Author's Note: A big thank you to all who reviewed last chapter. I hope you enjoy this chapter and please leave a review.

Chapter 2

Katara listened to Ms Joo Dee's retreating footsteps echoing in the empty corridor beyond the library. Her hands clenched into fists on the table in front of her and she gritted her teeth. She felt stinging tears in her eyes. It was like nobody understood that her best friend was in hospital, possibly dying, and all she wanted to do was be with him and do what she could to get him through to whatever the end of his illness would be. She'd promised him that picture and she would damn herself until her dying day if she did not give it to him.

She glanced up at the soft thud of the library door swinging shut and caught Zuko in the corner of her eye, still staring at her. She wouldn't cry in front of him. "What are you doing in here?" she spat, facing him. Zuko looked back down at the desk in front of him with a shrug. Katara snorted and quietly labelled him a coward. "Let me guess, you were caught making plans to help your father overthrow King Kuei. What a stupid question." She may have only imagined it, but she thought she saw him flinch at the word "father".

Zuko reached under the desk and pulled a maths text book and exercise book out of his school bag and went for a second dip to find a pencil. He flicked the text book open to a dog-eared page and scanned it to find the question he was up to. The insides of his notebook were messy, un-ruled pages filled with scrawled numbers and pro-numerals and half-distinguishable signs which made up each equation, its working out and its answer.

Katara watched him just as intently as he looked at the simultaneous equations he was finding the point of intercept to. She wasn't finished with him. "Do you think that it's fun to kill innocent people?" Zuko's pencil kept scratching along the paper. "Don't get me wrong, the political system around here is corrupt, but King Kuei is just a puppet, a figurehead. He's not even the man you should be after." Katara sat back in her chair and watched him. He didn't react to her words. He just kept doing his homework. "But no matter what your clause is, does it really justify the killing of so many innocent people?" Her voice was dripping with sarcasm. What gave him the right to go to school amongst the people he was murdering? Why did he feel justified in his actions in the first place? Katara blew a strand of hair out of her face and tucked it behind her ear with a grunt. "What do you care anyway? You're Ozai's son, and your family had been head of the Red Army for generations. Spreading all this war and violence is in your blood."

Zuko suddenly slammed his pencil down and stood up. "Shut up!" She flinched, not having expected the outburst, but she composed herself again quickly and glared up at him.

"Why should I? I'm only telling the truth. You got a problem with that?"

"What truth?" He kicked his chair aside and started walking towards her. "You don't know what you're talking about. You have no idea what you're talking about!"

Suddenly threatened, Katara stood up. She was taller than most people thought because she was usually hunched over her sketchbook or schoolwork. But with her back straight, she was not much shorter than Zuko, though she was two years his junior.

"What do you mean; I don't know what I'm talking about? What the hell do you know of what I know?!" Her voice was louder than either of them had expected and Zuko stopped coming towards her, his face ablaze with rage. "You have no idea what this war your type started has put me through, me, personally!" Her voice faltered at the end as she realized she had said more than she'd intended. She looked back down at the table and sat, lips pressed tightly together, refusing to look back up at him.

"What happened?" he asked, seemingly uninterested.

"Nothing," she snapped back.

He gave a nearby chair a kick and it toppled to its side. "Dammit, tell me! You can't blame 'my type' for something and then not even tell me what it is! What the hell?!"

"If it's any of your business," she shouted, standing up again. "Members of the Red Army killed my mother in my home in the southern regions when I was six! Happy? My mother is dead and yes, 'your type', the Red Army, are the ones responsible."

Zuko's face emptied itself of rage and he took a step back. Katara silently cursed herself for saying so much. She sat down again and turned her chair away from him and quietly wished he would go and sit down at the other desk again. She wanted to be alone. Tears choked her as she held them back. She still refused to cry in front of him, but she couldn't stop the tears that escaped her eyes or the sobs and shook her body. Katara fumbled clumsily for the blue pendant of the necklace she wore; a gift from her mother and the only memory she had left of the woman. It was the only piece of her mother she knew the place of in this world, and it was her piece to keep, hers alone.

Zuko did eventually return to his seat when Ms Joo Dee re-entered the library. The conservative teacher was taken aback by the toppled chair and the distraught girl, facing away from the world in her misery, and Zuko who was breaking the rules by not being seated and would receive another detention for his disobedience. But Ms Joo Dee did not ask questions. She did not want to become involved in what she called "issues within the personal lives of the students." So she sat back down at her desk and continued marking students' work, Katara's sketchbook safely locked in the confiscation box in an office on the other side of the school complex.

"I'm sorry." Zuko's voice broke through the silence. Ms Joo Dee glanced up in disapproval and confusion. He was looking across the tables at Katara, who was still facing away and still shaking with sobs. "That's something we have in common."

Ms Joo Dee shook her head. "Students may not talk during the detention period without expressed permission from the supervising teacher." Zuko fell silent and Ms Joo Dee watched him for a moment longer before returning to the papers in front of her.

Katara steadied herself and banished the last of the tears from her eyes. She thought, What does he mean? She turned around to look at him, and found that he was still watching her.

Author's Note: I just finished doing a module of Graphs and Relations in maths, so excuse all that jargon; it was the first type of approved homework that came to mind. Hope you enjoyed this chapter. Please review and leave your thoughts.

Fun Fact: The Japanese Red Army was a communist militant group founded in 1971 with the stated goals of overthrowing the Japanese government and monarchy and starting a world revolution.