"Split up?" Katara looks at Sokka's stoic face with wide eyes. "What do you mean 'split up'?"
"Exactly what I said." He doesn't sound happy about it; if anything, he sounds almost weary. "Our group is too big, we're too easy to follow."
"He's right." Zuko looks down to meet her anxiety with soft gold. "There's no way we'll lose the army in a group this size. We're an easy target right now." The tension between her brows is straining- a harbinger of the headache she'll have later tonight.
"So we don't have a choice in whether we split or not?" Ty Lee's voice is weak and small, and it's clear that she isn't a fan of breaking their group up either.
"It's our best option right now." Suki keeps her voice soft, but the way she says the words makes it known that the topic is not up for debate.
Silence falls upon the group, but Katara's thoughts have never been so loud. The idea of separating from the group churns her stomach, and uncertainty crests like a wave inside of her. Zuko senses her anxiety (or maybe he can see it in the folds of her tunic and the curls of her hair, maybe it peeks out from under her lashes to shine out into the chill night) and lays a heavy, warm hand on her back. She melts into him and her stomach calms. Her head drops to his shoulder, the heat seeping through his clothes warming her cheek, and his hand rubs a soothing rhythm up and down her spine.
"So," Sokka continues with a heavy sigh, "I think it's best if we split up into three groups. Suki, Toph and I will be one group. Aang, Ty Lee, and Mai will be—"
"No way," Mai interjects. "I'm not being in a group with the peppy twins over there." She tilts her head towards the two Othered.
"Mai!" Ty Lee looks stricken, and Katara is surprised to see Mai's face soften as a result.
"Ty, you know I love you." Her face doesn't look very loving, save for the slight upward tilt of her thin brows. "But you two are way too optimistic for me. I'd go crazy after three days."
"Alright, fine." Sokka scrubs his face with a tired hand. "Toph, you go with Aang and Ty Lee then, and Mai can come with us."
"What," Toph gestures with her arm in the general direction of Aang and Ty Lee. "Now I have to get stuck with them?"
"What's so bad about that?" Aang bristles at Toph's complaint. It's rare to see him frustrated, but Katara knows that it's best to avoid getting him angry.
"Guys," Katara says to quell the impending argument. "Why doesn't one of you just come with us?" She assumes that her and Zuko will be travelling together, and as much as she may want to travel with him alone, she also very much does not want to do that.
"No." Mai and Toph answer in unison, their deadpan refusal drawing a strangled noise out of Katara's throat.
She crosses her arms and pointedly doesn't look at Zuko. "Okay, rude."
"Nah, I'll go with Twinkletoes and the ballerina." Toph spits over her shoulder. "You guys aren't that bad, I just wanted to rile you up." Almost everyone groans at Toph's antics.
"Now that we're done playing around," Sokka says with a pointed glare at Toph (who can't see it anyway). She responds with a loud sniff. "We'll have to reorganize our packs so that we can split up tomorrow morning. Katara, you and Zuko should go southeast for a while before turning back north to the Serpent's Pass. Toph, Ty Lee and Aang, you guys should go north, and Suki, Mai, and I will go straight through. The three of us aren't Othered, so if we get stopped, we have the best chance of getting away without actually having to fight."
"I guess that makes sense." Aang shifts under the blanket draped around his and Ty Lee's shoulders. "But won't this make the journey to The Source even longer?"
"We'll have to ditch some of our stuff so we can travel lighter." Sokka rubs his forehead with a tired hand. "Hopefully that'll make up for some of the time we'll lose."
"Better safe than sorry," Suki chimes in, and the group nods. "We better get started if we want to be ready in the morning."
The eight of them pore through their collective supplies, sorting things into different groups based on their importance. There's only four tents between them, and Katara's face gets hot when she realizes that she'll be sharing one with Zuko for the first time since they found Aang. If there are any gods up there, please help me. A burning anticipation makes a home in her gut, and every time she brushes Zuko's hand with her own the fire flares inside of her and sends blood rushing to her cheeks. At least I know I'll be warm.
