it's clear that he's been gearing up to this question.

What way out does Katara have? "The Avatar."

"What?"

Katara shrinks further into herself, unable, and maybe in some dark recess of her mind, unwilling to explain how she knows. She just shrugs.

"These are tall tales you're spinning, Katara."

Now, Katara turns to face him. "Are you calling me a liar?"

"I don't know what to call you, anymore." He gets up and leaves.

Traveling with the Avatar in her previous life had robbed her of most luxuries. She was lucky enough if she was able to find a stream to bathe in, and it was a rare treat to be able to sleep on a real bed. She had to deal with Toph's smelly feet and Sokka's constant complaining. And the usual enemies, of course. One of the few things she was able to revel in, however, was the moral high ground, the purity of purpose, the sense that what they were doing was right.

This had been neatly stolen from her since she first arrived in this new world. Her ability to bend and take care of Aang has now been put in fierce juxtaposition with her family's trust in her and the peace of her tribe, and she had somehow prioritised the former. She worries that the frayed edges of her relationship with her family may never be smoothed out again.

To this end, she needs Sokka to return with Aang, just to show that she hasn't been lying. Katara blinks tears away at her father's heavy words. At the same time, she needs to keep Zuko away from the white light, and then away from Aang somehow. And then... she'll think of and then when the time comes, when Sokka is back on her side and they can plot and scheme just like they used to in another life.

So when Kya comes into the hut and tells her, "you need to hide," Katara readily agrees. Kya qualifies her statement soon after, frowning down at her daughter. "The Fire Nation is probably looking for a waterbender, and we don't want them to find you. Or Lee - nobody is technically allowed on or off this island without the Fire Nation's knowledge."

This is news to Katara, but she is wiser than her baser instincts to question her angry mother. Which is how she finds herself creeping under her Gran Gran's floorboards as a Water Tribe boy carries Zuko in. He plops Zuko down on a small cot, wipes his forehead with the back of his hand, and smiles at them.

"Thank you," Kya says gently. The boy nods.

Kya turns back to her. "Ground rules. We wait until the next time the Fire Nation docks. If they suspect anything, they'll do a sweep of the area. Once they don't find anything and leave, then, and only then, can you come out. We'll give you food and water here."

"Wait, aren't you staying here with me?" Katara asks her mother.

Gran Gran shakes her head. "It'll be too suspicious if the Chief's Wife is missing. We'll be fine."

"Besides," Kya adds, "I think you need some time to think about what you've done."

Maybe she does. The floorboards look flimsy enough to break through if anything were to happen, anyway. Wanting to keep the peace with her family while having a ready excuse to keep a watchful eye on Zuko, she agrees.

They leave.

Katara spends some time examining the Water Tribe lore her grandmother has stored down here, and then moves on to looking at the old pots and furs stuffed in different sections of the room, before spending an inordinate amount of time staring at her knees.

Mercifully, Zuko decides to wake up just when she started getting bored.

"Hi," she tells him, and he turns to look at her dimly. "You, uh... fainted."

Zuko turns slightly pink and scowls up at the ceiling. "Where are we?"

"In my Gran Gran's basement."

He turns to her. "Why?"

"They caught me bending." She picks at deer thread unravelling from one of the furs by her feet. "They think the Fire Nation is coming after me. And you're a refugee, technically, so..."

"Right." Zuko sits up, wincing and touching his head. He flips his palm upwards and breathes, then closes it into a fist when a flame doesn't appear. "What do you think happened?"

"I don't know," she shrugs. "I got really dizzy and feverish and it felt like there was all this energy, then something just sparked in me and I could bend."

"Same," he replies, "except, I... you know."

"Yeah," she sighs. "I had a dream a few nights ago. About La, I guess. He's the Ocean Spirit - "

"I know," Zuko interrupts.

"Do you?" She peers at him.

"Yeah, I recognised his name in one of the scrolls from the library."

She stares at him in wonder. "I didn't know you could read our text."

He fiddles with the edge of his furs and mumbles, "only a little."

She shakes her head a little, the incongruence of the Zukos of her two lives widening. "Anyway," she continues, "I had a dream about La and I think he was warning me against bending like this."

"Do you think that's why I fainted?" he asks.

"I really don't know."

They lapse into silence, whiling away time and caught in their own thoughts. With only Zuko for company, her stoic anger for him begins cracking under the weight of her curiosity about his life.

"Are you actually a refugee?" is the first thing she wants to know.

He glances at her from the corner of his eye. "Yes."

"How did you end up here?"

"Mind your own business," he tells her, but Katara's strengths don't include minding her own business. She presses forward.

