Katara returned to the arena the very same day that she killed the guard. Her departure was much less grand than her arrival; she got hustled out a side gate like her continued survival was an embarrassment to the Fire Nation. Nevertheless, many gathered to watch her leave. She would have felt like a zoo animal, if she had felt anything at all.
A young man stepped forward to spit in her face and she didn't try to dodge — minutes ago he'd cradled the body of the boy she had killed in his arms and wept like his heart was breaking. What surprised her were the numerous hisses of disapproval from the servants and courtiers, and the way one of her guards shoved him away, so hard that he stumbled and fell.
Her soldier with the crooked nose and yellow eyes was one of the many people standing at the gate. She hadn't seen him in the audience, but he must have been there. He was in full monstrous armor, his helmet tucked under his arm and something almost like pity on his face. Katara planted her feet and, to her dull surprise, was not pulled off them by her chains. Everyone crammed into the courtyard seemed to hold their breath when they saw the Southern Raiders' insignia on his arm.
"Did you speak to my father?" Katara asked, using the ragged hair he had shorn to hide from his gaze.
"I did," he confirmed.
"...Did he at least try to avenge me?"
From the shifting of his boots and the murmurs that arose, nobody expected her to ask that, not even him.
He was silent for so long she almost believed he wouldn't answer, but still no one tried to make her move.
"He fought like a demon. He killed my first mate."
Katara took a moment to digest that. Part of her was glad that he still loved her enough to kill for her, even if she wasn't worth saving from that same fate. She squared her shoulders and looked straight into his eyes.
"If you see him again, tell him that he doesn't need to try anymore. Tell him I'll avenge my mother and myself."
When she stepped into the street, nobody save her guards followed.
Well, them and three pairs of royal amber eyes, one cold and fascinated, one clouded with regret and pity, and one not sure quite what he saw in the slight, vicious little girl who could have, in another world, been his friend.
She was handed off to the prison guard with the missing eye, who didn't seem to know what to think of her imperial escort and the almost respectful, almost wary way they treated her. As she was pulled through the dark hallways by her newly-unchained arms, she could feel curious eyes on her, cataloging her missing braid, her burns, her bruises, and the way she favored her still-healing hip. Anyone could tell that her sojourn in the palace was far from pleasant, but she supposed that most of them never expected her to return at all.
Some of the prisoners went white when they caught a glimpse of her, like she was a ghost or a vengeful spirit. Some of the guards looked almost relieved to have her back; most of them had at least one or two frostbitten stumps where their fingers should be.
Her sifu had clearly been making everyone under the arena aware of her displeasure.
Katara was hit by a wave of homesickness and homecoming when they shoved her inside of Hama's cell. Most of the furnishings were gone, and there were new scars in the metal walls, but the familiar, artificial scent of fire lilies still lingered. The Puppetmaster sat on her thin futon, pushed into the least destroyed corner of the room, her blue eyes wide with shock and joy. Katara was across the room and in her arms before she could blink.
"Oh, Katara," Hama breathed. "My little nuusiq. They haven't killed you. You came back."
Katara felt soft, withered lips against her forehead, felt dampness creep into her hair and shudders wracking Hama's frame, and realized that her sifu was crying.
"Y-you are the first that has returned to me," Hama said, voice scarred with old grief. "You are the only one of all our brothers and sisters that survived that spirits-damned palace."
Katara peppered the Puppetmaster's face with childish kisses, the way she used to with emaa-emaa. "I was so scared," she cried, and Hama's thin arms tightened so much around her that she could barely breathe. "They kept hurting me and they kept making me fight and I couldn't even heal myself and—and— my ataa doesn't want me anymore." The last words came out as a wail, and Hama froze against her.
"Katara, what do you mean? What did you do?" Her arms dropped from the embrace, and Katara whined at the loss.
"Th-they figured out I'm the war chief's daughter so they took my braid and used it to try'n get ataa to stop fighting but he—he wouldn't. Why? Why didn't he save me?!" The words came out from a deep, bruised, broken place inside her chest. She wanted to stop feeling ashamed of her weakness; she wanted to go home.
And then the Puppetmaster's hand cracked across Katara's face and sent her sprawling onto the floor.
"Foolish, selfish girl!" she thundered. Katara's blood was icy, and she wasn't sure how much of it came from shock and how much of it came from her sifu's rage. "Be grateful your father is loyal to his tribe! Would you condemn your people to a lifetime of what you have suffered? Have I taught you nothing?"