The moon sits high among the stars when they've finally finished, and Katara retires to her tent, doing her best to enjoy the last night of solitary sleep she'll get for a while. Part of her wants to stay awake, to stretch this time for as long as she can so that she doesn't have to face the next morning and the rising sun in Zuko's eyes. But an equally strong- and much more devious- part of her wants to fast forward so that she can feel Zuko's heat as she drifts to sleep, so that they can share the intimate space like they had in the sandy room in Misty Palms Oasis or in the shabby hotel in Ba Sing Se. She can almost feel his hands on her back, his calloused fingers dragging along her skin when they had slept so close, but not nearly close enough. Her mind runs away from her, and instead of stifling her feelings and pushing them all away, she loosens her mental restraints and lets go.
There's an itch in her veins that wants her to crawl into Zuko's arms and map out his life in the lines of his hands, using the whorls of his fingerprints as a compass. She wants to slip under his skin and make a home in the spaces between his ribs, to curl around his spine and watch him shiver under her touch. She wants to count the stubbly hairs on his jaw with her lips and hear him call out for her in the newborn light of morning. She wants to trace each and every scar, to thread the needle and guide his hand as they stitch him up in all the places he's ripped. She wants to lay with him under the light of the moon, to take all of their worries in their hands and throw them up into the sky and watch them shrink into glistening stars. She wants, she wants, she wants, and all she can do is hope that he wants her too. Katara has never been in love, and even if she had, she doesn't think it could ever compare to what she's feeling now.
Xx
The morning finds her groggy with heavy limbs and cold toes. She squeezes her eyes against the rising sunlight, but it seeps in through the corners no matter how hard she tries to stay in the dark. Crisp autumn air fills her lungs with a sharpness that comes along with the colder season, winter lingering just around the corner, and the invigorating chill prompts her to stretch and rise from her bedroll. At least keeping warm won't be an issue when travelling with Zuko; they had all been taking advantage of his warmer-than-usual body temperature. A strange thrill swirls in her stomach when she thinks about being alone with him, and she presses the heels of her palms into her eyes in an effort to banish the troublesome thoughts.
She walks out of her tent not long after waking, finding all of her friends already rifling through their packs or sitting around the fire eating breakfast. Sokka shovels food into his mouth and uses his spoon to point to various places on the map for Aang; Suki and Zuko sort through supplies and make last minute changes to each party's load; Toph sits between Mai and Ty Lee while they eat with her feet propped up on a raised dais of rock as she cackles along with Ty Lee's giggles. Katara looks around at the hodgepodge group she calls her family and friends and tries to memorize each detail of the scene before her. It's unlikely that they'll all end up at the Serpent's Pass unharmed, and she tries desperately not to think about what she would do if any of them didn't show up at all.
"Hey." In a blink Zuko is in front of her. "Are you okay?" The heat from his hand on her shoulder leeches through her clothes and warms her very bones.
"Yeah." His raised brow is enough to tell her that he's not convinced. "Really, I'm alright. I'm just nervous I guess."
"It's all going to work out," he tries to reassure her. He keeps his face smooth, but she can see the tendrils of anxiety that curl behind the shining gold of his eyes. "We're all a lot stronger now than we were even just a few months ago. We'll be fine." Some kind of gravity pulls her into him until her cheek is pressed to his heart and her arms wrap around his waist, and when she's secure in his warm embrace she feels like everything might actually be alright. She counts the beats under her ear, the cadence even and warm, and commits the sound to memory.
They walk together to get their breakfast, sitting side by side with warm bowls cradled in already red fingers— well, hers are red at least— while the others chit chat idly around them.
"Hey Zuko." Aang appears before them. "Sokka wants to talk to you." The two men switch places, and Katara wills her eyes to unstick themselves from Zuko's back.
"Are you excited to travel with Ty Lee?" she asks; she needs to distract herself, and she's always had a knack for giving great advice to others (even if she can't take it herself).