"You said that we need to learn to trust each other for this to work!"

He sighs. "I was on the run in Ba Sing Se. I'm a wanted man. Happy?"

"By the Dai Li?"

He gives her a sharp look. "No... how do you know about them?"

Katara flushes. "How do you know about them?"

"Touché."

"Are you alone?" is what she asks next, by which she means where is Iroh?

"Yes," he says, and he refuses to elaborate. Without knowing how to tactfully rephrase the question, she moves on.

"Why are you on the run?"

"Enough," he says, holding up a finger. "My turn. How do you really know who I am?"

"W-what?"

"Don't think I don't notice. You said I was famous, which is how you knew who I was, but nobody else in the village recognises me. How do you know me?" He leans towards her, eyeing her levelly as he rests his forearms on his thighs and loosely links his hands.

Katara prays for a tale as convincing as the one Aang told the Zhang and Gan Jin. "Fine, I read about you in one of the scrolls on the Fire Nation - "

"Why? Light reading?"

"No - "

"What's even stranger is that you're paranoid. Like, really paranoid."

"Your people are invading my home!"

"You're actively lying to your family about my identity. None of them broke into your library to steal scrolls with me. Why?"

"It's not unreasonable to want to know how to bend - "

"You know what I think?" he interrupts again, leaning forwards even more and surveying her. His eyes fall into his hair and she catches gold through the curtain of black. "I think something happened to you that's made you like this. Something with the Fire Nation. And given that nothing strange really happens on this iceberg and nobody else from your little tribe is acting like you, nobody else knows."

Katara begrudges that he's not as stupid as she had gleefully spent her time believing.

"Isn't it enough to just hate the Fire Nation?" she mutters, looking away from him and swallowing.

"Maybe," he allows, "but this feels personal."

Katara would like very much to water whip him into another century. Or herself. Either works. Before she can open her mouth to stammer out an excuse, someone knocks at the floorboards, and then she hears the creaking of the floorboards shifting. A face peers down at them, and Katara recognises it as the boy who helped carry Zuko down here.

Katara props up a ladder against the neat, rectangular hole in her Gran Gran's floor, and the boy lowers himself down, gripping the rungs of the ladder with one hand and holding food in another. He reaches them and hands it over to Katara. Next to her, Zuko watches the boy, tense and untrusting.

"Thank you," Katara smiles at him.

He smiles back and nods. He stares at her for a second, and Zuko clears his throat. The boy blushes.

"What's your name?" Katara asks him gently. "I must have seen you around before."

He cups his palms together before folding them, then touches his forehead with a fist.

He's deaf, Katara realises with a start. "Saket?"

The boy nods, and Zuko gets up to stand beside her, crossing his arms.

Katara reaches forward and touches Saket's arm. Both Saket and Zuko stare at it. "Saket, I've been waiting to meet you! I'm so glad you're here - I have so many questions for you - are you a waterbender?"

Saket shakes his head, and Katara withdraws her hand disappointedly. Is she actually the last waterbender of the Southern Water Tribe? Her hand reaches up on instinct and she touches her bare neck.

"Do you know what happened to all the other waterbenders?" she asks him, and Saket turns to look at Zuko.

"Lee's harmless," Katara encourages, while Zuko scowls.

Saket flattens his left palm and undulates his other hand on top.

"Water?" Katara guesses, and Saket nods. Next, he flattens both palms together so that the tips of his fingers are facing her, and then pulls his knuckles away so that only the heel of his hands and the tips of his fingers are touching. He extends his arm out towards her, and Katara stares blankly at it.

"Shark? No, pot?"

Saket shakes his head, and then mimes water again.

"Boat," Zuko says, and the boy nods. "They've taken away the waterbenders."

Katara forgets to breathe for a second. "Where?" she asks Saket urgently, who flattens a palm and cups his other hand over it. He clenches both fists before expanding them and repeating the motion rapidly.

Neither Zuko nor Katara can guess what he's saying, but when Saket finally draws his index finger over his throat, Katara understands immediately.

"What happened to you, Saket?" Katara asks, heart somewhere at her feet.

At this, Saket shakes his head again, frightened, before he touches his hip and then mimes drinking water.

"Poison?" Katara asks, and Saket repeats the action before moving his hands in a wide arc.

"What is it? Are you trying to waterbend?"

Saket keeps doing the same thing, increasingly distressed, before dropping his head into his hands and shaking it.

"What is it?" Katara asks. "Where are the waterbenders?" She takes a step towards him.

Nothing more will come out of Saket, and he doesn't remove his face from his hands. She reaches forwards to shake him, and he leaps back, startled.

