"Dear friends," Aang read aloud from the scroll in his hands, "I believe the ruse has been going well. The people here seem convinced that the young boy with the bison is the Avatar, and it seems that no one has recognized you traveling with him, Zuko. Your recent antics in the Earth Kingdom have helped propagate this idea, so good job.

Now that you are nearing the northern edge of the Earth Kingdom, however, I would recommend staying out of sight as much as possible I will continue to throw them off your trail to the best of my ability from here, but you must do your part and stay hidden.

Good luck and safe travels in making your way to the Northern Water Tribe. Zuko, I am sorry that I cannot be there to see you master your third element, but know that regardless, I am proud.

Until we meet again,

Iroh.

Zuko shifted uncomfortably in the silence that followed the final words of the letter.

The four of them were camped in a forest on the edge of the Earth Kingdom. One more day, and they would be leaving the continent behind entirely. The Northern Water Tribe was so close.

"Does that mean we should hide out here for a while," Aang asked, "so Iroh can throw the Fire Nation off the trail? Or should we keep going and just try to stay out of sight?"

"We should keep going," Katara said, at the same time that Zuko said, "Maybe we should wait a day or two."

They both paused, then looked at each other, Katara with a glare.

"Of course you'd say that, Zuko. You've been trying to slow down our progress to the North Pole since you first joined the group."

Zuko gritted his teeth, but before he could open his mouth to speak, Sokka jumped in.

"Katara, maybe now's not the time for this? We need to make a plan, not start an argument."

Katara continued to glower at Zuko, but she said, "Fine. I think we should keep going. We've got a flying bison. We can't stay hidden here with him."

"We can't stay hidden in the sky with him either," Zuko countered, against his better judgment. "And I didn't say we should stay here forever, just a day or two. It's not going to be easy to hide Appa no matter what, but it'll be a lot easier down here in the trees than in the open sky."

"I mean… Zuko's right, Katara," Aang said, and Sokka nodded. "Appa's not the most stealthy guy around." He shot a grin toward the bison, who was lying just outside their little circle, watching them talk as if he understood every word. "Isn't that right, buddy?"

Appa grumbled in acknowledgement, and Zuko could swear he looked embarrassed.

"There must be some way we could hide him," Katara said. "Maybe you could airbend clouds around him, Aang? Or I could try waterbending them."

Aang scratched his chin, looking like he was considering that idea.

"Er…" Sokka took a deep breath. "No offense, Katara, but I think the Fire Nation might notice that, too. Plus, would you even know how to waterbend a cloud?"

"I might," she said, "if I had a teacher."

Here they were again. Zuko felt Katara's angry look fall on him again, and his whole body tensed.

"Katara, be reasonable," Sokka said. "We've been headed toward the North Pole as fast as we can—"

"Sure." Katara got up and started walking toward the trees. "You know what, why don't you three just make a plan? Nothing I say is going to make a difference anyway. Not with Prince Zuko around." She gave him one final withering glance before she turned away.

Zuko shot to his feet, but Sokka grabbed his arm just as fast, and that calmed him just enough.

"Katara—" Sokka began, but she had already disappeared into the trees.


The stunned silence hung for several seconds after Katara stormed away, and in the middle of it, Zuko felt his anger getting hotter and hotter.

"She didn't mean that, Zuko," Sokka said. "She's just…" He kept talking, but the words buzzed in Zuko's ears, meaningless. He began to stalk after her.

"What's her problem?" he grumbled. "She's hated me ever since I joined this group, and I've been nothing but nice to her."

Aang tried to grab his arm, to pull him back down. "I don't think you should try to talk to her right now, Zuko. You're both pretty hot. I think you need to cool—"

Zuko shoved his hand off. "Leave me alone, Aang," he growled.

Sokka and Aang exchanged a dubious look, but neither of them followed as he stormed off after Katara into the woods.

After a few minutes of walking, Zuko found her sitting on the bank of a river, her feet dipping into the water. Jets of water sprayed in all directions with each violent motion of her legs, which she was kicking back and forth. When he pushed his way into her clearing and stopped at the edge of it, she looked up, and her expression, which was already angry, darkened further.

"What are you doing here?" Katara began to kick at the water even more aggressively.

"What's your problem?" Zuko demanded. The words burst out of him before he had time to think. "I know there were some issues when I first joined the group, but we've been together for a while now, and Sokka and Aang have finally accepted me. But not you. You've hated me from the moment we first met, and I don't even understand why. Sometimes it seems like you hate me more now than you did at the beginning. I'd like to fix whatever this is between us, but I don't know what I did to offend you in the first place."

"Why do you care?"

Zuko resisted the urge to throw his hands in the air in exasperation. "Because I want this group to work, and I don't think we're going to accomplish anything if we don't start trusting each other and working together." And because, though he could not say this part aloud, he had seen glimpses of her kindness in the way she treated Aang and Sokka and Appa, the way she interacted with the villagers in the various towns they went to. Part of him longed to have that smile land on him for once.

Normally, Zuko didn't give much thought to the way others treated him. Over the past three years especially, he'd grown used to getting weird looks or terrified glances, both from people who knew who he was and people who didn't. When a giant burn scar covered half your face, stares were unavoidable. When you traveled a nation dressed in the garb of its enemy, hatred was even more so. But something about Katara made every withering glance hurt worse. He didn't know what it was, exactly, but he felt an urge to please her that he couldn't quite shake.

Katara didn't say anything, so Zuko pushed on, his voice becoming more and more frustrated as he spoke. "Look, Katara, you don't have to like me. I understand if you don't. I'm sure I'm not—"

Katara jumped to her feet and whirled on him. "Don't you dare say you understand, Prince Zuko. You don't. You have no idea what I'm going through."

