A/N: ... I don't know what to say about the hideous gap between updates. School took over my life, I suppose, and general laziness. I do plan on updating a lot more frequently from now on! This is the last chapter of baby!Zutara - the next is set two years in the future, and will pick up during the events of the show. Things will get exciting! (Although they will be extremely AU, don't hate me!)
Chapter Four: Explosions and Lies
Caldera City, Fire Nation Capital
The crowd pulses and surges and she's reminded of water – it's like being swept underneath a river's current, being dragged along by this sea of humanity hollering and whooping. People are carrying flags and cartons of hot food peddled by vendors with carts lining the sides of the streets. Paper lanterns criss-cross above them like makeshift stars, lighting the path towards glory and when they eventually spill out into the main square Katara's breath catches in her throat.
She isn't supposed to be out tonight, and most especially not alone, but her obedience only stretches so far when it is Master Yori's stern mouth and furrowed eyebrows giving directions, and here she is, dipping underneath a man with a child sitting up on his shoulders to swipe a paper cone of fire flakes from a cart overwhelmed with customers (she'd pay for it, if she had the money, but the justifications she makes for it feel so pitiful that the guilt grows in the pit of her stomach until she feels sick with it – she'd always had an overwhelming sense of wrong and right – until she can't eat them anyway and leaves them on a step she passes by).
Fireworks crack coloured in the inky black sky, and she tilts her head back to watch until her neck aches and she rubs at it fruitlessly in an effort to watch them longer. They look much prettier than they sound, she thinks, and remember another night like this one teaching a boy how to walk quietly around her bedroom, and instead of whipped feet when he'd failed he'd gotten sheepish reprimands and pink cheeks.
In the distance there are drums and horns and sharp clashes of percussion and she's grinning, caught up in the atmosphere, being swung around by strangers who laugh softly and compliment her costume.
The product of months of planning and toil and she know that she looks divine: garbed in white robes and a veiled hat with a wide brim, red paints curling over her skin like spiders legs. The painted lady; a spirit she'd read about in Master Yori's books when he wasn't watching.
As the crowd surges forward, she finds that it is easy enough to duck underneath waving arms and slip around bodies that are loose with alcohol and excitement, and before long she is as close to the temple as she could be, a lowly Caldera peasant, and yet she revels in the way the crowd of thousands pushes her up against the makeshift barrier separating them from the nobility in their crimson and gold finery, as if it is a living, breathing thing urging her on towards greatness. Silence descends down across the great square as if some great, omnipotent hand had draped it there, and she moves her own upwards to tilt the wide brim of her hat backwards.
The speeches begin, and there are drums and swirling robes and coloured mist curling in over the lot of them. It smells sweet as incense but it is not thick or heavy; it feels as delicate and as refreshing as any vapour made from water should be, and she smiles slowly, pleased with this turn of events.
And there he is all of a sudden – the Fire Lord, resplendent and glowing and she feels something soft and loose in her chest that has no right to be there at all, so with the same ruthlessness she had learned from the bloodbender Hama, she squashes it.
He is waving and the crowd is screaming, cheering, clawing at each other to get closer and then there is a blinding white flash, earth scattering and falling all around their ears and the roar or something neither voices nor fireworks and now the screaming is different – frenzied and panicked and Katara wants to run, but she holds fast and cranes her neck upwards, pushes up onto her toes for a better look through the falling dirt and swathes of dust in the air around them.
The nobles in front of her are scattering and clouding her view, so without a second thought for the propriety of such a thing, she clenches her hands around the railing and flings herself over. She does not think about the swirling white of her robes, or what she must look like – there are more important things on her mind. Her ears are ringing from the explosion and she chokes a little on the dry atmosphere. Here she is hopelessly powerless; she tries to gather a little water from somewhere but there is none left, not this far from the sea and the fields outside the city walls, there is not even saliva or sweat but there is blood if she could just wait long enough for night to fall.
It is dusk and she can see priests and ministers being ushered out of sight by rows of helmeted guards, and the Fire Lord standing tall and proud and indomitable over his people and she breathes a loud sigh of something that feels raw in her chest.
"We will not give in to terrorism!" he shouts across the fleeing body of his city's population, his voice projecting unnaturally loudly in his fury, his hair loose and mighty around the majestic lines of his face, "the culprits of this vile act will be found, and justice will be served!"
Katara ignores the shivers shooting down the length of her spine, and turns and bolts to safety with the rest of them.
