Sometimes it stunned her to think about how quickly things could change. A week ago, Katara would have been elated at the opportunity to spend the night someplace where she didn't have to set up a tent or cook for herself and the others. But now—while Aunt Wu's invitation to stay a few days in her spare rooms had sounded good at first, it was less appealing when she realized just how little there was for her to do with no chores to worry about.

And now that she'd lost control of her bending once already, the idea of going out in public to get her mind off of things didn't sound entirely wise. It was evening by the time that she and Zuko finally finished their thoroughly unhelpful meeting with Aunt Wu. Which meant that by the time the boys tried to convince her to go out and explore the rest of Makapu with them, it was dark enough that all the streets would be bathed in lantern light. And though she very much wanted to go out and lose herself in normalcy for a while, the unsettled, fiery energy swirling in her core was too strong to push past. She wasn't sure she could trust herself near a fire, at least not out in public.

For a while, she managed to make the best of it. Sokka and Aang were just as full of noise and nonsense as usual, which went at least part of the way toward distracting her. The vague awareness of Zuko's absence—they hadn't exactly invited him to join them in their evening of lounging around, and yet they hadn't gone out of their way to exclude him either—did niggle at the back of her mind from time to time, but it wasn't so bad. She was making do.

But then the boys went off to bed, and the silence closed in on her, and all the thoughts that she'd been trying to suppress for the past few hours flooded back in.

This could still be fine. All she really had to do was go to sleep.

She tried. She really did, but the longer she lay still on the broad, fluffy bed, listening to the boys snoring across the room, the farther away sleep seemed to crawl. At long last, she gave up, climbed out of bed, dressed, and crept barefooted out into the hall.

She wasn't really sure where she was going. Aunt Wu's house wasn't so big that she was likely to get lost, but it was full of twists and turns and hallways that could function as rooms all on their own. Plenty of places where she might accidentally bump into people in the dark, if nothing else. Places where she might not be entirely welcome, especially at this hour.

So she did the best she could to move silently, trailing a hand along the wall and testing each floorboard before she stepped. Her progress was slow that way, but she passed by the room that Zuko and Iroh were sharing—there were murmurs from inside, and she paused a moment to listen at the door. Then, when she couldn't make out anything more than Iroh's distinctive rumble, she crept on farther, down to the end of the hall where her feet found the carpeted stairs.

There was a back door, she thought she remembered, at the bottom of the stairs and just off to the left, that would lead her outside and into a quiet garden at the back of the house. Maybe some fresh air would do her good. Though the perfume and incense didn't bother her half as much as it seemed to bother Zuko, the house was beginning to feel a bit stifling. Maybe that was why she couldn't sleep. Maybe it didn't have anything to do with the fact that she'd lost her own bending and then lost control over the bending that had moved into its place.

Right?

As she reached the bottom of the stairs and made her way cautiously toward the door, she let out a slow sigh. No, she couldn't even get herself to believe that. She could lie to the others passably well, but she couldn't manage the same for herself.

Still, stepping out into the cool night air—even if she had to tiptoe to avoid stepping on too many jagged rocks or sticks with her bare feet—was a relief. Not as dramatic an improvement as she'd hoped for, but an improvement nonetheless.

Carefully, she slid the door shut behind herself and started for what looked like a bench underneath a scraggly, bare tree. She'd only made it a few steps, though, when a shadow shifted at the edge of her vision, and she whipped toward it, heart racing.

"Katara?" the figure said, in what was unmistakably Zuko's voice.

She exhaled, and her pulse began to slow again. Until she noticed the stance he'd taken, at least. Katara crossed her arms. "Were you about to punch me?"

Zuko dropped his hands to his sides as though that would make everything better, then reached up to scratch the back of his head. "I—no, I was just—"

"You were. You were about two seconds away from punching me in the face."

If he'd been standing in a less shadowy part of the garden, Katara was almost convinced that she would have been able to see him blushing. He seemed to do that a lot. "I just—I heard someone come out here, and I couldn't see who it was at first. Without my firebending, I have to be a little more alert to protect myself."

"Mm-hmm."

His hand dropped back to his side, and although his scowl wasn't visible in the dark, the annoyance in his tone was more than clear enough to make up for it. "What are you doing out here?"

Katara shrugged, turning toward the bench again. If Zuko had been out here for any time at all, there was no chance that there were any strangers waiting out here to surprise her. His paranoia would have taken care of that. Which meant that all she had to worry about was avoiding stepping on anything sharp with her bare feet. "The same thing as you, I'm guessing. I couldn't sleep." When there was no answer, she glanced over her shoulder. "Am I right?"

