"Katara what on earth has been taking you so long?" Sokka screeched.
She looked at him as if he was crazy and shrugged. "What do you mean?"
"You said that you were only going to go pee, it seems like you've been gone for over four months!"
"Like you weren't gone that long?" she asked, crossing her arms. "Anyway I wanted to take a shower too, and …," she blinked and cocked her head at them. "Okay now what?
"What did you do to your hair?" Aang asked.
"I found some minerals and fruit juices, it kinda died my hair."
"So you have blonde hair now?" Aang asked, his eyes wide with shock.
"Don't you like it?" she asked, running her fingers through it.
"Just forget it, Aang," Sokka sighed, "girls are like that."
"You would know, being one, right?" Katara asked, with a sly smile.
He looked at her and growled, turning away. "So who was your first kiss, anyway?"
"You said that Sokka and I helped you get it?" Aang said. "But I don't remember setting you up on a date or anything."
"You didn't," Katara said. "You did it by helping me get go to jail."
"When did you …," Aang began searching the farthest reaches of him memory banks for anytime she might have been in prison. "Wait, you said it was after we left King Boomie, right?" She smiled and nodded.
"When did we get her in jail?" Sokka asked.
"It was when we helped you get Haru out of prison, isn't it?" Aang said. The girl nodded again. "It was Haru, wasn't it?" She smiled widely, her teeth shining in the light. "Haru!" Sokka growled. He leapt to his feet, "I can't believe this! I thought I could trust him!"
"Oh come on, its not like I made out with him! I just kissed him!" she snapped.
"So how did it happen?" Aang asked.
"Well, that's a story …"
ZETOPA
She had been captured, by the Fire Nation, thanks for the efforts of her brother and her friend, but it had to happen. It was her fault that Haru was captured, her fault that he had been turned in by the very man he had tried to rescue. She scanned the prison, cautious of the guards. Finally she spied him, and slinked over to him until he spotted her, and hurried up to her.
"What are you doing here?"
"I got the guards thinking I was an Earth Bender," she said, looking around as people sat on the ground, their heads lowered to the ground, their hope vanished. "This is terrible."
"If they don't use our talents for slave labor, they use our muscles as slave labor," he whispered, anger rising a little. "And for those who can't be used a slave labor, they're sent to solitary, never to be seen again."
Katara frowned, "How can they use you for slave labor, if they don't want you to use your powers?"
"They threaten our families, or brainwash those with the most talents to obey them with no challenge to their authority."
"That's horrible," she said, looking down. "There's got to be a way to change this, to free these people."
"Not without getting the people to stand up against the Fire Nation, and that means, getting their hope back."
She looked at him and then turned away. She had hoped to slip out with him during the night, but there were so many people. Katara decided the time was ripe to reshape her plan.
Reshape your plan?
Will you please let me finish talking?
The night was long and cold, and she was very hungry. The food that she had been given was worth giving to an animal, let alone a person. There were nearly twenty other women in the same room with her, all of them wearing rags to protect their bodies from the cold. She stayed awake, listening to the guards march too and fro. The prison yard was a large circle, while the cells were square and small. She could feel the breath of air on her shoulders from her mates, as they tried to keep warm themselves. Their body heat kept her warm, and hers' kept them warm. She laid on her back, listening to the sounds, to the motion outside, to the folding of paperwork and instruments of information. The sky was bitter black, as if the day itself had given up all hope in this horrid land. To the very far left of the prison was a bleak and desperate room. Haru told her that the very weak were dragged off into that room, and the smell of odd gas could be smelt afterwards. Then smoke would rise from the chimney as black as even the might, and those dragged in there, or escorted, or simply volunteered without giving into violence, were never seen again.
It didn't take too much to know what the Fire Nation was doing in there. If the prisoners were worthless, no hope of giving the occupiers what they wanted, then well… she knew they had never had a problem with genocide before, wiping out the Air Benders, with the exception of Aang. Had he not run away, he would have been killed too.
Then the more successful of the talented Earth Benders were sipped off to the Fire Nation, where it was said that odd experiments were being preformed on them. It was all the talk of the cell that night, and apparently many nights before it.
"What kind of experiments?" she had asked, when she was sure that no one guard was listening.
One woman looked at her and healed her breath, "We don't like to talk about it too much, but they say that the Fire Nation is trying to make the perfect soldier, one that possesses all power of all four elements, and obeys every rule without question."
"I heard that after our capital falls, the Fire Lord plans on creating some kind of space program," another woman said.
"A space program?" Katara asked, raising her eyebrows. "The plan on sending people into space?"
"That's silly," a third woman snarled, an elderly woman. "They don't have that kind of technology."
"Did you ever think you would see machines like they used during the last assault on the capital?" a young woman asked. Numerous admitted they did not. "Machines that rolled like large serpents, or snails, that fired flames from large metal cylinders. If they can come up with that, why not a space program?"
"But they don't even have the power to fly, let alone go into space," Katara said. "Are you saying that's going to be next?"
"I heard a general near the north pole was looking into that kind of thing," one f the women said.
If Katara couldn't sleep before, because of worries for getting these people out of here, there was the this new problem. She frowned questions running through her mind. What was she going to do now, how was she going to get them out? What if Aang and Sokka didn't come in time?