Katara only trembled and shook, wide eyes still leaking tears. She'd landed on her left side, and the burn Azula gave her was throbbing viciously. (So were the ones from the boy she had just killed, but those were smaller, and easier to ignore.)
Hama pulled her arm back, as if she can beat understanding into her student, but then sighed and let her arm drop. "Katara, you must remember: our lives, when weighed against our tribe, mean nothing. We will die here. We can never go home, and if going home would harm it, you should not wish to. Your father did the right thing."
"Sifu, I'm sorry," Katara said, her face throbbing in time with her burns. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, please forgive me—"
"Of course I will, silly girl," the Puppetmaster said, pulling her pupil back into another embrace. "So feel this pain, and let it pass. The only people you must blame are your captors, and the only thing you must feel for them is anger. Our people deserve our love, our protection, and our sacrifice. They are all we live for."
Hama healed her wounds as best she could, but it had been too long to keep Azula's mark from scarring. She made Katara heal the throbbing welt on her face by herself, but it was harder without direct contact with her own blood and all she managed was to turn it green and yellow. The guards pushed a single bowl of rice through a slot in the new and reinforced door, and Hama let Katara eat all of it, humming an old Southern lullaby as she combed thin, bony fingers through what remained of her student's hair.
Eventually, there was a timid knock on the door, and Hama pressed their foreheads together for a long moment before gently pushing her to her feet. "You need your sleep, nuusiq, and you won't be able to get it here," she laughed, gesturing at the deep gouges carved into the floor and the walls. "I know you want to see your friends, too."
Katara smiled, unspeakably grateful for this one indulgence. Hama had never approved of her relationships with Bao and Chen, had told her again and again that they would kill her in a heartbeat if she let them, but her master also understood better than anyone how deeply Katara needed people she could claim as her own.
The guards were reluctant to even touch her, and Katara might have found it funny if she wasn't so impatient to see her friends. She snapped at them to hurry up and they complied immediately, without even trying to strike her. There was a swell of vindictive satisfaction from the fear on their faces, the way they cradled their hands as if afraid she'd take more extremities from them. It would be easy — the Fire Nation was ill-equipped to deal with frostbite.
Later, Katara promised herself, bursting into the room where most of the prisoners slept. She scanned the crowd of slumbering bodies, too distracted to notice the whispers and stares that broke out among those still awake. Eventually she spied a small silhouette huddled against the far wall and broke into a run, dodging sprawling limbs and jumping over snoring inmates until she dropped to her knees by Chen's side and nudged her awake.
Chen blinked up at her, green eyes wide and watery, and traced her face with trembling fingers.
"I'm back," Katara whispered past the lump in her throat, and wrapped her in a hug so tight that she could feel the ridges of her ribs dig into Chen's slightly more padded torso. Chen gripped her with equal desperation, half-pulling her into her bedroll and running her hands over wherever she could reach.
Katara broke away eventually and asked, "Where's Bao?" She was a little upset that he hadn't been watching Chen as closely as she asked him to, before she was taken away.
Chen pointed towards the infirmary, and Katara sighed. She shouldn't have expected him to look after Chen when he had his own fights to survive, though she was glad he managed to win. "How is he?"
Chen shrugged, that familiar apathy already stealing across her face. A part of Katara wanted to shake her, but it was the most alert she had seen her since that first catastrophic fight. She slid underneath Chen's blanket instead of bullying the guards into getting her her own bedroll, luxuriating in the warmth and comfort of another human being. It felt even better than the palace infirmary beds, better than the brittle strength of Hama's embrace, better than the half-forgotten memories of the fur bed she shared with Sokka that had turned sour and bitter since her father's choice.
If my family doesn't want me, Katara decided, then I'll make a new one.
Katara went to the infirmary the next day to visit Bao. She made sure to stay discreet, but the guards were noticeably reluctant to engage with her even when they did see her. She had to fight a smile with each successive Firebender that miraculously failed to notice her.
Bao was laid up on his side on one of the infirmary cots, covered in sweat and breathing heavily. He was cradling his heavily bandaged stomach, curled in on himself like a dead bug, but he was so stiff that Katara knew there must be more injuries she hadn't noticed. His face was flushed and sweaty, and when she settled on the end of the cot, it took ages for him to open his glassy eyes.
"Katara…?" he muttered, struggling to focus. "'S this real?"
"Yeah, Bao, it's me," Katara said softly, laying a comforting hand on his blanket-covered calf. "I'm still alive."
"Oh. That's good," he said, and made an aborted move to sit up that ended with a yelp of pain.