He gave a halfhearted shrug before stepping a little away from the wall—not far enough to leave the shadows entirely, but enough so that she could make out his face. "Sort of. I'm avoiding Uncle too."

She cocked her head slightly to the side. "I thought I heard you in there talking to him when I snuck out."

"Unless it took you more than an hour to come downstairs, you didn't."

Frowning, she turned away from him and focused her attention on the path again. One cautious step, then two, then three. "Well, I heard him talking to someone."

"He's playing Pai Sho with Aunt Wu. Or that's what he said they were doing, anyway. Frankly, I'm too scared to go and find out."

Katara made it the rest of the way over to the stone bench and sat down, pulling her legs up into a crisscross in front of her before she glanced toward Zuko again. "Would Iroh do something other than playing Pai Sho in there? That's the room where you're supposed to be sleeping."

Another shrug. "He and Aunt Wu were going to play Pai Sho somewhere else until I got sick of listening to the flirting and left. So I don't know. It's not a chance I'm willing to take." He still hung back, just at the edge of the shadows, and stuffed his hands deep into his pockets, shoulders hunching a little with the motion.

She couldn't really blame him for trying to avoid that. Had she been in the same situation with Sokka and some girl he liked, she would probably have done the same. Or, probably more likely, she would have kicked Sokka out of the room and made him do his canoodling elsewhere. She could out-stubborn almost anyone.

With a small sigh, she leaned back against the tree, the roughness of the bark pressing through the soft fabric of her robe. The garden was nice, if a little dried-out and scraggly at this time of the year. And the fresh air did make it a little easier to slow down her thoughts and to calm the burning energy in her core. But it wasn't quite what she'd envisioned, either. Part of her had been hoping to find someplace quiet where she could sit alone to pick apart all her worries. Where she could decide exactly how she was going to deal with the fact that Aunt Wu hadn't been able to tell them anything that they couldn't have figured out in another week or two.

But it turned out that thinking was a bit of a difficult prospect with Zuko standing there in the shadows, awkward and stiff and staring at her with some inscrutable expression on his face. It was almost like he wanted to talk to her, but he couldn't seem to find any words.

After watching him for a few seconds from the corner of her eye, she said, "This is starting to feel like a habit."

"What is?"

"This." She gestured broadly around the garden, at the two of them, at everything. "Being the last two around after everyone else has gone to sleep."

There was a slight pause before Zuko spoke. "I'm pretty sure that Uncle is awake this time."

"You know what I mean. He's not here. Just like how he went to 'collect firewood' the other night." She tilted her head back to look up at the stars—most of the constellations that she'd known back home were still visible here, but they lay in different parts of the sky than she was accustomed to. "It's like the universe is trying to say something. Or—well, the universe and your uncle, maybe."

"Mostly my uncle."

She pursed her lips. "Unless there's something that you're not telling me, I doubt that. Your uncle isn't the one who messed up our bending."

"I guess."

There was something in the quiet reluctance of his voice that caught her attention, and she looked his way again. Zuko still hadn't moved. Still and stiff as ever, he stood about ten paces away, watching her with unwavering eyes and furrowed brows.

Katara frowned. "Are you just going to keep staring at me? Because it's starting to creep me out."

"Sorry." Zuko started to turn away, pulling farther back into the shadows.

"No, that's worse."

He stopped, then tossed his arms out to the sides. "Well, what do you want me to do, then?"

"Just—" She fumbled, then trailed off and patted the open stretch of bench beside her. "Sit. At least then I won't have to watch you staring at me."

Zuko froze, and for an instant, she thought that he would refuse or disappear back into the house. By the way that he was looking at her, she wouldn't be surprised if he decided that listening to his uncle flirt with Aunt Wu was preferable to coming any closer. But then after a few long seconds passed, he came around to the far end of the bench and sat stiffly an arm's length away. "Happy now?"

She turned her head far enough to stick out her tongue at him before turning her attention back up to the stars peeking through the bare branches of the tree. "Not exactly, but at least I know what the word means."

He grunted. "Rude."

"Am I wrong, though?"

"I know what happy means. I'm not stupid. I just—I realize that there isn't much reason for me to be happy. Especially right now."

