Itttssss a new chapter! This one took a little while for me, simply because I wasn't sure where to put everything, but I'm fine with the outcome. Also, I decided to name the story, "Cabbageblanca" as a play off of the great Casablanca, I'm not saying there's much resemblance, I just couldn't think of anything better! You guys will like this chapter I think. It's full of gritty drama and Aangst. Also, I'm rating it a loose M, but only for a bit of 'gore' towards the end. Nothing really major though.
Enjoy! ^.^ As always, comments are always appreciated!
"I don't think I will ever get fully used to this stupid method of travel."
Aang glanced back at the earthbender who was currently trying to repress the need to vomit down Appa's fur coat. He smirked and Appa hummed an annoyed complaint.
"Appa's right, Toph! You ought to be a little nicer to things that happen to be carrying you!"
"Easy for you to say, you practically live on him." She held her stomach in discomfort. "I haven't been on Appa for a little under a year now! I'd forgotten how... uncomfortable it could be."
"Well we should be there soon." Aang squinted as the shining rooftops of Ba Sing Se came into view on the horizon. "Lucky for you, Ba Sing Se is only a few hours trip from Capitol City."
"Lucky me," Toph agreed quietly, pale and slightly green.
They flew on in silence for a while, and Aang's mind was on the perfectly shaped rock in his pocket. Zuko's comments had made him uneasy about just how desperate Katara had become. Was she really that unhappy with her life? With him? He knew he couldn't wait forever to ask for her hand, but then, why was he realizing suddenly that he had been stalling for quite some time? He bit his lip in unsure frustration.
"Hey Toph...," he called behind him. He heard a gurgling noise and looked back to see if she was alright. Her face was contorted into an unappealing grimace, but her color had begun to creep back and it appeared as if she was pulling out of her airsickness. "Can I ask you a question..."
"Marry Katara, Twinkletoes."
"I... Wait, what? How did you...?" His heart skipped in confusion. Toph's only response was to flash a knowing grin. "That wasn't my question."
"Then what was? I know it's about Katara..."
"I, well, yes, it is about her, but..." He watched a cloud pass under the giant flying bison and marveled for a moment of the wonder of it all.
"But what? You don't want to marry her?"
"What? Of course I want to marry Katara! I just don't know what to do..."
"You do realize that made no sense, right?" Her voice held a bewildered amusement.
"I suppose not... I guess I'm just confused." He paused a moment to really think about his next words. "Honestly, I'm not even sure what I'm confused about."
"Perhaps it's not confusion at all."
"How so?"
"Well," the blind girl sat up in the saddle to look in the approximate direction of her childhood friend. "You say you want to marry her, right?"
"Right..."
"But you also have duties to the world and to the kingdoms, which, I assume, is what is causing the distress."
"There are other issues," he reasoned, not liking that even the blind one could see his lament with such clarity.
"Like what."
"Well... We've been drifting lately." He sighed, the quiet ache returning to his chest. "Lately I've just been so busy with official Avatar stuff that our time is being severely cut down." He paused and they both fell into silence for a moment. "Like, what if she's over me? And I've let her have every excuse to move on! I don't dote on her enough, I'm never around for activities anymore... hell! She could be seeing another man behind my back and I'd have little clue!"
"Aang, calm down. I doubt she has another man in her life."
"How do you know?"
"Because I know Katara. She is loyal and patient." Her words soothed the doubt, but only enough to keep a cap on his fears.
"I just... I guess I just worry that I'll let her down." He sighed again, resting his head against Appa's fur as Momo snuggled up against his side.
"Aang, you remember back when you were getting ready to fight the Fire Lord and you met with that crazy guru who taught you about your chakras?"
"Yes..."
"And you remember how you lied to us and told us you has mastered them when really you refused to master the last one in fear of losing Katara?"
"Where are you going with this..." He frowned at the memory, recalling the pain that decision had caused both him and Katara.
"Well what happened after all of that? When the time came for you to master it, and you let her go, you also ended up losing your life." She shook her head, knowing she wasn't doing a good job convincing him. "What I'm trying to say is, to you, she is absolutely everything. So why are you neglecting and avoiding your everything? You act like you're doing this charming renegade, 'save the world' thing for her, but really, you're just running from commitment."
"That wasn't really the advice I was hoping for," he sulked.
