Yes, I know I have three un-updated fics but I am actually obsessed with these two, okay. Sue me.
Happy reading!
Disclaimer: I do not own Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Next time, Katara thinks grumpily, she's staying at home.
Sure, it sounded fine at first. A road trip with all of her best friends before college. The wind in their hair, music blasting, nothing but open road before them. All-around fun friendship bonding times.
It'll be fun, Katara. Don't be a stick in the mud, Katara. It'll take your mind off things, Katara.
Except they got about a day into the trip before Toph and Aang spilled the beans about their secret relationship and then it was just Katara, the perpetual fifth wheel stuck with all the lovey-dovey couples. Poor, poor Katara, cheated on and single and lonely and sad.
Well, her friends can find someone else to drag into their ridiculous shenanigans next time because she is done.
She scowls and looks out over the cavernous waiting chamber.
The Crystal Catacombs are Ba Sing Se's most renowned attraction, and it has the crowds to prove it. There are tourists as far as the eye can see, clad in sunshine yellows and deep scarlets and periwinkle blues, calling for lost children or preparing for the tour to start. Her friends have disappeared somewhere into the mix, gone to buy tickets and leaving her to take care of all their stuff.
As always.
Katara sighs and slumps down onto the floor, resting her back against the rocky wall. It isn't strictly dignified but she's been walking around Ba Sing Se all day and her legs ache to the high heavens and really, if anyone deserves a break, it's her.
She gazes vaguely down at her brochure. The picture across the front features one of the biggest caves in the catacombs, crystals clumped together in groups like bunches of blooming wildflowers. The entire cave system is supposed to be full of them.
Very original naming there.
She recalls Suki lecturing them all about the history of the catacombs, something about ancient legends and secret tunnels and forbidden lovers. She'd tuned out somewhere at that point. She's had more than enough romance to last her an entire lifetime – quite possibly multiple – thank you very much.
"Oh, give it a rest, Azula," an irritated voice snaps, so loud that it cuts through the din in the chamber. "I'm sorry if I didn't schedule my break-up around your glorious life."
Katara has the sudden, dizzying feeling of being flung off her axis, the slant of a tightrope walker caught in suspension the moment before she falls.
She braces her hands against the floor, abruptly terrified that she is about to get caught in an earthquake, but it is absolutely, completely still. The chattering crowds move about as always and the world continues as it has before, and it is only Katara left with the scrape of rough stone against her palms and the shuddering tremor of her heart.
What the hell was that?
She peeks over her shoulder.
She sees the messy shock of black hair first, then the cotton-clad back, following the long legs that end in scuffed sneakers with the laces slightly askew. His face is turned away from her, toward the beautiful, dark-haired girl opposite him, but then he shifts his weight slightly and she glimpses the cut-glass line of his jaw.
There is a ringing, shrill and piercing, inside her head.
"You're the Fire Lord's son! Spreading war and violence and hatred is in your blood."
Katara is on her feet before she knows it.
She is disoriented, caught off-kilter, the way she felt as a kid when she stepped off the merry-go-round to find that the world kept spinning. Logic demands that she get out of this place, find her friends, but she can't tear her gaze away from the back of his head, raven hair brushing the collar of his saffron-bright jacket. She is struck with the strangest feeling of knowing, as though she has met him a long, long time ago and if he only turns around, she will finally remember –
"Katara!"
Aang steps before her, obscuring her vision, and the sight of her friend is like a dash of cold water splashed into her face. She snaps back into herself and the fog in her brain rescinds, leaving her gloriously, thankfully, clear-headed.
"Didn't you hear me calling your name?" he asks, a little bemusedly. "I got our tickets! Come on, the tour starts in a few minutes."
She shakes her head and tries to shove away whatever came over her. Probably just anxiety, brought on by the fear of going underground. Something perfectly reasonable.
She grabs the ticket Aang holds out to her. "Right, sorry, let's go."
Katara follows her friends through the crowd, away from the strangely familiar boy with his scraping sea-salt voice, and tries to ignore the tug in her gut that pulls her in the wrong direction.
o-0-o
Zuko wonders if he can get away with throttling his sister and throwing her into a cave.
He's probably out of luck on that one, he thinks gloomily, wending his way through the crowd behind her. Azula doesn't say a word, but people move aside for her nonetheless, getting out of her way as though parting for royalty.
Smart of them.