"Tell me!" she demands, and suddenly Zuko drops a heavy hand on her shoulder.

"Stop," he says, as Saket scurries up and out. The floorboards shift back into place and she feels the heat of Zuko's hand seep through her parka.

She knocks his hand away and spins around to face him, breathing heavily. "What did you do that for?"

"You were scaring him," he tells her, stepping back from her and furrowing his brows. "Clearly, he wasn't able to tell us about it."

She looks up at him as the enormity of what Saket mimed hits her. Her breath begins to come out unsteadily and her eyes shift between both of his, one widened slightly in shock and the other slanted and surveying.

"Do you think he meant... when he ran his finger across his throat..." She cuts off, her voice catching. He doesn't reply, but keeps watching her, clearly unsure. His silence is enough of an answer.

"Do you think I'm the last waterbender of my tribe?" she finally asks him after a few minutes of silence. A few tears work themselves free.

"I'm sorry," he tells her, a little hopelessly, raising an arm to reach for her and then dropping it back to his side. She nods, suddenly thinking about the last time she was vulnerable around him, and sits in the corner. She wipes her eyes with the back of her hands and then picks up a scroll, pretending to read it.

She can feel Zuko watching her before he sighs and flops back down on to the cot. They remain in silence as Katara ponders whether this world is better or worse than the one she left behind.

Nighttime brings with it its own challenges. Katara feels numb, having spent most of her energy trying not to cry in front of Zuko. Now, they stand side-by-side, examining the single cot in the room.

"You take it," Zuko offers. "I can sleep on some other furs."

"I don't mind," Katara tells him perfunctorily, emotionally drained. Zuko shakes his head and insists, so Katara crawls into the furs and inhales deeply. It smells like her Gran Gran. She wonders, not for the first time today, where Sokka is. She closes her eyes and focuses on evening out her breathing, hoping that a new dawn brings will diminish the splintering inside her. She flips this way and that, sometimes too hot and sometimes too cold in the basement. She huffs, staring at the ceiling.

"Waterbender," Zuko says to her, irritated, voice slightly rough with sleep.

"Katara," she corrects.

"... Go to sleep."

"I can't," she tells him, voice also raising in annoyance. "How do you expect me to sleep? Especially in the same room as you?"

He sighs deeply, turning to his side to face her. The two gold points of his eyes dance in her vision. "Do you want me to tell you a story?"

"A story? I'm not twelve!"

He raises the hand that's not tucked under his arm in a placating motion. "Sorry! I just... my mother used to tell me stories, whenever I couldn't sleep."

She gives that topic a wide berth, the enormity of him mentioning his mother not lost on her. "Fine." She looks down at him, expectant.

He looks at her again, mouth slackening for a second, before he smiles slightly. "Once, there were two people called Ran and Shao. Ran was a girl and she always wore blue. Shao was a boy and he wore red."

Despite herself, Katara giggles. Zuko pauses, looking at her. The corner of his mouth tips upwards.

"Sorry," she whispers, "continue."

"Ran and Shao were deeply in love, but a lot of people disapproved of it. People told Shao that Ran only loved him because of his wealth, and they told Ran that Shao only loved her because of her beauty. Really, they were all jealous of their love. One day, they planned to get married, but the marriage was blocked by the town minister's son, who was in love with Ran.

'Prove to me that you really love each other,' the minster's son demanded.

'How?' Ran and Shao asked.

'Give up your wealth and your beauty, and then let's see if you still are in love.'

And they did. Shao moved out of his home and gave away all his possessions, including his slippers, to the minister's son. Ran stood in the town square soon after and cut her hair off. Together, they went up to the minister's son, who still refused.

'Your love must prove to be pure,' he said to them, and pointed to a fire. He said, 'walk through the fire and if you come out the other side, then you can get married.' So they did, holding on to each other and walking through the fire."

"What happened to them?" she whispers, burrowing into the furs deeper and blinking at him sleepily.

"They did, and they got married."

She squints at him. "They died, didn't they?"

He shrugs with one shoulder, still half-smiling at her. "Yeah, but then they became dragons because their love was so pure, and now they're the guardians of the eternal flame."

"That's a cool story, Zuko," Katara yawns.

"Thanks... Katara."

"There was no white light!"

Katara and Zuko both sit up abruptly in their furs, peering sleepily at each other. A banging noise continues above them and they look up at the floorboards. Katara has never heard her Gran Gran shout before - the woman usually liked to encourage good behaviour with disappointment and guilt - but the scratchy voice is unmistakable. She throws the furs off and staggers to her feet. The heel of her left hand rubs her eye sleepily as she glares up at the ceiling. An answering murmur reverberates in the room above her but it is largely unintelligible.