"Well then you should know better than to ask an earthbender for advice."
"I guess this whole time I've been acting like if I played the busy diplomat, I could have the excuse that I'm building a better future for us," His breath crisped in the cooler evening air, and his eyes traveled towards the crescent moon rising in the east. "I can't keep living in fear that one day she'll think I'm no longer worthy. That's what this is, right?"
"You tell me, Twinkletoes." When he didn't respond, she lifted her head to fruitlessly look over the saddle edge at him. Fruitless because she looked over Appa's tail in her blindness. "Honestly, you two seemed so happy at Sokka's and my wedding, but in the year that's passed even I can see the tension between you two."
"The truth is, I love Katara, and I would do anything to be with her forever. I want to start a life with her, and I want to raise children together."
He sat forward a moment and reached into his pocket to run his finger over the smooth surface. "Tomorrow we'll settle this meeting and when we get home, I'm proposing to Katara. I refuse to wait any longer."
"'Atta boy, Aang."
"Lee, which of these dresses do you think Katara would like to wear more?" Zuko held up a shorter, bright red wraparound dress and a long, flowing burgundy gown, as his inquisitive look convinced the messenger that the Fire Lord was perfectly serious in his inquiry.
"Uh," he stammered, confused as to why a man with such power was asking for a servant's advice. "I do not know, my lord. The dress is likely to reveal more while the gown is more formal and proper."
Zuko grinned. "The shorter dress then." He nodded to a seamstress who retrieved the gown and brought it to a chair in the corner to repackage it so as not to get it dirty or wrinkled. "Will you bring this to Katara and ask her to wear it this evening? She's in need of some pampering." The Fire Lord turned towards his balcony and stood watching the sun set. Lee bowed and quickly flew from the room, hurrying down hallways and passages with the package he had been sent to deliver.
He was a cunning man, though anyone hardly bothered to notice, and he often found great delight in running the messages and gossip of the wealthy to each other, knowing that with every bit of information shared, he was becoming wiser and wiser to his nation's most well-kept secrets. It was common knowledge, for instance, that the Fire Lord's girlfriend, Mai, was anxious and on edge, but only he and a chubby healer servant knew she was pregnant. He also knew that Aang was planning to propose to Katara upon his return from Ba Sing Se, as the messenger had seen him collecting rocks from the zen garden earlier that day. But these were simply idol gossip compared to the real reason he had been sent to work at the palace.
The Earth Kingdom rebels outside the city had hired him five months ago to figure out just who was closest to both the Avatar and the Fire Lord so that they could find a way to strike fear into the hearts of those in power. And, as it turned out, Lee knew that it happened to be the same person; Katara. Well, he thought to himself, soon Zuko will need to care for Mai and her child, and our window of opportunity will be lost. The coup must happen tonight. He'd send a messenger hawk to the rebels on the outskirts of the city just as soon as he reassured Katara of her evening's plans...
She was anxiously if unconsciously tearing apart the fire lily when the messenger knocked on the door, offering her a red dress she could only blush at. Zuko had simply insisted she wear it tonight Lee had assured her, and she could only nod and take the fabric from him as he scurried away down the hall. The man seemed to be eternally in a rush.
But with only the prospect of getting dressed and joining her friend for dinner ahead of her, her mind wandered over the events of the past few weeks. Had Bumi's death meant so little to Aang that he could blow off her attempts at comfort so easily? Or was his chilly mood in accordance with something else?
She was losing him and it shook her to the core. A single tear drifted down her face, soft and bitter, exposing her emotions to the empty bedroom. She had tried so very hard to make it work for them, but it appeared that all her trouble had been for naught. He had moved on, and it was high time she do the same. But when she stood to pull the dress over her slender frame, the red of the dress bringing deep swirls of copper to her eyes in the setting sun, she knew that her heart would only ever belong to that stupid monk she had once dragged out of the ice.
With another soft tear and a quiet sniffle, she set her jaw and stalked out of the bedroom to meet Zuko.
The setting sun was wide across the horizon and in the warm glow of early summer the breeze was cool on her skin. Katara's steps echoed in the marble hallway and she delighted in the chirping of distant birds as they joined her noise to make a rhythmic beat of innocence. She smiled at the turtle ducks quacking in the pond and the flowers just starting their blooming season. Her mind was preoccupied with pleasantries as she rounded a turn, stopping suddenly as the messenger, Lee, stood directly in front of her. He hurry towards her, a forced smile on his face.