He should have possessed half that self-preservation instinct when she asked him to accompany her to Ba Sing Se, but she caught him blindsided right after he broke up with Mai, and before he knew what was happening, he was saying yes.
And now here he is, dragged on some tour for his sister's sick amusement.
He's fairly sure Azula doesn't even want to walk around some musty old catacombs. She just knows he wants to do it even less.
They arrive at the entrance to the tour, a single path cut into the rock that slopes down, down, down into what looks like darkness. Zuko can't say he relishes the idea of heading down there, but he consoles himself with the thought that it'll be an hour, tops, and then he can get back to his hotel room and lock himself inside – far, far away from Azula.
"Oh, do cheer up, Zuzu," Azula chirps next to him. Malicious glee drips from every syllable. "Don't start glooming around on me like Mai. It's really all your fault I had to get away from her, you know."
He turns his head to snap a retort.
There is a flash of blue, bright as the summer sea.
The crowd parts, just for a second, but it is long enough for him to catch the bits and pieces of her – sapphire beads woven through her hair, the glimpse of dark satin at the hollow of her throat, the cresting wave of her smile – before she disappears from view.
The world comes to a sudden, shrieking halt.
There is no crowd, no sister, no sound at all. There is nothing in the echoing emptiness but her, as if the rest of existence has simply folded in upon itself and they are all that remain, he and her, the way they have always been, and if she would only turn around, he would know –
"You don't know what you're talking about."
It is the words, his but not-his, that send him reeling back to himself.
Zuko returns to his bustling reality with the force of a physical blow, stumbling backward into the family coming up behind him. He should apologize, he knows he should, but the words will not form in his mouth, and he cannot make them. His mind spins out and beyond his control, a revolving carousel of thoughts and images that flash by too fast to note, and it is only when Azula grabs his arm and yanks him forward that it all finally, blessedly stops.
His sister gives his shoulder a shake. "Zuko, what the hell? Are you about to faint?"
Azula's voice is sneering, condescending, but for once he doesn't care. He jerks his head up, scanning the crowd for the slightest glimpse of blue, but there is no sign of her. Relief and disappointment war in his chest at the realization, and he cannot figure out why.
"Really, Zuzu, we don't have to go if you're going to be that much of a baby about it."
"I'm fine," he mutters, shoving past his sister even though reason screams for him to take her offer. Azula would tease him, but he's grown more than used to that. It would be the wiser decision to get out of here, now, after – after whatever the fuck just happened.
The tour guide yells out a command and the group surges forward.
There is the briefest moment, on the cusp of the plunge, when he hesitates. Tosses a glance over his shoulder, to the spill of daylight through the open doors beyond. Back to safety and surety and a place where the strange occurrences of the day will dissipate into fine mist, forgotten forever.
The darkness beyond the passage glows with faint emerald light, like the beating heart of some sleeping beast. It creeps up the stairs, swirling ivy-vines into the grooves and notches of his heart, and tugs.
Come, it says, and he is powerless to resist. Come.
Zuko follows.
o-0-o
Katara doesn't want to see a single crystal again for as long as she lives.
It is all she can see, in any direction she looks. Crystals jutting up like shining spears from the floor. Crystals hanging from the ceiling like bright green bats. Crystals embedded in the rocky walls, gleaming emerald-bright in the fluorescence of camera flashes. They wink at her as she passes, as though they know something she does not, and she cannot shake the unsettling feeling that she has seen them before, somehow.
"Well, this was a great idea," Toph grumbles from behind her, every word accentuated with the clack of her cane against the ground. "Let's drag the blind girl to go look at rocks."
"You agreed!"
"That was before Tour Guide Snoozy over there decided to start giving us his lecture. Seriously, are we on vacation or back in school?"
"Come on, Toph," Suki entreats. "We're standing in a place of legend! Isn't that interesting to you in the slightest?"
"Only if that legend is that a seriously awesome battle took place here and it's haunted by the ghosts of the slain – "
"You're absolutely hopeless – "
Katara rolls her eyes as Sokka and Aang jump in, and the argument becomes a four-way discussion, divided between Toph and Sokka as Team Battle and Aang and Suki as Team History. She's been dragged into far too many of these stupid debates to get involved in this one, so she leaves them to it and drifts over to the front of the tour group.