The girl sat forward and began an idea, she wasn't sure it would work, but it was the only thing she had going at the moment. Even though her brother and Aang tried to convince her to escape during the night, she stayed, if nothing more than to help these people. When no one was looking, she slipped off, and disappeared into the men's cell.
"Haru, Haru?" she waited for an answer, and finally the boy slinked from the darkness. He looked horrified that she was out, but thankful to see her face again. "Haru, I have a plan."
"Katara, you should tell me about it tomorrow," he said, his voice low.
"No, I have to tell you tonight, timing is everything," she said.
"Katara, please, you don't understand, we really should talk tomorrow."
She frowned and looked at him, "Haru, we have to talk now! I have an escape plan I want to talk to you about, so I can tell my friends what they need to do."
"Katara, he snarled. "Just go on now, we don't have anything to talk about anything. There's no need to escape."
"Haru, what are you talking about, we need to get out of here! The Fire Nation is horrible, terrible, we have to stand up to them while we still have the chance!" She was angry, bitter, and a little confused. Had he lost his nerve, had he been brainwashed? Had he been working for the Fire Nation? "Haru, how could you talk like this? I thought I was your friend."
"Listen to me," he snarled. "You aren't my friend, I barely know you. You and your friends are just freaks," his snarled. "I don't know why I EVER listened to a foolish little girl like you? What was I thinking? I should have just let that old turn coat die under those rocks."
Her chest hurt, and she could feel tears sting her eyes. "Why? Why are you talking to me like this? I got thrown into the prison because of you! I thought you were my friend, I thought … I thought …," her eyes were watering now.
"That I liked you! Well I don't! In fact I should turn you over to them as the person you really are! Then they can catch the Avatar and this stupid war will finally be over!"
Katara shook her head and took a step back. "I can't believe I ever tried to help a jerk like you!" she cried. "I should have just walked away."
"Yes, you should," he said, his voice low and calm. He looked at her and then turned away, listening to the young girl rush off in a fit of sobs and wheezing. He licked his lips and wrapped his hands over his shoulders.
"Don't you think you were being a little too hard on her?" one of the men asked.
He turned to look at his father and looked down at his feet. "I think we both know why I did what I did," he said bitterly. "We were being listened too, though she didn't know it. I couldn't take the risk of putting her into too much danger."
"But in your angry little act you told her that you know she knew the avatar, do you know what they're going to do to her?" he looked at his son and turned away angry. "I brought you up better than that."
Haru looked at his father and back at where Katara had disappeared to. The moon filtered down on his yellow jacket, his brown hair. His heart pounded as he remembered how the Fire Nation squeezed the money from each villager their money. He remembered how hard it was when his mother took her son away from her, just like they had her husband. Her words, Katara's words, about how she had lost her mother, it drove at his heart.
"I told you your abilities Haru, I told you that you should always help those who are in need."
"And I did, and that's why I got caught."
"Now you are in the same position," he said. "Despite what happened, you still know right from wrong. Are you going to let Katara suffer?" It even caught him off guard. For a long time he had thought that he his hope was gone. But this girl who he had met on the court yard, she had brought that hope back.
ZETOPA
The next day she was gone, vanished. They took her just as they had taken him, that's what he had thought, until there was a cry, of an intruder, and the guards raced forward to capture her, and her brother. His father implored her not to fight, and for a moment he had also hoped she would not. Then there was a rumble, and an ocean of coal shout out of the air, covering the sky and the clouds with it.
Haru looked in astonishment as Aang rode that wave and landed, holding his glider in a defensive position. Then he heard her words. "Heres your chance, Earth Benders," holding a pieace of coal. "Take it, your fate is in your own hands." People stepped away from her, their eyes wide with worry of what an insurection would bring. The warden wasn't the kindest of men, and they knew that if they lost, it would be worse than a waiting to go home until the war was over. It would mean certain death.
She stared at them, hoping her words had inspired, and felt crest fallen that all they did was look at her like scared little rabbits. Haru took a step forward, at first going to talk her out, but his father brushed him back, again concerned for the general safety rather than the girl, now that he knew she was unharmed.
The warden mocked her, told her how worthless Haru and the others were, told her what a fool she was for believing in them, and then in arrogance turned to walk away. He didn't even realize that the avatar, the greatest threat to the Fire Nation's war effort was in his own mist! Haru felt his chest burn, and he used his energies to pull three pieces of coal to his hands, swinging them around like marbles, and then flung one of them at the back of the warden's head.
Both Katara, and the warden stared at him. He looked at her for a moment and saw that she understood why he had said what he had the night before. The warden looked at him as if he had gone crazy, like a foolish dog who had bitten his master's hand. Worthless? Hopeless? I'm going to bring you down, old man. His emotions must have poured out from his body, because after he threw the first blow, the others seemed to crowd around them, their faces marked with bitterness, anger and repression too.
The warden struck, but was blocked by his father. The fight had begun.
Okay short chapter, I know, but I couldn't think of how to do this one any other way. The battle scene, which lasts only three or four minutes will be discussed a lot longer, in the next chapter, and of course this kiss will happen then too. And then to the final chapter after that, and one more surprise!