No Promise of Summer
"You don't work, you don't eat."
Zuko glares at the girl. "That's never been an issue before."
She tosses her head proudly, her braid slapping her back, as arrogant as his sister. "That's what Gran Gran says. You've been sulking enough, and if you don't move around, you won't look very great. You'll start easy, don't worry."
"What if I really don't help you peasants?" Zuko challenges. "You can't have a dead Prince as hostage."
The girl narrows her eyes, and Zuko thinks he has her beat, but she shoots back with a note of triumph in her voice, "Well, we don't have to tell the Fire Lord you're dead; we're not exactly sending weekly reports, and he's not either. Do you honestly think that the Fire Lord would send some people over to traipse around in the cold South Pole in the snow to check up on you? They left us alone once the raids were over, so there!" She glares at him.
He glowers at the girl. "What will I be doing?"
She smirks. "You'll have the esteemed pleasure of working under me, Prince Zuko." Her tone mocks his title and sharply snapping the last syllable of his name like tossing a wet towel on a tile floor. If peasants knew what tile was.
"Under me, huh?" He can't resist taunting her. Every advantage he has, he takes. "You will never get a man if you dominate like that, princess, or you may arouse him if he likes that sort of thing."
Her cheeks flush bright red, but it's not due to the constant cold, and she upends his bowl of wash water on his head. "You sexist, filthy—"
"Katara!" A woman's voice calls. "Get that man out of that hut so you can start your chores! There's laundry to be washed, clothes to be mended, and lunch to be cooked!"
Katara glares at him and looks as if she very much wants to kick him in the unmentionables, but she sweetly calls out the flap, "Okay, Gran Gran."
They start with laundry. Katara shoves a woven basket towards him and the tub of water with a disgusting piece of brown soap nearby. It's slippery and feels so unlike the smooth, sweetly-scented, pearly-white, and oval-shaped bars that the Palace had and even different from the box-like shapes of unscented soap on the ship.
"What is this stuff?"
"It's soap. And you call us stupid."
He rankles and dunks a pair of pants into the freezing cold water, shivering. "No, peasant. What's it made out of?"
"Seal fat. Now scrub, if you know how."
"From animals?" He shudders and wants to shove it away from him as far as possible, if only he didn't have to touch it. "Disgusting."
"Where did you think soap came from? Do you scrub with sand?" the girl asks while starting on carefully washing a coat, a parka. There's a proper name for it, but Zuko doesn't remember or really care.
"Sand? Where in Agni did you get that notion?"
The girl flushes again. "When we had traders, before the raid, they told us that they scrubbed with sand in the rivers and creeks. We do it sometimes on the spring, when its warmer—it's a bit abrasive, but it gets the dirt off."
"Ridiculous." He's never heard of such a thing. "We have nice soap. Scented. It's molded sometimes into shapes, like seashells or flames. Not made from dead animals."
The girl is finishing the parka as she rolls her eyes. "How do you know how your soap is made?"
Zuko pretends that his own red cheeks are from the cold, despite that the ice house is surprisingly warm. "I heard my country makes it from ashes."
Her nose scrunches up. "Ugh. I hope it's wood ashes."
It takes a minute for him to catch on to her meaning. "Don't be barbaric."
"I wouldn't put it past you people. And we're not here to talk about soap—you haven't started to wash one thing, and I'm already halfway done! Get going."
They wash in silence. The girl finishes before he does, predictably, and starts to Waterbend them dry in front of the fireplace. The dirty water goes back into the tub.
"You're not going to use that for the next batch, are you?"
She glares at him when her control of the water wavers at his sudden question. "Don't be stupid. Now let me concentrate."
"Do I have to dry? I guess I can use my Firebending." He's eager to at least do something more than heat up the air around him, even though that is draining his most of his energy.
"You'll burn them with your Firebending." She turns away. "You finish your job, and when you're done, you can start on the mending."
"Mending?"
"Do I have to teach you how to sew?" She throws up her hands in the air with annoyance, and water splashes directly onto him and some of the dry clothes.
She swears loudly and starts again, but smirks again when he picks up the foulest piece of clothing yet—a pair of disgusting, smelly, woolen socks. He swears he feels slime before he quickly drops them into the wash tub.
"Uggghhh...are these your socks, peasant?"
She Waterbends soapy water at his head, this time, not one drop landing on the dry clothes. "Those are my brother's, and you'll be in charge of his clothes with that attitude."
When he finally finishes, she's starting to dry his batch of clothes and gestures to another woven basket full of clothes. "That's mending. Leave the skins; I'll do those."
Zuko nods and trudges over the basket. He knows how mending works—you thread a needle and...sew. The girl looks over and sighs. "You have to tie a loose knot before you actually start. Otherwise the stitches will come apart." Zuko nods and tries again—his stitches are a bit on the large side, but they're not falling apart. The girl is finishing up the drying and is taking up one of the parkas.
Then she chews it. It's the most peculiar thing he's ever seen. Zuko puts down the pants and stares.
She glares at him again. "What?"
"Are you starving or something?"
"I am doing this because it is getting dry and formless, and this is the way my people make the skin soft again. Otherwise, it would get stiff and cracked and would fall apart and would be useless. So stop staring at me; you're bothering me."
She continues once Zuko averts his gaze. His stomach is growling steadily, and judging by his internal clock, it's almost noon, and he's been up since a little over dawn.
Zuko groans when the elder pops in and calls that the girl should be making lunch now. "Do you do this stuff every day?"
The girl's eyes flash, and to his surprise, instead of complaining about his "spoiled prince attitude," she kicks at one of the fur rugs in what appears to be frustration. "Yes. Every day. And after this, we will get started on cleaning the dishes, hopefully getting Sokka away from 'warrior training' the three year olds to go fishing, then preparing dinner."
"Wait, what's he doing now?"
The girl looks annoyed that he apparently wasn't paying attention. "He's trying to train three year old who just want to penguin sled and go to the bathroom, and when that lasts, oh, about ten minutes, he goes off and practices his stupid boomerang! And he misses, the, the—oh! While I—"
Her brother then pops in at the most inappropriate moment. "Hey, Katara, can you add less salt to the sea prunes?"
Zuko finds himself oh-so-casually letting the hearth fire shoot out to dance across the boy's boots without burning them. He shrieks like a noblewoman when encountering a spider-fly and runs out the door as fast as he can.
The girl is staring at him with something akin to approval and also confusion in her eyes. "Well. Why don't we get started on lunch?"