The catacombs, the guide explains, are a series of interconnecting caves and larger caverns. So far, they've moved only from cave to cave, each one almost identical to the last, and Katara casts only a brief look around before they move on.
The next one is different.
For a minute, all Katara can do is gawk.
The statues tower over her, rising so far into the ceiling that she has to tilt her head back to see them fully. Every inch of them is carved from shimmering jade, and as she steps forward, she can make out their features.
A man and woman, wrapped around each other. Her hand caresses his cheek; his is settled around her waist. Their faces are tilted toward one another, as though even in stone, they cannot bear to look away from each other.
Something trembles inside her, like the shiver of a plucked guitar string.
She is vaguely aware that she is walking, her feet tracing the path to the plaque at the statues' base, but the rest of her cannot stop gazing at the two lovers, every inch of their stone bodies pressed together.
Katara wonders what that kind of love feels like.
She hoped to have found it with Jet once and yet – even before she walked in on him that night, she doesn't think it was love, not really, not the kind before her. The sting of his betrayal feels strangely muted here, almost as though it has faded away entirely.
She reaches the plaque and looks down at the words etched into marble, cast in soft emerald light.
The Legend of Oma and Shu
Katara's eyes dip lower, across the scrolling lines spelling out a story of love and loss and pain, and when she is done, something tingles, hot and bright, at the backs of her eyes.
"Have you brushed their feet?"
The voice sends her whirling around, heart thumping, but recognition sets in before she spies his face. Of course – their tour guide. The man whose long-winded tales she's been listening to for more than a quarter of an hour.
He is gazing at her placidly, clearly expecting a reply.
"I'm – I'm sorry?" she stammers.
He smiles and jerks his head at the statues. "Running your hand across their feet is supposed to be a sign of good luck. It will help you find your soulmate, as Oma and Shu found one another."
"I don't know," Katara says, laughing a little. "It seems more as though they lose one another."
"Why do you say that as though it proves me false?" the man asks, inclining his head. "You must find someone to lose them, yes?"
"I suppose," she acquiesces. "But it still seems a little ironic to ask for romantic luck from two people whose own love ended so tragically."
"Perhaps," the guide says, coming up beside her to gaze at the doomed lovers. "Or perhaps not. Some of the stories say that it was not the end. That destiny itself bent to their love and intertwined their tales in every lifetime, in every world, so that they would always find one another – no matter what form they took."
Something flickers at the corner of her vision, and she thinks she sees, for one impossible second, a boy with ink-dark hair and a girl caught in righteous fury, flinging words sharp as throwing stars.
"You have no idea what this war has put me through!"
Katara stumbles backwards.
"I'm sorry," she says, breathless, unsure what she's apologizing for. "But I don't really believe in destiny."
The guide shrugs. "Perhaps that is not as important as whether destiny believes in you."
It is likely nothing more than an act, a bit of faux wisdom dealt out to naïve tourists to enhance the experience, and yet the words slot into place within her like puzzle pieces.
The question slips her lips before she can stop it.
"Do you think they did? Find each other, I mean?"
The answer is immediate. "Yes."
Katara hesitates. "Do you think they were…happy, this time?"
Now, the man pauses to consider.
"I hope so," he says at last. "But even if their story has only ended in tragedy for every lifetime since, they have, after all, an infinity to find one another again. I'd like to think that in at least one of them, they are happy."
The guide gives her a gentle smile and moves to gather the rest of the group, leaving her alone at the plaque. She gazes at the sculpture, this monument to lost love, and as much as logic and reason and sense say otherwise, she cannot help but hope that the guide is right.
When she leaves, it is with the imprint of carved jade beneath her fingertips.
o-0-o
Zuko is fairly certain his heart is about to hammer straight through his chest and out of his body.
Part of him wants to turn around and flee. The other part of him whispers wait, leads him through caves and passages and thousands of glowing green jewels to…
Well, whatever it is, they haven't found it just yet.
He has a sneaking suspicion he knows what they're looking for, though it makes absolutely no sense. People don't feel like this about strangers, let alone strangers they've never met, whose names they don't know.
The last thought settles uncomfortably in his mind, off-kilter, the same way it feels when he's lying.
That makes even less sense.
It doesn't go away.
When he finally makes his way out of the cramped passageway and into a cave that is not packed to the brim with crystals, the relief is overwhelming. Zuko's had enough crystals to last him a lifetime. They will probably haunt him to his deathbed.