After Aunt Wu's thoroughly unhelpful advice, Katara had to admit that he had a bit of a point. Only a bit, though. She couldn't see much reason to celebrate right now, but that certainly didn't mean that she was going to succumb to despair. She wasn't going to fall into complacency just because she couldn't see a way out of this yet.

Although if she stopped to think about it, for all his pessimism, Zuko didn't seem inclined toward complacency either. Not in the least. Somehow, it seemed like he managed to both see the world in the worst possible light and to fight against it like he was annoyed by his own pessimism. Either that was somewhat admirable, or he was just a mess of contradictions.

Probably the latter.

"Do you have any ideas about what we could do next?" At the very least, he'd seen a lot more of the world than she had. It was possible that he might have some ideas.

Zuko shrugged. "Uncle probably knows someplace farther inland where we could hide out for a while. If we stay here for more than a day or two, my crew is definitely going to find us."

"How bad would that be?"

Another shrug. "Somewhere between unpleasant and disastrous. Probably disastrous."

Katara looked at him and raised an eyebrow. "Your crew would really turn against you that easily? How in love with the Fire Lord are they?"

Zuko met her eyes, and his forehead creased. "They don't love my father. They're doing their jobs, that's all." A short pause. "And they all hate me too. I'm sure that makes it easier."

He said it so simply, so matter-of-factly that all she could really do was stare at him. Hard. How could he think that that was normal?

It didn't take long before he began to squirm and looked away, shoulders hunching forward. "I think I'm going to cut my hair after all."

If his goal was to throw her off and change the subject, he'd chosen the right topic for it. Katara sat up straight. "Really?"

A scowl crossed his face. "You don't have to sound so excited about it."

"I don't see why I shouldn't." As something of a peace offering, though, Katara allowed her voice to soften. "What changed your mind? You were pretty set on keeping the punishment ponytail earlier."

He gave her an odd look, then sighed and shook his head. "Earlier, I thought there was a chance that Aunt Wu might tell us something useful. But she didn't, so—" He paused, and his shoulders hunched even further as he leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. "You know, I've followed every single rule of my banishment for three years. I kept my hair cut the way I was supposed to and never set foot on Fire Nation soil and kept searching for the Avatar everywhere I could think to go. That was supposed to be my ticket back home if I just tried hard enough."

"Well—you don't have to cut your hair if you don't want to. We'll figure out this bending thing sooner or later. I guess—if it matters that much to you, then there's no reason why you can't just keep your hair covered until then."

Zuko gave a dry, humorless laugh. "I think waterbending in front of my crew was the point of no return. At this point, my hair is just—it's nothing." His voice faltered a little at the end, and he rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand.

For several long moments, Katara just watched him. Whatever else he may have been doing, Zuko wasn't putting on an act. He actually did seem upset.

"Are you okay?" she ventured after a long hesitation.

He raised his head, looking surprised, then nodded, straightening again. Okay, that had to be an act. He definitely wasn't as okay as he was trying to appear. "I just—I've probably been lying to myself for a while now. Cutting my hair might be the only way to stop that."

Slowly, she nodded. "I get that."

Or—not really. Not entirely, anyway. She'd lied to herself before, but it had never been anything quite this dramatic. Nothing so serious that she had ever needed a physical reminder to keep herself grounded. But if Zuko was willing to cement the reality that he wouldn't be going home after this by cutting his hair, she wasn't going to stop him.

He leaned ever so slightly to the side and fished around in his coat pocket until he managed to produce a small, leather-sheathed knife. "I guess there's no point in waiting."

Or maybe she'd been a little too hasty.

"Whoa. Wait." Katara leaned a little away from him. "What are you doing?"

"Cutting my hair," Zuko said, as though that were a perfectly reasonable thing to do with a knife. In the middle of a garden. In the dark.

"Are you trying to make it look even sillier? Because cutting your own hair with a knife when you can't even see it is definitely how that happens."

He scowled. "I thought you wanted me to do this."

"Well—yes. But the point is to make it so that you blend in better. Not to just hack it all off and deal with the consequences later."

"What would you suggest, then? If I wait until morning to ask Uncle or—something, then I'll probably just lose my nerve." He turned the knife, still in its sheath, over in his hands. "Uncle always says that things look better in the morning light than they do after dark. Which is exactly the problem. If I don't do this now, I'll just end up lying to myself again."

Katara studied him. This was what she wanted. She wanted Zuko to give up on his search for Aang, directly or otherwise. She wanted him to take this one small step that would make the rest of his mission impossible. He could find another path, another life, another way to be happy. But taking the first step by making himself look more absurd did not seem like the best way to go.

