The trek south to Gaoling leads to an increase in heat and humidity, something that Zuko is used to but doesn't necessarily enjoy. His shirt sticks to his skin no matter how often Katara pulls the sweat away, but his pale complexion will crisp up like bacon if he takes it off. Cicadas drone in the trees around the path that will lead them to the affluent city, their cacophonous sound exacerbating Zuko's increasing headache. He's tired and hot and would do anything to take a break in a cold river, but they must press on if they want to get to Gaoling within a reasonable amount of time. The journey from Omashu to Gaoling should take about a month; the thought of two more weeks of the incessant summer sun and stifling humidity makes him want to lie down in the dirt and—
"What's that?" Katara's voice crackles with disuse, the heat too oppressive for them to engage in much conversation. She's pointing off to the distance where a grouping of trees has just come into view.
"It looks like a forest." Aang sounds relaxed, but something about the forest niggles at the back of Zuko's mind. He pulls his pack around and rummages through it looking for the map.
"It's not on the map."
"What?" Aang and Katara crowd in around him, the moist air making their skin sticky where it touches his.
"There's no forest or anything like that on the map." Zuko retraces their path from Omashu with his finger. "We're on the right road, but…" The three of them look back up at the trees and a ghostly chill slithers down Zuko's spine.
"Well, we don't really have a choice but to keep going, right?" As much as he hates to admit it, Aang is right. The three Othered share a look, and Aang shrugs his shoulders in a feigned nonchalance. "If we're on the right road, it should lead right through and we'll be fine."
Without any other options, they continue on, the trees ahead growing thicker and larger, eventually spanning a massive distance in either direction.
"There's no way in hell that something this big wouldn't be marked on the map." Something about the trees gives Zuko a bad feeling, and the heat on his skin turns cold.
"There's something really creepy about it," Katara says and looks up at him, wide blue eyes hesitant and worried. "I don't know what it is, but I don't like it."
"I feel it too." Aang's mouth is a hard slash across his face. "But we don't have a choice. We have to go through, it's way too big to walk around."
The trio steel themselves as they approach the forest, an earthy smell carried on the wet air wafting over them. When they first pass through the trees, the forest seems normal enough, but the further they go, the thicker the canopy gets, and the wetter the ground becomes. Soon, he realizes why the terrain is changing so rapidly.
"I think it's a swamp." Zuko's nose itches as the earthy smell turns sour, and mud squelches under their feet with every step. The road is disintegrating before them, what before had been easily identifiable dirt now barely a broken path. "And we're losing the road."
"Maybe we should turn around." Katara turns back towards where they had come from and stops abruptly. "Guys, where's the road?"
"What? We're walking on it—" Zuko and Aang turn around as well, and his heart sinks as he realizes that the dirt path they had been following is completely gone, thick foliage grown over where they had just come from. "Wait, what? We just came through there!"
"We stayed on the path the whole time..." Aang's voice is small, the group's confusion exemplified in his tone. "It can't just be gone."
"Well clearly it is gone." He can hear the anxiety creeping into Katara's voice, and lays a comforting hand between her shoulder blades. "What is this place?"
He tries to keep his voice calm and hide his own trepidation. "I don't know." A worried look is shared between the three of them, and Katara grips her elbows as a visible chill runs through her. "Let's just keep going."
The path in front of them diminishes to almost nothing over the course of a few hours, flora spilling over before them at every step. Vines and brush cover the places where they had just stepped moments before, the strange swamp covering their tracks as they move towards its innards. The dying light of the sun coaxes all kinds of bugs out into the air, their buzzing incessant in his ears no matter how much he tries to bat the damn things away. Darkness descends upon them quickly, strange noises made by unknown creatures prompting them to stop for the night. Katara does her best to draw as much water as she can out of the branches they use for the fire, but Zuko still has to keep an eye on it as it crackles and smokes excessively to make sure it doesn't die out.