"Where have you been?" Aliza screeches, clutching at Katara's shoulders until the girl pulls free, tossing her hat to the floor and furiously scrubbing at her face with the now filthy material draped around her shoulders. There is dust and grime everywhere, caked onto her skin, beneath her fingernails, dropping off of her eyelashes every time she blinks.
"Is Yori home?" Katara asks, the sound of unmitigated terror in her own voice not going unnoticed. She clears her throat and steels herself, walks calmly towards the sink in the kitchen and wets a wad of her costume, wrings it out and begins to clean her face.
"No," the housekeeper replies, pale-faced and clearly distressed, "but he has sent for you… he is at the palace… I don't think it is wise for you to go, not alone, let me send for Mak…" but the girl has already retreated upstairs, and Aliza knows that she will leave without being noticed, dressed in dark blue and silent and she can't help the sharp feeling in her chest, stabs of pain and anxiety and she grapples with the back of the chair she'd been standing behind waiting for the child's return, before she falls.
Katara reports to Yori thirty minutes after receiving his message from Aliza. She is pink-cheeked but scrubbed completely clean, and she is sent to her post to stand a silent guard, her hands clasped together behind her back, in a prince's bedroom. She melds into the shadows there as she always has, and watches the slopes of his face as he sleeps, illuminated by the light filtering in from the lit corridor where a further retinue of security waits. The sound of quick, regimented steps from outside must have been louder than she had thought (the sound of the explosion still rings in her ears, and she hates the weakness of it) because he stirs, rustling the sheets around him until he sits up. The thin cotton pools in his lap and she can see that he is bare from the waist up, and she averts her eyes then as if something about it was embarrassing (it wasn't, it couldn't be, she is stoic, steeled – but there is a tint of red seeping across her face).
"What are you doing here?" he asks, and stares straight at her, where she stands cloaked in darkness. She doesn't ask how he had seen her, although she wants to, just steps into the light with her hands tight behind her back.
"There is unrest in the city tonight," she replies with a hint of caution clouding her otherwise completely detachment, "your father sent to here to watch over you."
"I heard the explosion," he is thoughtful, chewing at his bottom lip in the half-light and again she feels that same softening in her chest, the one that is only remedied by standing up straighter, her shoulders so tight they almost hurt, "who is watching Azula?"
The question is unexpected, and it sends trills down her spine. How can she answer that? Tentatively she replies: "the princess has an armed escort watching over her." Katara does not look at him, but stares straight ahead at the doorframe. She does not reveal that she had first been asked to watch Azula, but that she had chosen to guard the Prince instead.
"And I get an eleven year old waterbender," he grouses, and moves to swing himself out of bed. Out of the corner of her eye she watches his movements, the way he holds himself, the white of his chest stark against the black cotton pants he is wearing. "Where have you been, anyway?"
Her heart throbs deliberately in her chest. She clears her throat quietly before she answers.
"I don't know what you mean."
It is not a question, but stoic and carefully phrased, so he continues: "You have been gone for weeks. Did you think I wouldn't notice?" (her pulse quickens) "where did he take you?"
She considers what an atrocity it would be to lie to a prince. The memories of Duzi Island are fresh and cutting, and it is not unusual for her to lie awake in the dark, trembling at the memories. Her indifference is a mask, convincing though it may be, it is a farce nonetheless and she is as permeable to damage as any other mortal thing.
"Your father was kind enough to allow me to take a cultural trip to the land that was once the Northern water tribe–" she begins, constructing a tale in her head that sounds as pleasing as she can manage, but he stops her with a harsh sound of incredulity. She lifts her eyes and stares across at him.
"I can tell when you're lying," and now it is her turn to scoff, and she does so openly, "your lips don't move as much as they usually do," and she wonders if that's true. In response, she presses them together and complies when he pointedly gestures to the space on the bed beside him. They sit there, thick as thieves, and she tells him what had happened. She tailors the story for more sensitive ears than her own; torture and murder were not things that little princes should be exposed to. If her time in Caldera City had taught her anything, it was that.
Towards the end of her tale, her voice is thick and hoarse and it trails off wretchedly. "I'll never be that desperate, that helpless," she spits, and she is back to normal then, bitter and stiff and she doesn't notice even notice that his hand had been pressed just above her knee until she stands up and it falls forlorn onto the mattress, "I will never beg for my freedom," she decides out loud, her voice steely, squashing that looseness in her chest that is not conducive to heartlessness, "I will always find my own way out."