4. Gravity

He remembered it well.

The heat of the day, sticky on his face with Mai's blood painted on his hands. Her horrified gasp as the metal chains with the heavy balls at the end hit her directly on her head, then her chest. How he had rushed to her, panicking at the blood that was spilling from her. The pain of her struggling to keep her eyes open. Her eyes remained open, and it was worse than if Mai had closed her eyes. Mai still looked alive, and Zuko always woke up from his nightmares with heavy gasps and vomiting into a bucket beside his bed or sometimes, now, nothing at all. He sits up and stares at the wall and is silent with a gouging ache in his chest and tears he had not yet learned to keep at bay.

He did his Resistance work methodically. He killed to bring peace; that's what he told himself. He did not deny the relief it brought, the relief that sickened him. He was alive. Sokka had told him that it was normal, but he still stared at himself for a long while in the mirror, his war-weary eyes that shouldn't belong on a seventeen year old.

When Sokka asked him to guard his sister, he had nodded, let his hair grow out into his eyes, bought new clothes, and hacked into the records to create a new identity for himself. He had enrolled in the girl's school, a very competitive school that required brains or buckets of money. He played the title of the haughty rich bastard who dumped girls like a routine very well while keeping an eye on her. She seemed to be trying not to be noticed or notice anyone. He would feel a vague sense of pity when she failed. She couldn't help making bonds with someone, despite her efforts not to.

She disliked him, and this suited him somehow. No danger, he told himself, but refused to finish his sentence. He admired her skill in weapons and her determination in her worst area of hand-to-hand. He admitted that she was comely, with dark, wavy hair with big blue eyes. His thoughts were like his work: simple, analytic, cautious to a point.

He found himself watching her more than what Sokka instructed him to do. He slowly began to talk to her, words slowly forming. He felt something warm and cold at the same time softly burst in his chest when she greeted him in a soft voice, with a gentle smile. She had turned to rifle through her messenger bag for an assignment at the same time when he reached out to receive it when his hand grazed her bare arm. She started, but handed him the paper without comment. He smelled something sweet that he couldn't exactly recall, but when he sat down in his next class, he knew. The same perfume...the same that Mai wore during their little trysts in the training room when all went to bed.

That night he threw up. He wished to call in sick for the Resistance when he spent the night ravaged with nightmares of Mai. But he didn't, because the city needed him.

It was too late for him to break the bond. She had grasped hold of him. He let himself feel again, carefully, but groping blindly for something he couldn't express. It was as he was traveling across a narrow bridge with no sides to grip with occasional bursts of light allowed him to see the abyss below. He allowed himself to hold her hand or place a casual hand on her arm. He tried not to flinch when she pulled away or stiffened at the contact. He tried not to breathe when the time came when she forgot to remove his hand, the moment as fragile and delicate as a candle in a storm.

Zuko then found himself on a "study date" with the girl. He wished he was normal. That this wasn't wartime. That they'd be sneaking in kisses and touches with the formulas. That Katara would be happily leaning in. That he didn't feel a tiny surge of betrayal or fear when he looked at her.

They had decided to take a break and watch a movie. It was a stupid but funny movie about a couple battling secret agents. When the two lovers kissed as the building behind them blew up in a combustion of fire and ash, Zuko quietly placed his hand on her knee. He watched as she turned towards him with a sad look that made him recoil and remove his hand so abruptly that it jolted the bowl of popcorn between them.

"Why?" he asked, raising his hand to trace a strand of hair on her smooth face.

"Z—" She was swallowed in gentle pressure on her lips, fingers lightly stroking her cheek. But it didn't last long when Katara shoved him as hard as she could away from him. His back hit the armrest.

"Go home, Zuko." she told him, trembling, touching her lips.

Something slid from him, there, and he realized it was a smile. He grabbed his red backpack, shoveling in papers and textbooks pell-mell with something akin to anger and rejection and frustration. Katara sat down on the couch rather helplessly, rounding her lips to pass forward the first syllable of his name, but it never came out. Zuko fumbled with the buckle and slid the closed backpack onto his shoulders.

"I have to go," he said roughly, throat stretching towards the four walls.

"I know." Katara whispered, looking away, fiddling with her braid for something to do with her hands.

"See you Monday."

"Yes."

Zuko opened the door and paused to flip up the hood of his dark jacket. "Lock the door behind you, Katara."

"I always do." she answered, seeming surprised.

"Good." His voice was too harsh, too cold. He softened it as he began to close the door. "Good night, Katara."

Katara let out a soft, tremulous "good night" as he stepped into the cold night.

They still saw each other—Zuko still faithfully guarded her, while Katara, despite her jumps whenever she heard footsteps behind her or a careless slam of a door, still smiled at him and waited by the front gate so he could escort her home. They didn't hold hands, no matter how Zuko fantasied about it, her warm hand slipping into his on a chilled day, her eyes gazing up shyly at him through long eyelashes, faint pink coloring her cheeks. Her arms were instead clutched around a textbook, while his fists clenched in his pockets, and their eyes never wandered from the forward destination.