"Oh! You startled me! I'm on my way to dinner, if that's what you were going to ask."
"Oh, no, my lady." His smile flickered with nerves and she smiled to him reassuringly. She had never gotten used to servants and while she was certainly a figure to fear in battle, she would never feel comfortable with them fearing her rage. "It's just that Lord Zuko has changed the location of your dinner, and he wished me to bring you to him."
"Oh, alright. Lead the way." Her mind was too wound around other issues for her to notice the slow grin the man produced as he led her towards the back of the palace gardens.
The sun had fully set and the shadows were starting to creep around dark corners by the time the man stopped in front of the stone wall in the back of the royal grounds and Katara looked about to see if this was going to be another one of Zuko half-baked 'rescue attempts'. He had a bad habit of luring his bender subjects to remote areas of his palace and attacking them, testing their bending capabilities and then 'rescuing' them from the attacking forces. He liked to think of it as 'keeping your guard up,' while most of the people he tried to involve thought of it as foolish. Katara, however, had always enjoyed the challenge and she gazed about now, eyes squinted, waiting for the young fire king to drop out of nowhere and attack.
A sharp pain suddenly shot through her spine, and her hand flew up to dislodge the dart from her neck, a tranquilizer she noted, as her knees buckled and the world spun into darkness. Her last memory was of the messenger, Lee, grinning from ear to ear as he bended stone cuffs around her wrists.
She awoke much later in the spill of a dim campfire, the embers sparking in erratic anger as her eyes darted about, trying to decipher her surroundings. She was in a tent, no, she thought, not a tent, a stone lean-to. The ones she had seen Toph use when they were younger and first helping the Avatar. Her mind was screaming in confusion, and her thoughts almost blocked out the sound of yelling and the clash of metal outside the hut. She strained to concentrate, to understand all that had happened to her.
She pulled at the stone cuffs on her wrists, without warning yelling into the night in agony, as her side stung like hot coals to the skin. She looked down to see a giant slice through the fabric of her dress, blood caked all over her wound. The pain seared through her wound and into her mind and for a moment nothing else mattered but the terror she felt, unsure of what had happened and how she had sustained the injury. And then, like a bolt of lightning, Lee's grinning image flashed through her vision and she gasped, realizing what had occurred. He had lured her away from the palace to capture her. He must have been working with the rebel forces that lived in the forest beyond the city, which meant that she was in far more danger than her clouded mind could even comprehend. But the sounds of metal and pain reached her ears again and she draw as much attention as she could towards the source of the din. Her eyes caught glimpses of men dressed in green tunics falling to the ground, silvery axes splitting their skulls and flaming arrows piercing their body. She witnessed men in red bending fire towards a group of stacked green bodies, the clothing taking flame as the scent of burning flesh wound around her brain.
Her vision fogged and she lost her train of thought before picking her head up again to see if there was any way to get out of her bonds. Her wound throbbed as she pulled against the rock, and she jerked her body towards the ground, pounding the cuffs against the cool earth. Her body buckled though, and she felt the searing heat of a knife slit her cheek as her eyes snapped to a guard, green robes folded over his legs, sitting close by. She didn't know how she could have missed him before, but her terror grew as he stood, crouched over her, brandishing a silvery steel knife and nefarious sneer.
"Well," his voice was gravelly and cruel, "it seems our watery little princess has awakened." Her eyes brimmed in horror as the man reached for her, pulling at the strap of the dress, revealing a murky shoulder in the fire light. She watched him lick his lips before she grimaced and looked away, waiting for the man's meaty hands to invade her. But his lusty grip never touched her and she looked back cautiously, watching as he was thrown from the stone hut and immediately run through with two twin dueling swords. A thin but muscular form towered above him, a ball of fire spiraling in his hand, and as the meaty earth soldier grunted in pain, the dark form lowered his hand and ignited the man's skin, the slow, irony scent of burning flesh once again creeping into her senses and making her vision go dark once more.
As if in a dream, she heard a man calling to her, desperate and needy. Her voice was small as she called back, "Aang?" before the world collapsed into total nothingness.