She bit her lower lip, then straightened and held out her hand toward him, palm pointed upward. "Let me."

"What?"

"Let me borrow your knife. I can cut your hair for you."

This time, it was Zuko who leaned away from her. "You expect me to just hand over my knife and turn my back on you?"

"No. I don't really expectanything. But I am offering. I cut Sokka's hair all the time, and I know for a fact that I'll do a better job than you will." Keeping her hand extended, she waggled her fingers a little. "Either I can do it right the first time, or you can cut your own hair and have someone else fix it tomorrow morning. Or if you're just worried about the knife thing, we can go back inside now and see if Aunt Wu will loan me a pair of scissors. If she and your uncle aren't too busy—playing Pai Sho."

His nose wrinkled. "You had to remind me of that, didn't you?"

She shrugged. "I didn't even know that it was a possibility until you brought it up. I don't think I'm the one who's to blame here."

Rolling his eyes, Zuko shook his head. Then, "Fine. I guess I'd rather risk it than risk seeing that."

Carefully, Katara accepted the knife from him. "Aunt Wu did tell us to spend more time together. I'm not sure a haircut was what she was imagining, but it can't hurt." She pushed herself up on her knees and scooted a little farther down the bench to meet Zuko in the middle. "I promise I'll do a good job."

Eventually, Zuko had managed to get a bit of sleep. From the garden, he hadn't been able to see the lights from the window in the room he was sharing with Uncle, but he could see the window in the hall just across from the doorway, and sometime after Katara had finished trimming the stray hairs where his ponytail used to be down into stubble, he'd seen the hallway light up briefly, then go dark again as Aunt Wu finally left. And fortunately, by the time that he'd found the nerve to venture inside, Uncle was already asleep.

Which, at the very least, meant that Zuko was marginally better-rested than he'd hoped last night. But he still wasn't quite well-rested enough to deal with all the reactions to his new haircut at once.

"I did not know that you had decided to cut your hair, Nephew." Uncle sat cross legged on a flattened, faded green cushion by the low parlor table. "I admit that I am impressed to see how neat a job you've done with it."

That was a surprise. Zuko hadn't expected Uncle to be angry, but shock or disappointment would have been perfectly reasonable. He ran a hand across the soft, evenly cut prickles where his ponytail used to sit. "That's probably because I didn't do it myself."

"Oh?" Teacup cradled between his hands, Uncle smiled knowingly.

Zuko caught a quick glance from Katara. His face warmed, but before he could respond, a hand came up from the other side and skimmed across his head.

"You look like a peach," the Avatar said. "Kinda feel like one too."

Almost by reflex, Zuko shrank to the side and smacked the Avatar's hand away.

"Maybe a moldy peach," Sokka said. "I don't know much about fruit, but I do know that that is not a good fruity color."

Katara elbowed him in the ribs, then ruffled the stubbly side of his head. "Speak for yourself, Fuzzball. Yours is completely brown."

Sokka pouted. "My hair looks like a fluffy otterpenguin chick, and you know it."

"Right. My mistake, tough guy. You look just like a baby bird."

Zuko kept a suspicious eye on the Avatar until he finally lowered his hand and gave up on feeling Zuko's hair. Then when he finally glanced toward Uncle again, he caught another nearly smug smile.

"What?" Zuko said, voice flat. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

"I'm not sure what you mean, Nephew."

"You're smiling."

Uncle set down his teacup long enough to pour for all the rest of them. "I see no reason why I should not smile. It seems to me that progress is being made."

Katara glanced up at Zuko. "If by progress you mean that we both stand a chance of blending in now, then I guess you're right."

"Among other things, yes." Uncle passed her a teacup, then moved on to serve all the others. "In fact, I believe that I heard you and your friends discussing the possibility of seeing the sights around Makapu late last evening. It occurs to me that my nephew is quite familiar with some of the attractions you may wish to visit."

Zuko felt his eyes bulge, and he almost dropped the teacup that Uncle passed his way. "Uncle!"

"What kind of attractions are we talking about?" Sokka inserted before Zuko could finish. "Because if it's more of this mystical garbage, I think I'll pass."

"Nothing of the kind," Uncle said easily. "I was thinking of the fact that there are some rather spectacular views of the mountains to be seen just outside Makapu. And many delightful teashops inside the village as well."

