Twenty-four hours later …
"Oh man, what a day," Sokka said, flomping down on his sleeping bag. "The turtle seal we're having for dinner? I helped kill it! That is how you hunt. And I got a date for tomorrow! This is the life."
He looked around. Katara and Aang wore matching scowls. Zuko, who was clenching his fists as though his mortal enemy's neck was in his grasp, turned and stormed out. Their house's covering of skins flapped down behind him, and Katara had the impression that if they'd had a door, he would happily have smashed it off its hinges.
"Uh – I mean, I guess it was okay," Sokka amended. "Not great, not terrible. What'd I miss? Hey, what happened to your necklace?"
"I don't think I'll wear it while we're here," Katara said, taking it out of her parka to show she still had it, then putting it back away.
"Why not? And why are you two so down? You've both wanted to start waterbending training since forever."
She sighed internally. It had been humiliating enough the first time round, but maybe talking about it would be therapeutic. "It all began when Aang and I went to Master Pakku's training grounds this morning for our first waterbending lesson …"
"Good morning, Master Pakku!"
Pakku dropped his stream of water, rose, and turned, muttering under his breath. He had seven other students already there, meditating or moving water around in loops; they pretended to keep working, but gradually paid more attention to her and Aang.
"This is my friend," Aang began.
"It will be difficult to teach waterbending to someone who is not a waterbender," Pakku said.
"I am –" Katara began.
Behind her, someone cleared his throat. She and Aang jumped and whirled. It was Zuko.
How'd he get three feet behind us without us hearing? Walking on ice?!
"I'm only here to observe," he said. "By your permission."
Pakku frowned. "Not with a novice waterbender starting today," he said. "He should have as few distractions as possible." Zuko hesitated. "It would be discourteous to stay where you aren't welcome."
"I'm not welcome anywhere," Zuko said, and he turned and walked away. The ice crunched underfoot this time.
What was that about? Since when does Zuko ever give up that easily?
"That goes for you, too," Pakku said to Katara.
"I'm not here to observe, I want to learn," she said. "I'm a waterbender."
"I didn't know you'd be a girl," Pakku said. "In our tribe, it is forbidden for women to learn waterbending. Other than healing."
"I know," Katara said, with her most diplomatic smile. "But I think you might make an exception in my case. First off –"
"No," Pakku said.
"… You didn't even let me say anything," she said, her smile flickering.
"Because the answer is no," Pakku said. "It would waste both of our time to pretend it might not be. Rules are rules. Go off to the healing hut."
"You're the Tribe's best waterbending master. If you wanted to make an exception, surely you could."
"I don't want to," Pakku said flatly. "I have seven other students, and I want them thinking about their water chakras, not yours." His students tittered.
"What's a –" Aang began.
Katara gave an angry gasp and talked over him. "If the boys are too stupid to focus just because a girl is there, that's their fault, not mine."
"And yet."
"But – it would be an important gesture of friendship between sister tribes –"
"You mean you'll be my friend if I break our laws because you say so? Do you really mean it?"
Katara flushed in anger. "It's the will of the spirits that I learn waterbending! How do you think I made it across the entire world, with the Fire Nation running us down the entire way?!"
Pakku's sarcastic sneer twisted into something much less pleasant. "The will of the spirits is absolute," he said, very slowly and clearly, "but unknowable. You made it here because the Avatar protected you, and he is human."
"Well," Aang said, "would you teach her as a favour to me, then?"
"No," Pakku said. "The Avatar commands respect because he respects the sovereignty of the Tribes. If he expects us to rewrite our rules on his whim, then we might as well surrender to the Fire Nation."
Katara saw red.
"I don't remember exactly what I said next," she said.
"I do," Aang said, "but you probably don't want me repeating any of it."
"Sounds about right," Sokka said.
"Honestly, the nerve of that man! As if teaching girls something we absolutely should be learning is anything like what the Fire Nation does! He wouldn't be so smug if they'd ever had to fight in the war instead of just sitting around like –!"
"So anyway, what happened after that?" asked Sokka, who knew how long she could go on if she built up enough momentum.
"Well, he wouldn't budge, so I figured, healing waterbending is better than no waterbending …"
She pushed open the healing hut's flap. The elderly healing mistress Yagoda sat with a class full of girls who might have been half Katara's age. Akini was there; she looked up and gave a little wave. Katara's heart sank. She liked kids just fine, but not when she was supposed to be training to become a warrior.