Eventually they lay down to sleep, the three of them staying close to one another to ward off the creepiness of the swamp. Zuko would be happier about sleeping next to Katara again if it weren't for the cold anxiety that weaves its way through his body, and he makes sure to keep his scabbard slung over his shoulder. It feels like he's just fallen asleep when he jerks awake, the distinct feeling of wrongness shivering through him before he's gripped tightly by something around his ankle and yanked forcefully into the trees. He sees Aang and Katara come to the same fate and get dragged off into separate directions before his vision is clouded with twigs and ferns and mud. He scrabbles at the thick roots that protrude from the wet ground to no avail, every handhold slipping through his fingers before he can get a firm grip. Muddy, smelly swamp water soaks through his shirt, underbrush scraping his arms and face as he's continually pulled through the swamp until he stops abruptly. He raises up on his elbows, panting and confused at where he is and what he's supposed to do now. What the fuck just happened?
Slowly he gets to his feet, his body sore and probably bruising from his violent journey along the swamp floor, and tries to assess his situation. His clothes and hair are disgusting, dirt and mud and leaves sticking to every part of him, the smell so strong that he almost gags, and he does his best to peel or brush off what he can as he walks. Without any sense of direction, he walks a random path that he hopes will lead him back to Aang and Katara. Every part of the swamp that he passes through looks exactly the same as the last, and he can feel tendrils of panic crawling up his legs as he is forced to continue.
Some time later he comes upon an area that's a little clearer than the rest, the ground a little drier and more even, enough space in the canopy allowing the moon to shine down and dapple the space in soft light. His feet are sore and his head is pounding, and just as he's about to sit down the air before him shimmers. Stunned, he rubs his eyes, chalking the strange phenomenon up to dehydration and lack of sleep until it happens again. Something begins to take shape in front of him, and his feet stumble backwards of their own accord as a strange mist coalesces into the shape of a person. The person— a woman— turns around to face him, and his heart almost stops in his chest, his blood running cold at the familiar face.
"Zuko..." the apparition's voice rings out, ethereal and fading at the edges. "What happened?" Her voice is just like he remembers, concern and love drenching her tone as she bends down onto one knee, reaching out to something he can't see.
"Mom?" He sounds like a child again, his voice breaking as tears gather in his good eye.
"Oh, my love, it's alright." The ghost of his mother pulls something invisible to her, cradling it to her chest. "Your father doesn't hate you, he just... gets angry sometimes." He sees bruises around her wrists when her flowing robe falls back, marks he had missed when he was a child and had been more focused on his own pain. "Don't say that Zuko." She rests her head on what he has to assume is his invisible form, her eyes full of pain and dread. "You'll get it some day, I know you will. Where's your sister?" His heart lurches in his chest at the thought of Azula, still stuck at home with their tyrant of a father, still enduring his abuse in Zuko's place. "Let's go find her, okay? We can all go sit in the garden for a while." She stands up from her place on the ground, reaching down to take his younger self's hand with a soft smile, and turns her head up to look directly into his eyes.
"Mom..." The tears make tracks in the dirt on his face and a pathetic sob rips from his throat as his mother approaches him.
For a wild moment he thinks she might embrace him, that he'll get to feel her hold him like she had all those years ago, but she walks right up to him and into him before evaporating into the night air. He grips his hair in tight fists, clenching his teeth against the sorrow rising like waves in his gut, breath a sharp staccato as it heaves from his chest. The violence of the reaction his mother's ghost has pulled from him is startling, and he has to swallow the bile that claws at the back of his throat around gasping breaths. The world spins around him, a different kind of buzzing in his ears and panic gripping his heart like a vice, and at a loss for what to do he begins to walk again, quickly breaking into a dead sprint.
He pushes himself to keep going even when his lungs burn, trying desperately to outrun his nightmares, to leave the sharp edges of his memories as far back in the swamp as he can. The grime that had clung to his face after he had been ripped from his slumber into this godforsaken hellscape of a swamp smears as he wipes roughly at the tears still falling from his undamaged eye. Eventually he stops, having no choice but to catch his breath before he passes out. The memory of his mother is visceral and stinging; he hasn't seen her since the day they set her funeral pyre alight, the image seared into his mind at the tender age of ten. He remembers clutching Azula's shaking hand tightly in his own, his father's dead eyes flashing with the light from the flames. The evocation of hanging up his white mourning clothes, knowing that things were about to get so much worse and that there was nothing he could do to stop it, is as vivid in his mind today as it was the day it happened more than sixteen years ago.