They talked, though, as cautiously as they could. Katara told him about her brother, his role in the Resistance, something she never should have revealed, something that made Zuko look behind him on instinct. Did she know how dangerous this was, talking to him so flippantly about the Resistance and taking down the Equalists? For her, she was sharing a secret, a secret that could get him the tallest mansion in the city and her and her brother a death sentence. Her mother was killed, her father dead in early Resistance work, and her grandmother had passed away a year ago from a heart attack. Did the girl know nothing?

He pretended he was an ordinary, ignorant boy as always, eagerly nodding while she whispered secret missions at her house or softly mentioned a hero—Haru, who had been killed with his father against the Lieutenant of the mad group—in a tea shop, but all he wanted to do was take her by the shoulders and shake her. Did she not know the seriousness of it all? Telling him, whom she thought was a friend, about her rebellious thoughts and information?

He was torn between scolding the girl and hiding her away or kissing her and holding her close.

She trusted him.

A year passed before Zuko knew it, and he tried to find ways for him to be with her, since school presented no more excuses, and her brother made it no secret about his objection to her joining the Resistance, which meant Zuko's separate identity was kept in the dark. Sokka was getting more anxious by the day, checking over his shoulder and fiddling with his house key. After one of their more dangerous raids—Sokka's leg broke with a well-aimed blow, and Zuko had to reset it before someone caught them, a rag clenched between Sokka's teeth as he fought off rising screams from the pain and the sharp snap—Sokka had retrieved his will hidden in his desk and spent a few moments crossing a few words out and adding a postscript to the bottom. Zuko had watched him out of the corner of his eye as Song stitched his arm, and finally, Sokka came up to him, limping, and pressed a spare house key into his shaking palm.

"If I die, take Katara far away and run, far, far, away. I know she comes of age soon," Sokka sighed and looked at his lap. "and if she finds out about this, about me, she'll want to help. In fact, I know she'll want to get involved. She always mentions it when I get home." He leaned forward, then cursed as he jarred a recent wound, stitches that Song had not yet taken out. "How's my sister lately?"

"Her Waterbending? She's a...prodigy." Zuko shuddered at the broken nightmares of blue fire and madness when they surrounded her and struck her with lightning of their own, contorting her into nothing more than wild screams, but it was the best way to describe her. But no—he'd seen Katara, the fear in her eyes when he had caught her twisting away water from the floor in the careless safety of her house. He'd shown her his Firebending, a tiny flame bobbing between his fingers, and wished she knew about the Resistance's well-equipped sparring ring, but they instead practiced in a hidden field near his apartment. Katara had relished in knowledge and a proper opponent, but he alone knew the red streaks of paints that swirled so elegantly across her moonlit face, the gauzy veil and the wide-brimmed conical hat, the hand-sown costume.

He nearly laughed at the irony. Here was the girl Sokka was trying to shield, whom he was afraid for, and here she was, the little vigilante who worked on her own and saved citizens. Not that the Resistance cared nothing for the people, but Katara told him that they did not do enough to protect them. She showed him how the Equalists harassed suspected benders, destroyed the houses of rebels, lurked on every corner, tried to trip someone up into giving away a secret. But she also showed him how nonbenders were being treated. They were underpaid, overworked, taunted and abused by benders, cowed into submission or cornered into rebellion. She knew she didn't fully understand their problems, but she tried to help in small ways.

He realized she talked, too. She gave speeches. But she healed and she fought, and to win, you had to lose.

"Be careful," he always told her, and she always smiled back.

"I always am, Zuko." Her eyes had shone on that night, like polished sapphires. "This is a way I can help."

"I'm coming with you."

"Zuko—" her tone was annoyed and impatient, yet resigned, when he finally showed her broadswords and a blue mask. She had touched the carved wood of his hidden identity with light fingertips, then had leaned in. She had held the veil away from her face. He had not moved, not even to take off his mask.

"She's a fighter, but she's a healer. And—" He was rubbing the key between his fingers like a lock of hair, not looking at Sokka. "she's kind and strong and cautious and...lots of things."

Sokka smiled at him, grasped his shoulder. "I did the right thing. Picking you." He then looked away. "But I want a life for Katara, you know? No hiding. No fear. No worry. She shouldn't have to...I never want that for her."

Zuko saw the blows, the metal bolos to Mai's head and chest, that smashed her bones and crushed her lungs, how she didn't die right away, how stubborn she was for two days, how she held his hand, how she screamed in the night and bled, how he thought she would pull through because he loved her. He thought of Katara, broken and crushed, eyes staring at nothing, blood dripping on the pristine hospital bed, a faint ghost of a smile. And he nodded, closing his fingers around the key.

A few years ago, I wrote an AU piece for Zutara Week that involved Katara and Zuko in an Anti-Bending world ruled by Amon, based on the scatterings of information we had about the Legend of Korra. I meant to write a whole fic about it, and some of this is actually the prologue to explain why Zuko stayed away from Katara.

"Gravity"—Of grave consequence, seriousness, or importance.