Daylight Moon
Prologue, Part II
108 AG
A face––the flash of a scar––stretched into a boyish smile, 25 this summer and only faintly reminiscent of that glimpse, nearly a decade ago, soft in the green light of Ba Sing Se.
His face, welcoming her back into his palace again and again, and again, between the months she now traveled alone. Who else could she go to? Not Aang, not even when they tentatively began writing to each other again, Aang, who was still healing, for the first time, without her. (Because of her, she used to suddenly remember, wincing awake at night with the thought). Nor her brother, caught up in his life with Suki and the countless nieces and nephews, happily lost to the hustle and bustle of Republic City, the whirl of a new age, as was Toph and the rest of them.
But Zuko–– well, Zuko was alone too.
Mai was sick. Mai had been very, very sick, for a year or so now, wasting away under a mysterious consumption-like disease, without cause, without cure, only certainty of a certain end. For not long after the Fire Lady had first grown ill, Katara had brought spirit water from the North Pole to the palace in Caldera to see what she could do for the love of her friend's life.
The illness, Katara had realized with dread, hands hovering in a blue glow over Mai's unmoving form, was everywhere, in every last cell, from the tip of her tapered fingers to the inside membrane of her stomach. She could do nothing.
Knowing the implications of that, and knowing that everyone knew the implications of that, she had avoided Zuko's face for the rest of her and Aang's visit, an otherwise tense trip that would become their last one together.
By the time Katara's visits alone began, Mai was too sick to see anyone except the royal doctors and her husband. Zuko certainly never spoke of it. But she could see the creases around his eyes that only seemed to grow each time she came. How, like clockwork, he would excuse himself when the moon had risen to a certain point in the sky, and disappear back into the royal chambers, sometimes with a physician by his side, sometimes not. The way he had taken to staring into the distance when he thought no one was looking.
Once upon a time, Katara thought, maybe she would have tried to therapize it through with him. Talking, she would have prefaced in her most motherly tone, always helps. Tell me how you feel, Zuko. I think I know how you feel.
And maybe she did know. Just, some things are too lonely to be said aloud.
And so maybe that began it all, she thought.
A quiet recognition of their partner griefs, a common thread of loss, both their decade's companionship gone. How it bore a refracted resemblance to their very first connection, all those moons ago, under the emerald glow of the crystal caves, quiet revelations of their shared, foundational mother-pain.
All her life, so bound by her wounds, Katara thought.
Never the reason. Only the catalyst.
Her, stepping off her balloon, small in a way she'd never been before. Holding her crossbody bag, her only companion these days, close to her chest. Looking around for someone.
Him, there on the dock. Dressed in his simplest robes, absent of his usual entourage. Tired, expectant, a thin frame against the setting sun. Waiting for her.
The wordless way, each and every time, she ran, and fell into him with the ease of habit and familiarity. Bag thrown to the ground, Fire Lord propriety forgotten, the warmth folding around them like an old friend.
Again and again, until her life settled into a new pattern: months-long stints in villages, then a visit to Caldera, then another village, then Caldera, again and again and again. Rinse, repeat, without thought, until two summers had gone by. And then it came.
It was a quiet afternoon in late September. The leaves in the royal courtyard were just beginning to turn golden, beginning to fall in a scatter across the lawn.
The Fire Lord and Master Katara were sitting across from each other, playing a game of Pai Sho, a recently acquired hobby that was just the newest addition to the List of Evidence Zuko Was Trying to Morph Into Uncle Iroh that Suki and Toph had drawn up during their last Gaang dinner (the first one, everyone noted, that both Aang and Katara had attended in some time. It had only been as awkward as expected, which most took to be a good sign.)
Zuko sput down the winning tile: the red rose.
"Hah!" Zuko threw his arms up, golden eyes widening with triumph. He looked up at her, the corner of his lip turning up into a grin, uncharacteristically free of the Fire Lord stateliness he had come to assume in nearly every waking moment, even when it was just the two of them, as it was more and more, whenever Katara was here–– reading his council scrolls over dinner, her poking fun at the stuffy language of the Fire Lord Court and him trying not to smile; dueling until they both glistened with sweat in the courtyard his frazzled attendant had hired an earthbender on call for the sole task of putting back together; slipping out to the city in disguise, on his rare days off that seemed to coincide more and more with her stays in Caldera, giddy and almost silly in the black uniforms from their Southern Raiders mission that invariably earned odd looks from the street merchants and shop-owners. Uniforms they'd both kept and used throughout their late teens and, now, their twenties, every time they wanted to forget they were the Fire Lord and Master Katara for a few hours. One of thos senseless things one solemnly holds onto.
Usually, Katara would have playfully scowled back, thrown a teasing but snide comment that would have then made him challenge her to a match, let's battle it out the old-fashioned way, their matching propensities for competitiveness ignited.
Usually, Katara would have.
But that afternoon, instead, reason unknown, she just looked at him, her friend of ten years.
Taking him in.
The way a few strands of hair escaped from his topknot, falling and framing the gold of his eyes, currently sparkling with amusement in the afternoon light, at her. The outline of his face, sharper now, its old casual boyishness. The black stubble along the side of his jaw, so prickly-looking she could feel them under her curve of the hollow in his throat–– how under the red of his robe, his shoulders broadened and rose into a perfectly royal posture, the awkward slouch of his teenage days long gone.
This man, with a face like home.
(How much had she noticed, quietly, without noticing she had noticed?)
Slowly, so slowly, a scene in the snow began to rise in the back of her mind.
One she thought was long dead, dead years ago, when she had made Aang swallow the fact that her love was not the love he thought it was and his love, well, his love was always first first to the world he had been born to serve, and she couldn't live like that forever, she said, both their faces wet in the misty Southern Air Temple rain.