"Come in, come in!" said Yagoda. "Are you here for the healing lesson?"
"Yeah, I am," Katara said, having mostly cooled down on the walk over.
In theory, healing would actually have been a perfectly reasonable skill to learn, even if it wasn't what she'd set out for. Logically, the first healer should be more important than the fourth fighter, especially when they had Aang, who was already a master of one element and counting. It would be awful if she met someone mortally wounded and couldn't save him because she'd never worked on her healing.
In practice, adults are rarely willing to entrust small children with anything important, and Yagoda didn't say anything that Katara hadn't already figured out from healing Appa. She went over the flow and feeling of chi, that it was important to steam bleeding and heal vital organs first, and some vague stuff about the spirits. A private lesson might have gone better, or offering to help with an actual medical emergency, if there was one. It seemed there wasn't, the men had managed to go at least a full day without seriously injuring themselves, which Katara couldn't help but think was awfully selfish of them.
She valiantly tried to tough it out anyway, hoping that maybe something would click if she gave it time, but time was something she didn't have.
Bang. Bang bang bang. Bang, bang bang bang bang bang –
And then there's this guy.
"What is that?" Yagoda asked, frowning. "It sounds like a storm."
"That's just Zuko firebending," Katara said with an eye roll. "He's either doing his katas or throwing a tantrum over nothing. And he's been training before dawn, so …"
"Well, he's making a nuisance of himself," Yagoda said, which was true: the young girls had all frozen, looking at Yagoda and Katara with big scared eyes. "Can you get him to quiet down?"
Katara sighed and got to her feet. "I'll handle him. Go on with the lesson without me." Anything had to be better than taking a class with girls half her age who kept whispering about how cute her brother was.
The healing tent was sited near the inland edge of the city, so as to be close to any hunters who got injured on the job. This meant it was only a short walk to leave the city limits, where she found Zuko in a permafrost field, shooting fireballs rapid-fire at nothing. The ice around him had melted and re-frozen into a weird landscape of dips and ridges.
"Hey!" she called.
He didn't even spare her a glance, just kept going through his kata.
She took a moment to observe and contrast with Aang. Aang was so nonchalant about bending that you could almost forget it was bending; he'd do things like bending air behind his staff when he was reaching for it to blow it closer, little things too subtle to count as airbending moves, as natural as walking. Zuko, on the other hand, was utterly focused, like he needed every last iota of concentration to do even the simplest of moves. And everything was always discrete fire punches or kicks; she wasn't sure what the firebending equivalent to Aang's micro-bending would be, but she was sure Zuko didn't do it. Aang was obviously more talented, but he made everything look too easy to be impressive, whereas with Zuko, you could feel just how much skill everything took.
"Hey!" she yelled again, walking closer. "I'm talking to you!"
He shot one last fireball into the sky and turned to glare at her. "What?"
He was wearing a light shirt and was still covered in sweat. His coat lay on the ice, well away from his tantrum area. She was reminded of Aang, who'd refused all offers of a parka, citing his airbender breathing exercises.
"You're making a racket," she said. "Can't you keep it down?"
"You want me to make quiet explosions?" he asked incredulously.
"I've seen you fight without explosions. Or you could go further out."
He folded his arms. "You won't be much use in a fight if you can't focus with one firebender training in the next valley over. Go back to class and deal with it."
"Apparently I'm not going to be much of a bender either way," Katara said bitterly, "because Master Pakku doesn't train women. I've been stuck in the healer's tent with all the little girls. I can deal with their noise or yours, but I'm in no mood for both."
Zuko's expression fell. "And you just went along with this?" he asked, appalled. "I can't believe it! You went on and on for weeks about how excited you were to learn waterbending! I thought that was supposed to be the entire reason you were travelling with the Avatar! But no, you were going with him just to spite me?" He threw up his hands. "What am I saying, of course I believe it."
"I don't exactly have a choice! Yes, I tried to talk him into training me, but it's against the law!"
"Your laws are stupid!"
"They aren't my laws!"
"They're still stupid!"
"Yes! I know!"
"These people are idiots!"
"Yes! I know!"
"Augh! You want training that badly? Then fine, take it!"