Zuko stands next to her, tipping his head down in her direction. "What do you think - " he begins to whisper.

"Shh!" Head clearing somewhat, Katara walks towards the ladder propped up against the wall and climbs up the first few rungs of it. She is now nose-to-nose with the bottom of the floorboards, and she angles her ear towards the ceiling.

Zuko stands by the foot of the ladder, scratching the back of his head absently and holding on to the base of the ladder with his other hand. Someone with a deep voice murmurs, " - saw it on the way back to the Fire Nation, don't lie to me, lady - "

"I told you! That wasn't a white light - that was the Southern Lights! Surely they don't accept imbeciles in the Fire Nation navy!"

Katara flinches away from the ceiling. She's sure Zuko heard what Kanna said by the volume of the old woman's shouting.

"Well - we went there and there was nothing at the source of the white light - we wanted to know if your people knew anything."

"Yes, of course we do, because those are the Southern Lights! Now get out of my house and leave me alone."

There's an answering murmur, and then a pair of heavy footsteps walk out the door. Katara hears her Gran Gran's slow footsteps disappear from the hut as well. Katara climbs back down the ladder and turns around, only to find herself uncomfortably close to Zuko.

"Um - do you mind - "

"I saw the white light, too," Zuko breathes, his eyes flicking back and forth between hers. There's a look in his eye she recognises from just before he fainted, and from somewhere else as well.

"You heard my Gran Gran, it's the Southern Lights," Katara fibs.

Zuko takes a step back, keeping his eyes on her the whole time. His eyes narrow slightly. "I thought I was dreaming..."

"No, like I said, those were the - "

"Southern Lights? The Naval Officer might have been an idiot, but I'm not. There are no Southern Lights here - only Northern Lights in the Northern Water Tribe. Don't lie to me," he cuts off in a low voice. "Katara, do you know the terms for my returning to the Fire Nation?"

There is something in the way he's speaking, deliberate and hesitant, like he's creeping up on an easily-startled realisation.

"Do you know what I've been looking for, or rather who I've been looking for, for nearly a decade?"

He's on to her, and she can't let him leave. She remains steadfast, standing her ground but not quite meeting his eyes. Her hands start to shake slightly with an impulse she tries desperately to quell.

"Oh, I think you know very well, waterbender," he all but growls, and she shivers - aren't you a big girl, now. They stand still, Katara staring insolently at his shoulder, heart thudding.

"Look at me," he finally breathes, and she drags her eyes up to his. Suddenly, she can place the expression in his eyes, and she can almost see a younger version of him with a ponytail, and she acts on instinct when she pulls the water from the jug towards her. Flames suddenly burst from Zuko's knuckles, and a familiar adrenaline rushes through her. She spins her arms around and bends her body to coax the water into a whip towards him -

- and suddenly loses her grip on the water. Pain bursts up the side of her head and Katara clutches it, eyes screwed shut and suddenly hunched on the floor. She sees La for a split second, ethereal and furious, and the scene suddenly shifts to Aang's Avatar State flickering from where he remains wrapped in furs, Sokka and Toph each holding one of his hands. The scene disappears, and she sees black.

She wakes up slowly to the sound of pained breathing, and then recognises that she's been hoisted on to Zuko's back as he climbs up the ladder. He pulls them both out with a grunt and drags her out the door with a few shaky steps. Suddenly they're lying on the snow outside Kanna's hut. Zuko turns to look at Katara, and she sees pain and exhaustion in his own eyes. Clearly, his bending escapades took a toll on him as well.

Katara tries to push herself up, but to her abject horror her limbs remain unresponsive. She finds that she cannot open her mouth, let alone make sounds. She tries to look for Zuko and her eyes follow her command sluggishly.

Zuko manages to crawl towards her. "What... happened?" he pants.

Katara, unable to respond, just looks at him wildly. His expression shifts in confusion. "Katara?" he prompts. He is met with silence, and he curses, himself struggling to push himself up. "Shit - we need to get you to your family - what the hell did you do? Oh god - "

But Katara is no longer listening. Her eyes are fixed upwards and fear suddenly seizes her. She tries valiantly to get up, to scream, to do anything, but she has to watch the sky in frozen horror as black snow begins falling in earnest.

Disclaimer: I do not own A:TLA.

A/N: I don't think I'm too happy with this chapter. I've been really struggling to write it - as you might have guessed by my slower publishing speed - and I finally decided to split the original chapter idea into two. Please, please leave a comment if you like it, I worked super hard on it!