A rustling in the brush to his side snaps him out of his thoughts, and just as he spins to face the noise a flash of blue and yellow slams into him, knocking him bodily to the ground and pushing all the air from his lungs.
"Oh, Zuko!" Aang's voice rings clearly in the small amount of light that the presumably rising sun throws into the swamp, and his breath rushes back to him in a gasp as the younger man and Katara disentangle themselves from him.
"What happened?" he asks after he catches his breath, and Aang clasps his hand and hauls him up off the ground. "Are you guys okay?" The younger man doesn't answer, instead pulling Zuko and Katara into a crushing hug.
"Where were you guys? I was looking everywhere for you!" Katara's voice is high and nervous, and Zuko swears that her glowing eyes are rimmed with pink and that her face is rosier than usual. Was she crying?
"I don't know where I was." It's the truth even if it feels like a lie when he says it. Katara looks into his eyes, and he knows she sees the same evidence of distress as clearly on his face as it is on hers.
"I was following a girl." Both of their heads snap to look at Aang, who's rubbing the back of his face and looking sheepish.
"A girl? What girl?" He's simultaneously glad that Aang hadn't had a painful vision like him and jealous that the monk escaped the harrowing experience he (and by the looks of it, Katara) had.
"I don't know. I didn't know her." The three of them stand in silence for a minute, confused and tired, before more rustling startles them.
Zuko drops into a defensive stance, the others mirroring him right before a mess of vines shoot out towards them. His fire isn't very effective in the humidity, and he thanks his lucky stars that he'd kept his dao strapped to his back even as he slept as he pulls them out of their sheath. Katara is at the advantage with plenty of water at her disposal to send in sharp discs towards the vines, and she slices through them like butter. Aang is effective in using his air to blast the vines back, giving Zuko time to hack at them with his swords, but the vines keep coming, and he's feeling the exhaustion numb his arms when the vines suddenly stop.
"Wait!" A disembodied voice comes from deeper in the swamp, and the trio stand at the ready, anxious for whoever will appear from the brush. It turns out, however, that the man that steps forward doesn't look like much of a threat; he's portly and clad in nothing but a dingy loin cloth, and has his hands up as he approaches them. But his most startling feature is the soft glow of his hazel eyes.
"You're Othered!" Aang's breathless voice prompts the three of them to stand down, and the man comes closer.
"I didn't know you guys were like me. Sorry I attacked you like that; we're not used to seein' outsiders in the swamp."
"That was you? With the vines?" Zuko asks, and the man nods.
"Yep. My gift lets me control the vines and plants. The name's Huu!" He smiles, showing off a few gaps in his mouth where teeth should be. "Y'all are a strange bunch. You don't look nothin' alike."
"We're all from different places." Katara takes the lead to explain their situation. "We're looking for The Source."
"The Source, huh?" Huu rubs his short beard with a dirty hand. "Come with me." He leads them through the swamp, the slope steadily increasing as they walk. "Everyone in the tribe that's born with a gift is sent to the banyan-grove tree. It's not The Source, but it's the next closest thing." They emerge from the brush at the base of a mountainous tree, the trunk four times as wide as Zuko is tall at the very least. "The banyan-grove tree is blessed, and its roots make up the entirety of the swamp. You see, everything in here is connected, just like the entire world."
"The entire world?" Aang sounds mystified, but Zuko is more confused than anything.
"What does this have to do with The Source?" He hates to be rude, but he's sweaty and smelly and there's dirt caked behind his ears, and he really just wants out of this damned swamp.
"The Source is just like the banyan-grove tree, but on a much bigger scale. It connects the world and everything in it, breathing life into everything we know."
"We're trying to find it so that we can protect it." Katara lays a hand on one of the giant roots protruding from the ground. "Someone's trying to destroy it."