His eyes land on the main attraction of this cave, an oddly shaped sculpture of what look like two people, before they are drawn to the figure at its base.
Long, wavy dark hair. Brown skin.
The ground tips sideways beneath his feet.
He is alone, cut loose, drifting across lands and oceans that refuse to yield him what he desires. He is chasing, seeking, finding, ever-finding, a lost ship looking for safe harbour, and for the flash of a second, he glimpses it in sea-storm eyes and the ghost of a touch across his cheek.
"It's a scar. It can't be healed."
Zuko stumbles through the crowd after her, always after her, and even though he knows how it will end, he cannot help but hope –
When he reaches the statue, she is gone.
The ache in him is a living thing, unfolding long, sinuous curlicues into the spaces between his ribs.
He has lost her. Again.
"Zuko!"
His sister's voice sends him spiralling back down to reality, to the place of rocky walls and messy break-ups and infuriating siblings. The place where you certainly don't feel inexplicably drawn to strange girls who appear and disappear in the blink of an eye.
He wants to punch a wall. He wants to scream. He wants to get some answers, and he wants to pretend none of this ever happened.
"What is wrong with you?" Azula asks impatiently, the minute she catches up to him at the base of the statue. "Are you going insane?"
Maybe he is. Maybe he's in a giant hallucination and none of this is real.
"Zuko!" his sister snaps. "Answer me!"
"I'm fine!"
He's always been terrible at lying, but what other alternative does he have? Oh, no big deal Azula, it's just this strange force pulling me to this strange girl I saw earlier and even though I've never met her before in my life, I kind of think I know her.
"I'm fine," he says again, even though nothing has been further from the truth. There is a twinge in his solar plexus, like phantom pain from an old injury.
His eyes fall on the plaque he's been inadvertently clutching.
His sister's voice fades into the background as he reads the names on the marble, and the tale of woe that follows. When he is done, Azula is gone, and it is just him and the statues and the sudden, choking lump in his throat.
o-0-o
Katara finds him first – or maybe it is he who finds her.
She is looking around the last cave, a place she has never set foot in but which she knows she has seen before, when his footsteps hit the earth behind her.
She spins. He stops.
This time, he is not on his knees.
o-0-o
For a minute, there is nothing.
There is no swell of breath in her lungs, or rush of blood in her veins. She cannot feel the ground beneath her feet or the hot, heavy air that weighs like lead against her skin. She is suspended, weightless, a ship without anchor, a daughter without a mother. She is a girl of frozen tundra, and nothing blooms in her but sorrow.
"The Fire Nation took my mother away from me."
o-0-o
For a minute, there is everything.
The weight of it buckles his spine, threatens to flatten him against the stone. Grief turns his feet to stone, rooted to the floor as if they will sink into it and remain there forever. He is worthless, abandoned, ruined, and he cannot pull himself free.
Like calls to like. Grief calls to grief.
He can feel hers calling to him, a siren song across the vast chasm of them. He will never make it, never reach her, but he has never been able to turn away the impossible.
He leaps.
"I'm sorry. That's something we have in common."
o-0-o
"Whenever I would imagine the face of the enemy, it was your face."
There is a boy with a scar like a bloodstain, and he cannot stop hunting her.
There is a boy with a scar like a crimson sunset, and he cannot stop finding her.
o-0-o
"I used to think this scar marked me."
He closes his eyes with a child's desperate plea on his lips, and all he can feel is his father's fury.
He closes his eyes with a child's desperate wish in his heart, and all he can feel is her warmth.
o-0-o
"I've been saving it for something important."
She cannot turn away. He cannot turn back.
o-0-o
The moment springs back and forth between them, leaving her reeling, winding through the thrum of his pulse.
She knows the handprint edge of his scar; his words settle in the cracks of her heart; she offers him absolution; his breath spills across her fingertips; they are one, brought together, pulled apart.
What is this? she wants to ask, and the question is reasonable and logical and completely pointless because she knows the answer, knows it is threaded through the collection of memory bequeathed to her by all those who came before her.
Who are you? she thinks then, but that is ridiculous too when she can trace the shape of him in the dark and the rhythm of his breath; when they have sung to each other all their lives and a thousand lives hence, back and forth, push and pull, since the stars of their constellation spanned the universe and the atoms of their bodies first collided with one another.
In the end, maybe, there is really only one thing left to say.