A face lifting a veil, familiar and different.
A feeling, rising in her chest.
An hour later, when she had retired to her guest room, heart still thumping, a dignitary dressed in the blue garb of the Southern Water Tribe appeared at her door, bearing the insignia of Water Chief Hakoda.
Katara, you are the new Southern Water Tribe Chief.
Her reign began without ceremony, with none of the elaborate fanfare her wedding would one day have. The news had reverberated quickly around the world, drowning out any gossip still echoing after her breakup from Aang three years ago, and then, just as quickly, become yesterday's news.
It had long been assumed, Katara realized, that she would lead one day. Something new swelled in her.
Her days were long, but they passed in a flash of the same things–– pacifying this hunting company with a tax cut. Imploring one of Pakku's thin-lipped proteges (one, if she recalled correctly, that she had bested in her third day of training as a 14-year-old) to fund five more scholarships for the Southern Waterbending Academy. Sitting through council meetings and state dinners with Chief Arnook and various Earth Kingdom dignitaries until her back began to ache like she was already Gran Gran's age. Staying up so late into the night that her seal-wax candle almost burnt to a nib, reading and re-reading centuries of tribal law so she could begin the painstaking process of amending them to fit this new world. Sharply schooling any Northern envoys still entrenched in the sexist traditions of their culture, in a tone that once would have made her blush instead of them. But not anymore.
Because Katara knew, like never before––even when meeting with certain dignitaries she'd rather just ice to the ceiling and call it a day––that this was her birthright. It always had been.
How ironic it was that from a point more distant than she'd ever been, she was beginning to understand Zuko.
Chief Katara, he addresses her, in his first letter since her coronation. She smiled wryly at the foreign phrase, scrawled in a familiar print on a familiar letterhead.
When she was travelling from village to village, she used to write him letter after letter after letter, scribbling furiously into the night. No one else responded so meticulously to the long, cramped accounts of her projects that blurred into rants, the black ink smeared with tears, or maybe it was sweat.
No one else understood what it was to try and love an endless parade of strangers. In the right way, the most useful way, and assuredly, the most thankless way. So she wrote him incessantly. And Zuko wrote her back. Letters full of steady advice that struck a thoughtful balance between Iroh-isms and the sober practicality a decade on the throne had beat into him.
This new letter was, inaugurally, from one leader to another and filled with official things–– a request to trade new summer crops for a shipment of whale blubber; updated news on a new trove of Water Tribe artifacts being shipped back from the Capital's museum. And then, at the very bottom:
Katara, I wish I was there to see your coronation. You know this already, but you will be a great Chief.
I miss you more than you know.
She held the letter close to her chest, the paper clenched tight in her fist. As if somehow, she finally squash the ache there, and with it, the face in the back of her mind playing and playing like a broken movie, carried all the way back from Caldera weeks ago and that she had tried, without use, to quell.
Katara stared into the darkness beyond her lamp. Then, slowly, she dropped her hand, letting the parchment paper flutter down the side of her desk.
She would write back another time.
She never did.
More of his letters came. Katara never wrote back.
Maybe, she didn't know what to say to the small snatches of his life scribbled between official notes like a casual afterthought, that, just a few months ago, (how much longer it felt!) she would have heard, even shared in, over breakfast in Iroh's old tea room; at a picnic next to the Turtle Duck Pond; walking hand-in-hand with Kiyi and Tom Tom through the bustling morning market.
The Kyoshi Warriors are in town. Ty Lee was even approved by the doctors to visit Mai this time. It's been nice to have them otherwise too. My usual guards never talk to me, if you remember… they only ever bow in my direction, although that's centuries of training for you, I guess.
Kiyi has a boyfriend and she won't tell me who. But I'll find out. I am the Fire Lord.
Uncle is opening a Jasmine Dragon branch in the Capital. He wants to be closer to home, he says.
Maybe it was just that.
His letters began to dwindle as the weeks since her coronation stretched into months, and then, before she knew it, a year.
The face in the snow slipped further and further in her mind, until it was barely there at all, Katara told herself until she began to believe it, ignoring the faint thing that twinged in her chest.
And then, one day: Mai's been a lot better. She's up and been able to get around, for a few months now.
We miss you.
Katara read the short, scrawled lines again, and then twice more.
She motioned to the attendant (she never used to just motion at people) to the side of her chair, who stepped forward.
"Mai –– the Fire Lady is better." She paused. "Arra, would you please prepare a proper gift basket and send it her court in the royal palace? " She tilted her head slightly. "There's still so much to get through before the council meeting tomorrow so I… I trust you can take care of it. Thank you."
She folded up Zuko's letter, and, after tucking it between her robes, turned back to her desk.
112 AG
When the letters have stopped, and Katara has been Chief for two short years now, it's Arra who brings the last piece of news.
"The Fire Lady has passed away, Chief Katara." Katara looked up from where she was leaning against her bedroom window, reading a scroll marked with the Northern Tribe insignia. "Yesterday, in her sleep..." Arra tilted her head slightly. "I will prepare and send a token of condolence on behalf of the Tribe. Will you be attending the funeral, my lady? Should I send word?"
Katara's face was blank in the moonlight.
"I can't miss this upcoming summit with the Northern Chief. We are the closest we've been in months of negotiations to securing his funding for the new waterbending school, as well as that revised trade deal I drafted after yesterday's council meeting. His nephews, who are inclined towards my side on both, will be there. I need–– I'm sure Zuko–– the Fire Lord would understand. I-–" Katara paused.
In the silence, Arra inclined her head, before stepping out. Left alone, the Southern Water Chief returned to her scroll, back to the neat paragraphs of characters crisp and black on the page.
Outside her window, the moon was beginning to set. A small dot against the length of the sky.