"If something were to happen to The Source, the whole world would shrivel up like a plant without water," Huu says, his voice is dire and serious. "I don't know who'd be stupid enough to try to hurt it, but you can't let that happen."
"Huu, you said the banyan-grove tree is blessed, right?" Aang asks, and Huu nods. "I saw a vision of a girl earlier. Was that the tree- or maybe The Source- trying to tell me something?"
"The banyan-grove tree is known to show visions to some people. It shows us visions that remind us that everything is connected; visions of those we've loved and those we've lost. Time, death, space, they're all illusions meant to separate us. But those we love never truly leave us."
"I saw my mom." A jolt goes through Zuko as Katara speaks, her voice small and watery.
"I saw my mother too." Her head whips around so she can look into his eyes, shining blue meeting bright gold in a wordless exchange.
"But I don't know the girl I saw."
"Well, time is an illusion, after all, so I'd think that the girl is someone that you'll meet some time in the future."
"Maybe she's the Othered we're looking for!" Aang turns to Zuko and Katara. "Bumi said it was a girl. Maybe The Source is trying to help us!"
"Makes sense to me." Huu shrugs, but Zuko's voice is still stuck in his throat. "Let me bring you to the tribe and get some food in you. And maybe a bath too!"
Huu does indeed bring them back to his tribe, a group of friendly, if not dirty, men and women who wear leaves as hats and eat bugs for dinner. Apparently the group had somehow found their packs that had been left behind when the vines had dragged them off earlier, which Zuko is unendingly grateful for. Although they're strange, their hospitality is greatly appreciated, and Zuko takes advantage of the clean water the tribe has on hand to scrub the dirt out of all the places it had coagulated on his body and rinse his clothes as best he can before changing. When he finally feels like he's rid himself of the stench of swamp mud he joins the tribe around their campfire, infinitely glad that he had stocked up on Yangchen's specialty scented soaps during their brief visit, even if the cinnamon makes his stomach clench as it brings back memories of his mother.
Katara's admission of her vision has been in the back of his mind all day, and he vows to ask her about it if they can find some time alone. Their friendship is pretty much back to normal, minus the playful flirting they had indulged in that had sent his heart rate skyrocketing. But still, sometimes the air between them fills with tension, and Zuko tries as hard as he can to forget how soft her lips are so that he doesn't start staring. He knows that she's caught him looking at her before, mostly when she's doing simple things like combing through her hair in the morning, and he doesn't think the embarrassment will ever lessen. It's moments like those when he realizes how far gone he truly is, when that word he's been trying not to think about bubbles up in his throat so powerfully that he has to get up and walk away before he blurts it out like word vomit.
He does end up catching her by herself later that evening. The people of the swamp had been gracious enough to let them stay for a night and even offered to guide them out tomorrow, but he had known that sleep wouldn't come easily to him tonight. Apparently it wasn't coming easy to Katara either; she sits next to the smouldering coals of the fire with her knees pulled to her chest, and Zuko drops down beside her without making a sound.
"My mother died when I was eight." Her quiet voice gently breaks the silence of the night after a few minutes. "A group of bandits or thieves or something came into our village and saw me with her. I was too little to know better than to look strangers in the eye." A sad smile pulls across her face, but quickly disappears as she continues. "They came to our home later that day. My dad was off hunting, and Gran Gran was doing something in town with Sokka, I don't know what. They wanted me. I didn't understand at the time why they would, but I do now." He remembers how scared she had been the first time they had run into a group of thugs, how she had trembled sitting with him for hours in that tree in the forest. "She sent me out the back door to run into town before they saw me so that I could get help, but by the time I got back it was too late. They were searching the house when we showed up. They didn't even move her body before—" she stops herself, dashing tears from her eyes and sniffling quietly. "That was the only time I've ever seen anyone from my village outside of my family look at me with anything other than fear or disgust. And I hated it. I didn't want their pity, and I still don't. I picked up all of the chores my mother had done and did them myself. My dad started going on longer hunts, the grief of losing mom pushing him away from our home. And I get it, I really do," her voice wobbles, and Zuko puts his arm around her shoulder to guide her gently into his side. "But it sucked. I'm over it now I guess, but it was all so fucked up, Zuko. I had to help scrub my own mother's blood from the floorboards of our home. And she died because of me!" Katara dissolves into silent sobs, and he wraps his arms around her as best he can. Salty tears soak into and through his shirt as she cries, his heart cracking along all of its fault lines as she breaks.