"I am, yeah." Aang smiles, small and soft. "But I'm nervous too. I don't really want to split up." Wide grey eyes glow as they meet with hers.
"Me neither." Both of their shoulders slump. "But we'll be okay," she regurgitates Zuko's words and hopes that they sound convincing. "Plus, you'll have Toph with you."
"That's true." There's silence for a beat. "How do you feel about travelling with Zuko?"
She should have known that he'd ask. "I'm… nervous. But a little excited too." Aang returns her shy smile with more enthusiasm than she can muster. "I've been thinking about what you've all been saying to me, and I think I'm going to try to talk to him about… everything."
"That's great!" he exclaims, and she's surprised that he manages to keep his voice relatively low despite his enthusiasm. "You won't regret it."
"Yeah." She looks over at her brother and Zuko as they stand over the map, and is almost disturbed by how well she can imagine Zuko becoming a part of her family. "I hope not."
Xx
They stand in their three groups, looking between each other with eyes bright with barely concealed anxiety. Even Mai looks a little nervous (she thinks that's why her brows are drawn down by a quarter inch) after her surprisingly emotional goodbye with Ty Lee.
"Everybody ready?" Suki asks and looks around, waiting for everyone's affirmative before officially sending them on their way.
I've never been less ready in my life. She had hugged Sokka as tightly as she could, had done her best to commit the feeling of her brother's broad arms around her shoulders to memory, but already she feels a gaping emptiness where his sturdy body had been just moments before. It's harder to leave him now than it was back in their little village; the stakes are higher, the environment is more hostile, they're actively being hunted down. The list of reasons why it's different this time could stretch from here all the way back to her lonely home.
Suki clears her throat. "Alright." Katara admires her strength, and tries to channel it as she takes a deep breath. "We'll meet up at the Serpent's Pass in about a month and a half. If not all of us are there in two months—" this is the part of the plan that Katara hates— "move on. We can't afford to waste any time." The declaration is sobering, even though they had all talked it over beforehand. There's a steady beat of silence, filled with tension and nervousness and hesitancy.
"Well, see you guys in a bit!" Ty Lee sounds just as chipper as always, but her smile is just short of big enough to be convincing.
They all wave at one another, and Katara turns her back to her brother before her smile falls along with the tears she's wrestling back. She and Zuko walk south east, Sokka, Suki, and Mai continue on the path eastward, and Aang, Ty Lee, and Toph head northeast. Her steps falter just before her brother is out of sight, and his name springs from her lips without a second thought.
"Sokka!" She runs to him like they're kids again, like she's scraped her knee and she needs her big brother to kiss it better, like she ripped her favorite doll and needs to cry it out, like she's running for her life and her mother's life and it's too late, it's always too late—
"Katara!" His arms are already open wide when she slams into him, forcing him to take a step back with the force of their collision. Tears spill from her eyes and are absorbed by Sokka's heavy tunic where her face is buried in his shoulder. "Hey, it's gonna be okay," he murmurs against her hair, and pulls her out of his arms after she's cried for a solid minute. He wipes her tears away with the calloused pads of his thumbs. "We're all going to be fine. We'll see each other at the Serpent's Pass soon, okay?" She nods, the pathetic movement accentuated by a quiet hiccup. "And if that hot head breaks your heart, he's going to have hell to pay." Her laugh is watery, but it's a laugh nonetheless, and it pulls a soft smile onto her brother's face. "I love you Katara. Be safe, and be smart, okay?"
"I love you too, Sokka. And I will be." They embrace briefly before separating again, and she turns around and walks back towards a patiently waiting Zuko with a heavy exhale.
She almost expects to see pity in Zuko's gaze as she makes her way back to him, but his glowing eyes hold nothing but a staggering warmth, one she'd like to call love, but doesn't dare. A warm, heavy hand rests on her shoulder, and she lets herself sag into Zuko's heat as they walk off into the trees.