"Maybe I would if you bothered to tell me," Zuko shot back.

"Fine. You wanna know why I hate you? Where do I even begin?" She shook her head. "My village, the one you nearly destroyed when you rammed it with your ship? We used to have our own waterbending traditions, but now I have to travel all the way to the other side of the world just to gain access to a smidgen of my heritage. That's because of your people and the raids that stole all our benders."

Unbidden, Zuko's mind flashed to that very first vision, when he'd seen Avatar Yora get dragged away from the South Pole in ropes and chains.

Katara continued. "My people were left shattered and aimless, a shadow of what we once were, and it took nearly half a century before I finally came along, the first bender to be born to the south since all the others were taken away. By that time, a lot of our forms and techniques had already been lost, and I was left scrounging with what few scrolls still remain."

Zuko opened his mouth to say something, but Katara was on a roll now. The words flowed out of her, as if once she let her walls drop a little they all came crashing down.

"And more than that, I've spent my whole life hearing stories about the Avatar, the one who was fated to learn all the elements and bring balance to the world. I've dreamed of the day when they would reappear, hoping that when they did they would maybe stop this terrible war. Then the Avatar turns out to be you, none other than the prince of the Fire Nation itself, and if that wasn't bad enough, what's the first thing you do after you find out what you are? Terrorize my village, run away from your problems, and try to go turn yourself in. The world needs the Avatar, and instead it got a coward."

Zuko winced, but his pride wouldn't let him be cowed for long. Instead, anger rose up, hotter than before. "In case you haven't noticed, I'm not running anymore. I've accepted who I am. I've been working with Aang on airbending, and we're nearly to the North Pole so I can start on water. What more do you want from me? I can't snap my fingers and make the war go away. My father is one of the most powerful benders in the world. If I faced him right now, I would die, and you all would probably die with me. I have to train if I want to stand a chance."

Katara studied him, and Zuko found himself fidgeting under the piercing blue of her eyes. She was looking at him the way that Uncle Iroh sometimes did, as if she was reading his very soul. "Have you accepted who you are, Zuko?" she asked. "Have you really? Sure, you're training, but you hide every time we go to a village. You deflect anytime anyone asks about the plan once you've learned all the elements. I've never once heard you call yourself the Avatar, not in so many words, not even when it's the four of us alone. Whether you like it or not, you're just as much of a coward now as you were in the beginning. The only difference is that you've gotten better at hiding it."

"It wasn't my idea to let people think Aang is…" He hated how much he struggled to say the word, because deep down, he knew it meant that she was right. "…the Avatar."

Katara raised her eyebrows at him, as if her point had been proven. "Sure, but you seemed more than happy to go along with it."

"It's dangerous for me to reveal myself! If you're struggling this much with the idea of the Fire Nation's prince being the Avatar, can you imagine how much worse it would be for the rest of the world? It's better for everyone if I keep this quiet for as long as I can."

"Maybe." Katara glared at him. She was playing, seemingly unconsciously, with the blue pendant she always wore around her neck. "I just can't help but think that the longer we keep this lie going, the more people will die, and the more families will be ruined. We could be doing something to help people, even something small, and instead we breeze right by every town." Her fingers twisted themselves around that pendant, and she held on tightly. Her voice dropped to a whisper. "I don't want anyone else to have to go through what I did." A tear slid down her cheek, and she turned away from him and sat back down on the edge of the river.

Zuko couldn't help it. He took a few steps forward toward her instinctively, reaching out his hand to comfort. Then, just before he got to her, he realized what he was doing and stopped, letting his hand fall to his side.

"What you did?" he asked.

The pause that followed stretched for an uncomfortably long time, and after a few seconds of it, Zuko found that he could no longer resist the urge to go to her. He cautiously approached and sat beside her on the river bank, but he didn't dare touch her. Instead he simply crossed his legs and stared at the water as she cried silently next to him.

Finally, she wiped her eyes, but still didn't look at him. "I guess you don't know. Why would you? None of us have talked much about our pasts." A deep breath. "Sokka and I… you could say I have a bit of a grudge against the Fire Nation. There was a raid on our village when I was very young, and my mother… I don't know why, but they targeted her. The Fire Nation took her away from me."

This time Zuko was the one who paused. He stared at his reflection, trying to collect his thoughts.

"I guess we have that in common," he said softly, raising his head to look at her. He watched as her breath caught in her throat, and her eyes darted up to his—and for the first time since he saw her and Aang land in the middle of her Water Tribe village, what seemed like a lifetime ago, her look betrayed not hatred or revulsion, but…kinship. Maybe she was right. Maybe he didn't understand everything she was going through. Maybe she didn't understand everything he was going through, either. But this was something that they could both understand.

There was a question there, too, in her eyes, unspoken. Zuko hesitated, reluctant to share. But Katara had poured out her heart to him. It was only fair that he reciprocated. So he took a deep breath and told her about his mother. He didn't say much, just that they had been quite close when he was a child, and that when he was eleven, she disappeared, and he had no idea where she was or if she was still alive. Just a couple of years later, he himself had been banished, gotten his scar, and been sent out on the quest to find the Avatar.

Silence fell between them, not the heated silence that comes after an argument, but a new kind, one that Zuko hadn't felt with Katara before. He couldn't help but feel like maybe this was a step in the right direction, no matter how small.

He glanced down again, and was surprised to see that at some point while he'd been talking, Katara's hand had moved over to cover his. Katara looked where he was looking, and her eyes went wide. At once, they both pulled away, and Katara pushed herself to her feet.

"We should get back. The others will be wondering where we are."

Zuko's fingers still tingled with the memory of her touch, but he nodded and stood up. "Yeah. They'll be worried."

They walked back to camp together, but Zuko couldn't help but notice that Katara made sure to stay out of arm's reach.