That, as far as Zuko was concerned, wasn't the problem. He had no interest in visiting any of the teashops around Makapu, and though the mountains—and the waterfalls closer to the village—were impressive to see, he didn't want to go out and spend extra time with the others. Or, more accurately, they probably didn't want to spend extra time with him. Zuko wouldn't delude himself. They were friends, and he was an unwanted outsider. An intruder. Even if they did something as tolerable as walking out to the waterfalls to see whether the badgerfrog tadpoles had begun hatching, spending that much time with people who clearly didn't want him around sounded like a particularly dull form of torture.

Though she didn't say anything, Katara was watching him closely, eyes narrowed in such a way that he thought she was about to speak. Like she was trying to find the best way to tell him what he already knew—that she and her friends would rather explore Makapu without him if they didn't have any other choice in how they spent their day. And sure enough, after a few tense seconds, she opened her mouth to speak.

"That sounds like a lot of fun," the Avatar blurted before Katara managed to start He'd begun bouncing at some point, and Zuko was sorely tempted to reach over and take his tea away. The last thing the Avatar needed was more energy. "I've been all over the world, but this is my first time in Makapu. I don't know where the fun stuff is yet."

Sokka groaned, long and low. "Aang, you're way too much like a polar puppy."

"What do you mean?"

"You think everything is fun as long as someone explains it like this," Sokka said, raising his voice to an exaggerated exuberance near the end of the sentence. Then, dropping back into his normal tone, he added, "I bet I could convince you that washing laundry is fun if I tried hard enough."

The Avatar kept bouncing. "What's wrong with that?"

Another prolonged groan.

"Sokka," Katara said warningly.

"What?"

"Knock it off. You're being rude."

"But I'm not wrong. Aang gets excited about everything, and I'm pretty sure Mister Grumpy here is immune to the feeling of excitement, which bodes really well for his skill as a tour guide." Sokka paused for a few moments longer than necessary before he added, "No offense."

Katara whacked his arm. "Knock it off."

"Me? If you keep smacking me like that, I think you're gonna knock my whole arm off." He made a show of rubbing at his shoulder, not the place where her hand had made contact.

The Avatar acted like he hadn't heard any of that. "I think," he announced, "that we should have a vote. I think it'll be fun to go out and explore the rest of Makapu with Zuko, and Sokka doesn't want to go. Which means that Katara is the only vote left, so she gets to be the tiebreaker."

Much to Zuko's surprise, Sokka actually listened to that suggestion. And even weirder, he agreed to it.

For a few long seconds, Katara just stared at him, and Zuko's tongue seemed to seal itself to the roof of his mouth. As badly as he wanted to speak, his voice wouldn't seem to cooperate while the weight of her gaze kept him pinned in place.

Finally, she nodded. "Fine, I guess it's not the worst way we could spend today."

Even after Zuko's voice returned, even after the groans from Sokka and the glee from Uncle and the Avatar finally died down, Zuko somehow couldn't find it in himself to point out that if the others were so intent on voting on how to spend the day, Zuko ought to have been able to vote too.

Author's Note:

Sooo... I have a confession to make, folks. The next chapter of Stolen Bending isn't finished yet. And I don't really have any plans to work on it in the next few weeks either. What can I say? Writer's block hit hard on this one specific project, and trying to get past that was making it much harder to work on the fic that was cooperating with me, and... I rethought my priorities a little. Turns out that updating two fics at the same time when you're nearly out of buffer chapters is difficult. And working through the writer's block that I ran into with this fic when I got covid back in May (and refused to admit that I really needed to delete a bit of the nonsense I'd written during that time and take a slightly different direction rather than plowing on ahead as usual) is finally coming back to bite me.

I'm definitely not abandoning this fic, I just need to take a step back before I try to dig in and deal with fixing the mess that I made out of the next few chapters. So to that end, I'm planning to take the month of November to do NaNoWriMo (again), finish editing Book 1 of A Tale of Ice and Smoke, and draft as much of Book 2 as is humanly possible, then focus on editing Book 2 until I have AT LEAST two months worth of updates stored up. Once I get to that point, and I have the editing buffer I need to set Ice & Smoke aside for a few months, then I'll be back to working on Stolen Bending with fresh eyes and (hopefully) some new ideas on how to address the corner that I wrote myself into with some of my later chapter drafts. I can't promise a timeline for my next update of Stolen Bending yet, but it'll be coming!

In the meantime, I guess feel free to check out my (many) other fics if you haven't already, comments and kudos are much appreciated, and all that good stuff!