Xx
There's no set path for them to follow; Zuko has nothing but his compass, their map, and the sun's slow waltz through the sky to direct them to their destination. It almost feels like their first few weeks after setting out from Katara's little village, aside from the bubbling anxiety in the pit of her stomach that is equal parts due to Zuko's presence and to the reality of their quest. Twigs snap under their feet as they traipse through a lightly wooded area before emerging into a large field. Long grass sways with the sharp breeze, rippling with the windy tide as the two Othered make their way through. Katara's hair whips around her face, getting caught in her mouth and covering her eyes; she tries to wrestle it into a braid, but the wind is blowing each section of hair apart before she can manage to collect the rest.
"Are you having trouble?" Zuko asks, and she realizes that she probably looks ridiculous with her hair tie clenched in her teeth and her hair wild around her face.
She grunts and gives up on the untamed tendrils. "Yes. Long hair is a bitch."
"It's definitely hard to handle sometimes." He's looking out over the field, and there's a familiar distance in his glowing eyes.
"You've had your hair long?" An image of Zuko with long silky hair floats into her mind, and is banished quickly with the slap of more hair on her face. She brings her hands back up to attempt to get a grip on her hair again, her venture no doubt hindered by her cold stiffened fingers.
"I cut it before I left Ember." He looks down at her. "Do you… need help?" The hair slips out of her hands as she loosens her grip and tries to wrap her head around Zuko's offer.
"Um..." She fiddles with the hair tie before taking a deep breath. "Yeah, I think so." They stop walking and she hands him the strip of blue fabric that she uses to hold her hair back; she tires to still the shaking of her hands and the out of control heart thrashing around inside her ribs. "Thanks."
"Yeah, no problem." Zuko's voice is a low rumble behind her, and she swallows past a heady mix of anticipation and nerves.
His hands start to gather her hair as it flies around her. A giddy heat blooms in her chest when he pulls some over her shoulder, and drips through her veins all through her body as he repeats the motion on the other side. His fingers brush the sensitive skin behind her ear, and she's too slow to stifle the quiet gasp that escapes her lips.
"Did I hurt you?" She's glad that it's almost winter, because there's no way that Zuko didn't notice her shiver as his fingers had ghosted along her skin.
"No," she replies with a breathy voice, and she clears her throat before continuing. "No, your hands are just… really warm. I wasn't expecting it."
"Oh." His fingers twitch where they grip her hair at the base of her neck. "Right."
It's impossible to stifle the heat that pulses through her as Zuko works with the tie to secure her hair. Warm hands brush the base of her neck and her hairline behind her ears, and suddenly she is very worried about sharing a tent with him for the next month and a half. My heart will explode way before we get to the Serpent's Pass. He's being so gentle, touching her hair like it's something to be worshipped rather than tamed, and it does nothing to quell the fire in her veins that lights her up from head to toe.
After the longest minute Katara has ever experienced, her hair is tied in a low knot at the base of her neck. Zuko steps away from her, and this time her chill is a result of the biting cold that hits her back in his wake. She can't look at him straight on, but she manages to peek at him from under her lashes, and notes that his cheeks are flushed brighter than what is usually brought on by the cold, and his bottom lip is red as if he'd been biting it. She tucks this information away and saves it for when she has to work up the courage to tell him how she feels.
"Thanks," she says with a shy smile. The one she gets from him in return swells her heart to such a degree that she worries that it may pop.
"No problem."
Xx
Her heart is pounding as she climbs into her bedroll that night. Zuko follows behind and secures the opening against the cold air; his heat is already filling up the small space, and she feels it even stronger when he finally lays down beside her. There's maybe half a foot of space between them, but it might as well stretch for miles, and the distance floods with an invisible tension that threatens to snap at any moment. She feels almost paralyzed where she lays on her back staring up at the empty space above them. Zuko keeps a small flame alive in his palm while he situates himself, and before he can let it go out, the urge to speak claws its way up her throat.
She clears her throat. "Just like old times, huh?" She turns her head towards him and finds a small smile on his face.