"I'm so sorry Katara." The tears have stopped, and she leans against his side as he rubs her arm. "Your mother was incredibly brave, and I'm sure she was a wonderful woman. What's her name?"
"Kya. And she was." Katara sniffles and rubs her nose on her sleeve. "Do you want to talk about your mom?" His heart stutters in his chest; does he want to talk about her? When was the last time he even said her name?
"My mother was everything to me. My father was cruel to Azula and I, but my mother took the brunt of the abuse so that we didn't have to. I didn't realize until after she died how much she actually dealt with." He swallows hard and tries to steady his voice. "She got really sick, really fast. She was an herbalist, and they told us she had poisoned herself by accident, but Azula and I never bought it. My grandfather had gotten really sick and died not long before she did. Azula and I always thought my father had made our mother poison him." He couldn't tell her why, not yet. "Maybe she felt guilty about doing it, or maybe she was scared of being caught. Or maybe she just couldn't take living there anymore, I don't know. She got sick and died within a week. I was ten." He knows he could stop there, but it's been so long since he's talked to anyone about his mother, and it feels like he's cut a wound to drain the pressure: painful, but cathartic. "Things got so much worse after she died. I tried to protect Azula as much as I could, but she was always my father's favorite. For a while I was scared that she'd turn out just like him, but…" He forces a deep breath into and out of his lungs, and Katara takes his shaking hand in hers. "When I was sixteen I got in a fight with my dad. Like, a huge screaming match. He never let me leave our house because he didn't want people knowing that his son was Othered, and he had caught me trying to sneak out. He—" The left side of his face tingles and he wrestles with the flashbacks that try to overcome him.
"You don't have to tell me if you don't want to, Zuko." Her voice is a balm, soothing and cool against the heat of his anger and shame.
"I want to." The glowing blue of her eyes is comforting, and for the first time since he was ten he feels safe. "He held me down and threw boiling water on my face." Katara gasps beside him. "He wanted to blind me, or at least fuck up my eyes enough that I'd keep them shut. But Azula came out of nowhere and pushed me, and it only got my left eye. She has a nasty burn on her arm from the water, and my father was furious. She was angry at me for a while because of her punishment." He blinks back the memory of carrying her into his bed in the infirmary, her limp and bloody body small in his bed when he curled around her. "But it made her realize how fucked up our father really is."
"Zuko..." He doesn't notice the tears on his face until she wipes them away with the pad of her thumb. "I'm so sorry you went through all of that. That's horrible."
"It is what it is." He can't acknowledge how bad it was; it'll only make it hurt more.
"What's your mother's name?" Katara's question feels like a lance in his heart; his mother's name is one of those things that he keeps locked away so deep in his mind that pulling it out leaves a gaping hole in its wake.
"Ursa." He can't tell if he wants to say more, so he forces everything else he feels back down and tries to move on. "Sorry I dumped all that on you. I've never really talked about it with anyone."
"Don't ever apologize for coming to me for support." She snakes her arm around his waist. "I'm here for you Zuko. You're my best friend, I'll always be here for you."
"I'm your only friend," he quips, and she shoves him playfully, a quiet chuckle spilling from his lips in response.
It's so strange to him that he can be crying in Katara's arms one minute and smiling with her the next. They sit for a long while, the moon hanging high above them in the dark sky. It had stung a little when she had called him her best friend, but the more he thinks about it, the more he realizes that he could never ask for more. He wants more, but if this is all their relationship can ever be, he'll take it any day. She's his best friend too; she's the only person he will ever spill his guts to like this, the only person he'd ever even want to know his past. The secrets he keeps gnaw at him from the inside, burning a hole in him like acid, but he can't tell her everything. Not yet.