"Bao, why don't you lie on your back? It'll hurt your stomach less," Katara asked anxiously. She moved to help him, but he weakly smacked her hands away before she could touch his bare shoulders.
"It's m'back, Katara. Hurts real bad." There were tears in his eyes, and that scared her worse than his cry of pain. She moved to the other side of the bed, and gasped at the numerous inflamed lines going up and down his shoulder blades, oozing greenish pus.
"Why haven't the healers done anything?!" Katara yelped, hands itching for water.
"Was'n from a fight. From a guard," Bao explained through gritted teeth.
Katara looked around wildly for a waterskin or a basin. Surely she could do something—
"He earned those lashes, and he earned their consequences," came a bored voice. Katara whirled around to see one of the supposed healers, who was standing behind her and picking at her fingernails. "Now get out of the infirmary or I'll hurt him worse. I'm not scared of ugly little ice rat girls."
She wouldn't meet Katara's eyes.
She might not be scared of me, but she's scared of sifu.
"I'll be back soon, Bao," Katara said soothingly, and had to dodge Bao's hand as he weakly reached for her.
"Don'—don' go," he slurred, eyes glazed with pain and fever. "You helped me in th' arena, an' you'll help me now, right? Please, I wan' some ice—'m so hot, please…"
"I… I'll be back, I promise," Katara said, tears in her eyes, and left when the healer took a threatening step towards her delirious friend.
"Sifu!" Katara said, slamming the cell door in the escorting guard's face without a second glance. "Sifu, I need you to get them to let me into the infirmary when no one's around so I can heal Bao—"
"And why, in Sedna's name, would I do that?" Hama asked, not even bothering to look up from her tea. Her voice was toneless, as if they were discussing the weather.
"Because he needs help, sifu! They whipped him really badly while I was gone, and they haven't even dressed his back! They just left him like that, hurting so bad he can barely move." Katara dropped to her knees, ready and willing to beg if that was what the Puppetmaster wanted. Her moods were as mercurial as the ocean, especially around the full moon, and just as dangerous. Katara sometimes had to remind her that she couldn't keep up with her yet, that her master' training sometimes came close to damaging her beyond the bounds of her considerable healing abilities. "I-I'm scared he might die if I leave him like that."
"And what of it?" the Puppetmaster asked, finally deigning to give her student her full attention. Katara shrank back at the sight of her gaze, as empty and uncaring as a dead fish. Today was one of her bad days, the days where Hama let herself drown in her rage and sorrow instead of using them as fuel. They weren't as dangerous as her good days, but they scared Katara worse than when she went too far in training, or hurt her student for real and forced Katara to heal her wounds without guidance or aid. She could handle pain, but the thought of Hama retreating inside herself like Chen, of leaving her all alone, was terrifying.
"I can't just let those fire-breathing scum kill him!" Katara said, hoping her righteous fury would move Hama even if begging would not.
Her sifu turned back to her tea with a weary sigh, drawing idle patterns in the steam. "What's another dead Earthbender, Katara? There's hundreds of thousands of them. They sealed themselves up behind walls of rock, just as the North did with walls of ice. You and I are the last two Southern Waterbenders. We need to focus on keeping ourselves alive, or we'll end up like the spirits-cursed Air Nomads."
Katara sat back on her heels, appalled. For a moment, she had to swallow down a million rebuttals, had to bite back the outraged retort that sprang to her lips. The Puppetmaster did not respond well to lip.
"But… he needs help. I can't turn my back on him," she whispered. "Please. He's my friend."
"Then it is fortunate," Hama intoned, voice heavy with apathy and old loss, "that you will not have to kill him yourself."
Aaaaand we're back in the arena, y'all! I know some of you are excited, and some of you are disappointed. Unfortunately, Katara's gonna be stuck here for a while longer, and we aren't going to see much Zutara interaction in the next few chapters. (They will see each other at least one more time before his banishment, though, I can promise you that much. I structured this story real weird because I started outlining it years and years ago and I keep getting new ideas for scenes I need to cram in, so I'll probably spend some time restructuring the pre-banishment chapters once I'm finished actually writing them. We'll see. You guys can be my editors!)
There will, however, be a lot of Azutara interaction while Zuzu's off in the mountains learning swordplay for like 3 months or however long swordplay lessons take. And there'll be even more while he's banished and during the Book One era of AtLA! A lot of you seem excited to see how their relationship develops, which THRILLS me because that's one of my favorite parts of this fic! Also my university just got shut down for coronavirus so I might even update again this year. Exciting, I know!
Much love to anyone still reading despite my glacial update "schedule," and a warm welcome to any new readers! Love you guys!