He did a flip-kick and shot a wave of fire at her; she reflexively stepped back, slipping on the snow, and barely managed to lift a chunk of ice to block. The heat wave washed over her and crinkled her hair. She didn't have time to do anything more than bend more ice in front of her, because he was flowing into another attack before the first one had dissipated.
"Wait, what?" Aang said. "He attacked you?! I thought you were on the same side!"
"You did?" Sokka said.
"It's complicated," Katara said, which worked on a lot of levels with Zuko.
"You think anyone cares what you want?" Zuko went on, shooting blast after blast at her, flash-evaporating her defences as fast as she could erect them. "You think being offered free healing lessons is bad? For the past two years, every other village I've visited has tried to murder me! D'you think I just gave up? No! I made them deal with me, because I cared!"
Katara slid into a little depression, which gave her some cover and let her build up a bit of a shield and catch her breath. "You're insane!" she shouted. "People attack you because they know you'll attack them!"
He dashed forward, leapt high, and slammed into the permafrost like a meteorite, spraying fire and ice shards in all directions, shattering her defences, forcing her back again. "I used to think the same thing," he said, wreathed in fire.
How can he talk and fight at the same time?! I can barely breathe!
"I thought I could be nice," he said. Her instinct would have been to counterattack or run, but he was relentless, and she was running out of stamina, fast. He switched to slower, more powerful kicks; each hit shattered her ice shield, and she'd barely have enough time to bend more to replace it before the next landed. "That I could talk to people. Tell them what I wanted, and we'd work everything out. It'd all be so reasonable. There's just one problem."
He reached up to touch his scar, letting his attack trail off. She gasped for air, bending a pathetic shell of ice between them.
"Nobody cares what you want," he said, not even a little out of breath. "Nobody except you, and that only matters if you're willing to take things into your own hands. So, why do you care what he wants?"
He extended his arms, and fire flowed around him, but at that moment, ice rose up and froze around his body, lifting and pinning him in place. Katara staggered, slipped, and fell. She crawled backward, too winded to talk.
Pakku had arrived. He stood with his hands folded behind his back. "In the Northern Water Tribe, we do not consider women to be warriors," he said. "We do not train them, and nor do we allow Fire Nation brigands to harm them."
Zuko snarled fire, and the ice melted. He made a three point landing, unfazed at being soaked. "Remind me to introduce you to my sister sometime."
He spun and kicked fire at Pakku, who blocked it easily and twirled his hands; the ice under Zuko's feet rose up to grip at his ankles. "Far be it from me to tell the Fire Nation who should learn her arts," he said.
Zuko stomped, bending a halo of fire about his feet and blasting the ice back. "You shouldn't tell anyone what they can't do. If they can learn it, they should."
Hang on. He was melting my ice as fast as I could make it, and he's melting Pakku's ice as fast as he can make it, and Pakku's making at least three times as much as I could. He wasn't trying to hit me at all. He's insane, but when he called this training, he actually meant it.
He leaped forward and threw a punch at Pakku, who blocked; Zuko bounced off and kicked his side, then snap kicked his chest. Pakku reeled and fell back into a defensive crouch.
So far, Pakku had been making tiny motions with his hands only. Now, he moved his entire body, and a massive tentacle of water and ice whipped forward and smacked Zuko back, hard. "Perhaps it's not my place to decide that, but it's certainly not yours."
Zuko pushed himself to his feet, but Pakku twisted something, and the ice shifted under him, sending him straight back down. Shards of ice flew up into a cloud, suspended overhead, then came whistling down. Zuko huffed, bending a haze of fire to take the brunt of it, but it was an unrelenting attack from every direction –
Katara might not have been able to stand up to a dedicated attack for long, but she could recover quickly enough. She got back to her feet and mimicked Pakku's movements as best she could. It wasn't perfect, but it was enough to make a water whip and knock him back.
"Zuko is selfish, obnoxious, violent, and all-round the biggest jerk I've ever met," she spat, "and I still prefer him to you. Because at least he takes me seriously enough to hear me out! And you know what? You might think you're at peace, but it's only a matter of time before the Fire Nation comes here, and when they do, you'll be sorry half your benders can't help defend you."