"Exactly." Gold eyes catch her own, the glow stunning and vivid in the darkness, brighter and warmer than any fire. They pull her towards him, and her body shifts onto its side without her even having to think about it.
"I can't believe it's been so long since we left home." She catches herself as he turns onto his side to face her. "I mean, since we left my home."
"I know. It's been about nine months."
"Nine months?" He chuckles at her incredulous tone. "Wow. I hadn't realized that it had been that long."
"I mean, I told you back then that all the days end up blurring together." The tilt of his lips draws her eye before she can stop it.
"That's true." She doesn't leave an opportunity for silence; she doesn't want to let herself think too much while Zuko is this warm and this close. "It feels like everything's changed."
"Most things have." He looks right into her eyes, and she hears the double meaning in his words loud and clear. "But it's not all bad, right?"
"No, it's not bad at all." Her words are soft and quiet. It's still dim in the tent even with Zuko's fire, but she can see some level of anxiety in his features, in the tilt of his brow and the lines around his good eye. "As crazy as this whole adventure has been, I'm glad for it."
"Yeah?" He sounds almost hopeful.
"Yeah." She smiles, and the lines around his eyes smooth out. "I can't imagine how bored I'd have been back home this whole time. Nothing exciting ever happened back in my village."
"It did seem a little boring," he quips with a growing smirk.
"Hey!" His smirk breaks into a full blown smile when she playfully whacks him in the chest. "Only I can talk shit about my village. It's off limits for you."
"Oh, is that so?" Something in his tone raises the hairs on the back of her neck and traces a chill down her spine despite his warmth.
"Yeah, it is." Silence threatens to creep in around them, and she thinks fast to continue their conversation. "How long was your hair back in Ember?"
"Really? That's what you want to talk about?" She nods her head and tries to stifle her smile at his deadpan. "It was down to my chest." He makes a motion with his hand across his heart designating where his hair had stopped.
"Wow. I never pictured you to be someone who had long hair."
"I had to have it long," he tells her, and shifts so that his head is pillowed on his arm. Katara mimics his posture to get comfortable. "The royal family always wears their hair up in a topknot. It's sort of like a symbol of status or honor. I had to cut mine off when I was banished."
"Oh." Her voice lowers. Somehow she always manages to bring up upsetting stories from Zuko's past, and she's determined to change the subject.
"It's not that bad though." She's surprised when he continues on. "It's much lighter, and way more manageable when it's short. Although it does get in my eyes a lot more."
"I think it looks nice short." She pushes through her embarrassment after she sees the shy smile that graces Zuko's face. "I think it would look nice long too, but short is definitely more practical." She doesn't mention Zuko's intimate encounter with her hair earlier, but she knows that they're both thinking about it. "Do you think you'll ever grow it long again?"
"Maybe." He shifts in his bedroll. "Everyone always told me that I looked like my cousin when my hair was long." At Katara's questioning look he continues. "My uncle's son. He died when I was just a kid."
"I'm sorry, Zuko. That's awful." Her brows pull together in sympathy, and she just barely keeps from reaching her hand out to hold his.
"It is what it is." He shrugs, but his voice holds more emotion than he lets on. "I always liked it when people told me I looked like him, but I think my longer hair made me look more like my father." The fire flickers in his hand, and he moves his eyes to somewhere over her shoulder.
"I don't know what your father looks like—" now she does reach for his hand, and at her touch his eyes come back to meet hers— "but even if you do look similar, you're nothing like him."
"How can you say that?" There's pain in his voice, and it deepens the lines around his eyes. "You don't even know him."
"I know what you've told me." His hand twitches in her light grip, and she continues. "And based on that, I know that you're a better man than he could ever wish to be."
Zuko's eyes are wide, and as he lets the fire in his palm wink out, she sees the beginnings of wetness pooling in the glow. He shifts a little closer to her, and she shifts closer as well and slots her fingers through his. It seems that he's done talking for the night, and she understands why. Eventually her eyes slide closed, and right before she drifts off, she hears a rasping whisper slip into the night air.
"Thank you, Katara."