"Hi, Zuko."
o-0-o
The moment his name spills from Katara's lips, Zuko knows there is no going back, not anymore.
This is not the first time he has had this epiphany, but that does not make it old or more familiar, the realization that he is hers to command as easily as she once commanded the tides.
He should be concerned, he thinks. He should be worried and hesitant and afraid that he is going stark, raving mad, but all he feels is perfect, calm quiet, as though a tuning fork has been struck into the layers of his soul and settled it to peace.
The space between them crackles with electricity, like the air before a thunderstorm.
He has been chasing her all day, the shadowy wisp of a dream, and now that she is finally before him in her entirety, he cannot stop himself from drinking her in. He commits the map of her to memory, the places that are familiar and those that are not, not in this lifetime, not yet.
The flash of her smile is like lightning arcing through his veins. "Please tell me this day has been as weird for you as it has for me."
Zuko laughs. "That might be an understatement."
He steps toward her.
"Hi, Katara."
o-0-o
The tug inside her vanishes the minute Zuko says Katara.
He draws out the syllables, Kah-tah-ra, slow, reverent, as though her name is an oath on his lips, and everything – absolutely everything – aligns, all the layers of her crumbling and crashing down on one another until she is a single, glorious whole.
Katara moves to Zuko, or he moves to her – it does not matter, really, when they have been orbiting one another all their lives – and there is nothing she wants more than to wrap herself into the circle of his arms, as she has wanted to since she first saw him, but it does not feel quite right.
They stop a hairsbreadth apart.
It is a moment as old as time. It is a moment crafted in the space between their breaths, fragile as a newborn star.
His eyes flutter close.
Her fingers splay across the raised, red ridges of his cheekbone.
The catacomb flickers in a flash of lightning, and she sees it all.
She flees and he chases; he draws back, and she pushes forward; she weeps, and he turns. They live a thousand terrible, beautiful moments together and when he falls with a star-splotch mark burned across his heart, her grief drowns the world.
Their cave glimmers back into existence, the imprint of his corpse scorched across the backs of her eyes. She raises her gaze to his. "Did you…"
His face is lit with quiet wonder. "Yeah."
Something ignites inside her, twin flames of endless love and endless despair. "You – you…"
He smiles, knowing and gentle, and in some other world, some other Katara screams, long and broken, over his unmoving body. "Yeah."
Her fingers rest, trembling, on his heart. "You idiot."
He huffs a laugh. "I think I prefer the other you. There was more weeping and gratitude."
She hits him lightly on the chest, and he catches her hand, twining his fingers through hers. This close, his irises are aureate-bright, brilliant as a star-speckled dawn.
"You died for me," she says, and the words strip all the humour from her voice. They are grave, stricken, sad, and for a minute she thinks of the Katara with ice in her veins and water-whips looping around her braids, who will spend the rest of her life in that lightning-struck courtyard, who will never go home, not really.
"I did," Zuko says, and his voice is tender, solemn, lovely.
Thank you, Katara.
His final words, choked through his blood, stained by her tears.
"We might end like that," she tells him, and even though they are not them, will never be them, she grieves for the girl with lightning-spark eyes and the boy fragile as brittle ice beneath her hands. "Even in this lifetime, we might."
"We might," Zuko agrees. She knows he mourns for them too, the people they used to be, the tragedy of their tale. "And we might not."
His heart thuds beneath her hand, solid and steady.
Katara looks up at him. "So, what now?"
She doesn't think most people form relationships on memories of a thousand lifetimes, on shared recollections of love and grief and loss.
"I don't know," he admits, but the words don't feel like a condemnation, not at all. Despite the story of them, told over centuries and millenniums and eons, this one still lies open before them, and it is theirs to write as they wish.
I'd like to think that in at least one of them, they were happy.
"We were Zuko and Katara then," she says slowly, "but we're also Zuko and Katara now. And now, we get to start again."
She holds out her hand, and smiles. "Nice to meet you. I'm Katara."
Zuko's eyes spark the amber-gold of sunrise at the edge of the sea, the distant horizon she's chased all her life.
"Nice to meet you, Katara," he says, and his voice is a serenade that calls her home. "I'm Zuko."
When their lips meet, it is reunion and beginning and eternity. It is a promise.
This time, we will make it right.
The future unfolds before them, as bright as the crystals that keep their secrets, and waits.
fin.