Pakku was already back on his feet. He flicked a water whip at her, much bigger and stronger than anything she'd ever managed. "Do you really think you're the first to say such things, that I've never heard them before?" he asked. "Our culture and traditions haven't survived for thousands of years by being weak. Abandoning them at the urging of a wilful child? That is weakness."
Zuko did his signature spinning fire kick from prone, disrupting the water whip, then kipped up and leaped forward to keep attacking. "You want to talk about weakness? It's where you beat down a child because it's easier than admitting you were wrong!"
He blasted away at Pakku's whips, even as more ice flowed in to replace what boiled off. Katara stood shoulder to shoulder with him, doing what she could to wrest control of the water and ice from Pakku. She couldn't overwhelm him, but she could at least weaken his attacks enough that Zuko could deal with them.
Pakku wasn't a master for nothing. His steady pressure with masses of ice and water overwhelmed Zuko's staccato bursts, and he was used to fighting waterbenders, whereas this was Katara's first time. "What makes you so sure I am wrong, though?" he asked curiously, only raising his voice just enough to be heard over Zuko's explosions and the hiss of steam. "Isn't it just as weak for the child to throw a tantrum because he's the one in the wrong?"
Zuko kept shooting, even as Pakku started taking it seriously and began bending more and more water. "It's never wrong to want to protect people! And you could be helping her protect the Avatar and herself and her brother, but instead you want to send her into battle unarmed against – against people like me!"
Pakku sighed. "I do not wish her into battle at all," he said. "And I tire of this."
He did a series of full-body undulations, far more acrobatic than someone his age had any right to be, and a tide of icy water slammed into Zuko, missing Katara by a hair, and tossed him across the field. She flinched away, tracking where Zuko had landed. Among the maelstrom of water, she saw flecks of red, and her heart skipped a beat.
"Zuko! Stop! Master Pakku! Leave him alone!"
She ran over to Zuko, who was half-buried under a small hill of ice. He looked bad. Jagged edges had torn up his shirt and swathes of the skin underneath, and the impact had to have done internal damage, because there was blood at his mouth. He was still struggling, trying to push the ice off, but there had to be at least a ton of it and he was too messed up to firebend at it.
"Stop it," she said, tearing off what remained of his shirt and melting ice to put on the lacerations. She positioned her hands, and the wounds glowed blue. "You're going to get yourself killed."
"M not," he said, pushing at her hands, his voice faint, "I can't …"
She leaned all her weight on one of his arms, bent ice around it to keep him down, did the other, and then went back to healing. "You're an idiot," she said. "No duel is worth this."
Looks like a boy's got himself grievously wounded after all.
It was only a matter of time.
Shut up and let me focus.
There came the whistle of wind against canvas, and the thump of Aang dropping from his glider. "Uh, is everyone okay?" he asked. "Zuko?"
Pakku began walking back to the city. "We're done here," he said. "Aang, return to the training grounds. I didn't tell you to stop doing the exercises."
"Zuko? Katara?" Aang asked, looking across the battlefield: shattered ice and dripping water, the bizarre twisted shapes of water bent into whips and re-frozen, and the half-dead Zuko.
Katara's face twisted into something ugly, but she kept her head down and her voice level. "Go on, Aang," she said. "We'll be fine here. I can handle this."
"Aang," Pakku repeated over his shoulder. "Come."
Aang shot her another uncertain look, but she focused on Zuko's wounds, and he turned and followed Pakku.
"I don't get it," Sokka said. "Since when does Zuko care whether you get trained? Surely he'd prefer it if you weren't? I mean, a big part of why you want to learn waterbending is to help Aang kill his dad. That's why he won't teach Aang firebending."
Aang shifted uncomfortably.
Katara did a palms-up. "I'm sure it somehow makes perfect sense inside his own head," she said. "Anyway, I healed him and he flounced off, no thank you for saving his life obviously, so then I went back to the healing huts …"
… where she'd missed the rest of the lesson. The girls came running out as she approached, chattering about going over to someone's house to play. Inside, she found Yagoda cleaning her training dummy.
"Thanks for that, Katara," Yagoda said. "Would you like tea?"
Katara wanted a lie down.
"Yes please," she said.
Yagoda bustled to the back of the hut, where she had a small stove. "I don't want to be rude," she said, "but do you really think he's mature enough for marriage yet?"
"Zuko? Ha," Katara not-laughed. "I can't imagine who – you think I'm marrying him don't you." Yagoda raised her eyebrows. "No! He drives me crazy!"
"All men do that," Yagoda said.
"Point, but even if I were engaged to anyone, which I'm not, and if it were from our gang, which it wouldn't have to be, he'd be my fifth pick."
"Aren't there only four of you altogether?"
"Aang, Momo, Sokka, Appa, Zuko," she said, counting them off on her fingers. "I'm not sure about the order of the middle three."
"But I'm definitely first?" Aang asked, cautiously pleased.
Sokka shot Katara a look of Oh by the way, did you know he has a crush on you?
She responded with Yes, I knew. Distract him!
"Wait," Sokka said. "That's perfect! Gaang!"
Katara and Aang gave him blank looks.
"I've been thinking for ages that we needed a name for our group," he said. "Something catchy. Boomeraang? It kind of works because Aang's the Avatar, and it's my signature weapon and I'm the leader –"
"Oh my goodness," Katara undertoned.
"– but for some reason it always felt, I don't know, forced? So I was thinking, Sokkataang? Sokka and the benders? But nothing quite fit. And what if we added or lost members?"
"Team Avatar?" Katara suggested.
"See, that's why nobody ever puts you in charge of naming things," Sokka said.
She folded her arms.
"But Gaang, that's perfect. I can't believe I never thought of it!"
Katara and Aang exchanged glances.
"Anyway …"
"If he isn't your fiance, who is?" Yagoda asked. "What sort of man lets his betrothed travel across the world without him? Is it Sokka? But I heard he was your brother."
"Wait a minute," Aang said indignantly. "What about me?"
Help me, Katara mouthed to Sokka.
"You don't count, you're too young to marry," he said. "You're younger than she is. Or, you know, ninety-something years older, which, ew."
"What's wrong with the boy being younger? Air Nomad boys dated older girls all the time."
"Yeah, but Air Nomads didn't raise their own families, did they?" Sokka said. "In the Water Tribes, a man feeds his wife and kids. You have to be able to hunt enough for yourself and at least two or three other people, every single day. Katara could marry if she wanted, but I couldn't, I'd need to get better at hunting first. Men usually don't marry until twenty, that's how long it takes to get good enough. Hunting's really hard. At least, if you don't have a waterbender with you. I've gotta admit, Katara, you had the right idea about that."
Aang frowned mutinously, probably thinking that he could gather nuts and berries just fine, and probably not thinking about how many nuts and berries there were in the North Pole.
"Anyway," Katara said, "it turns out Gran-Gran was born up here. This" she waved the necklace around "was her engagement necklace. And as long as I wear it, everyone will assume I'm engaged to Zuko. I'll put it back on after we leave." She sighed. "I can cope with that. I'm angrier about not being allowed to learn waterbending."
"Don't worry, Katara," Aang said. "We'll think of something."
"Yeah," Sokka said. "For example: Aang, why don't you just it teach it to her?"
It felt like a fifty-pound load fell off her back. "Why didn't I think of that!"
"Yeah, why didn't you?"
She ignored this. "You'll get a practice partner, and I'll have someone to teach me! Come on, let's go!" And she led Aang outside.
Sokka rolled onto his back. "You don't know how lucky you have it, Momo," he said. "I have to work my hands to the bone, and I'm still only third on her list. All you have to do is keep your fur nice, and you get a cushy spot in second place." He pulled Momo out of the jerky bowl and onto his chest, so he could begin scritching his ears.
Momo snuggled in and asked him whether he actually wanted to be higher on his sister's list.
"No, but it's the principle of the matter. I mean, I take care of my hair too."
AN
I don't have a solution for when canon and fanfic converge. It's boring to read a novelisation of something you already watched and can assume went about the same way, because Zuko's nefarious Fire Nation machinations haven't completely derailed canon just yet; but it's confusing to omit something that affects the plot and that might happen differently, or not at all. The feast happened: Aang asked Pakku to teach his friend, Sokka awkwardly flirted with Yue, Katara got lonely and tried to be involved. The biggest difference was that Zuko sulked in a corner. Phrasing the chapter as one character's recollection is an experiment in dealing with that: Katara can say one line of 'thing happened' in the intermissions, reminding the reader and confirming that yes it still happened in this continuity, and get back to the new stuff.
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