AN: Surprise! Not dead! I spent a little time not writing or checking messages and came back to find about a hundred new reviews on my stories. How could I not keep going? So a special thank you to everyone who posts a review or sends a PM, even after it's been a few months between updates. Here's the next installment!
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"I heard he made a scene because he didn't want her to scar. Because - well, you know…"
"Sure I know! Because if he wanted to see a burned up face when he was in the throes of passion, he'd keep more mirrors around."
"Oh, Genji you are terrible!"
"No, I'm amazing."
Sian ducked her head over the basket of wet linens and shouldered past the other laundresses so she could hurry out of earshot. It was shameful how they gossiped here in the sweating gut of the palace. A day passed and the original story became splintered and bifurcated as everyone tried to tell it so it served their own ends.
As if Prince Zuko was undignified as some randy stable boy or Princess Katara would ever submit to the sort of sordid deeds the maids cooked up. Oh, Sian had her own theories about what was between them - because it was obvious there was something - but she would sooner eat lye than break confidence and discuss the things she had witnessed. Because Sian understood discretion.
"If you girls are gossiping instead of scrubbing again, I'm gonna wring you both out and string you up on a line!"
Sian flinched against the sheer volume of the head laundress's voice, but didn't pause a step on her way to the drying lines. Machi was a loud woman, and stout enough to stop a runaway cart, but she was kind. When Pokui had sent Sian down here those weeks ago, Machi had found a place for her among the boiling vats and scrubbing tubs and quickly came to appreciate Sian's diligence.
Presently, Machi stood at the head of the drying lines, chatting with the woman who kept the palace stocked with soaps and other supplies. They were an odd pair, the former red in her lined cheeks and perpetually spotted down the front of her broad frock with water, while the latter was slight and wan and always primly dressed. Still, every week the soap woman visited to deliver her products, and every week she dawdled in the fumes and steam to catch up with the head laundress.
Sian wasn't trying to eavesdrop. She rapidly sorted through and hung the linens in her basket with pronged wooden pegs. As she worked, Hemya, the young waterbender stationed on the lines, slowly pulled the moisture from each sheet, dragging it downward with slow passes of her hands. Sian knew better than to try striking up a conversation with Hemya, who responded only with silence and brooding. (Not that Sian blamed her. She wore the same sort of iron collar as Princess Katara, and she had to be even younger.)
So there was really no way Sian could avoid overhearing the conversation Machi was having with the soap woman.
"-but finally she was exhausted, and that puffed-up Admiral managed to land a blow." She shook her head, frowning down at the dainty cloths she was folding. "He hit her hard enough to kill a girl her size. Much more fire on it than was necessary, from what I've heard."
"But that water princess is made of sterner stuff," the soap woman asserted.
"Right, right," Machi went on, a smile tugging up one corner of her mouth as she glanced slyly at her friend. "But this was when the Prince came running down to the arena."
"He didn't!"
"He picked that girl up and carried her straight to the royal infirmary. Not a word to anyone."
"Oh," the soap woman said, covering her face with her hands. "Oh my."
"Apparently he wouldn't set her down until he had found a waterbender to heal her. They're saying," Machi said in a lower tone, "he was insistent that she mustn't scar."
"Of course he was. Can you imagine? After everything..." The soap woman said something too quiet for Sian to hear, and Machi nodded. They went on whispering, but Sian's attention was diverted.
On her other side, Hemya had stopped working. Her hand hovered a few inches from the cloth in front of her, unmoving. She seemed stuck, a cross furrow in her brow. It occurred to Sian that this story must sound very different to someone who was also a slave. All the romance shriveled out of it, and the thing that remained looked more like a tragedy.
Because it was shocking and shameful that Princess Katara should be abused and exploited this way, when she was a better princess than what the Fire Nation had now.
Sian's eyes widened at her own traitorous thought. With shaking fingers, she began taking down the dry linens and folding them with exaggerated care. At length, Hemya went back to her work as well.
When the task was perhaps half completed, Machi called Sian over and pressed a stack of tidily folded handkerchiefs into her hands. "The Prince's chambers. Half for him and half for her." Her coarse hands closed around Sian's with warm pressure. "Where they can find them."
Sian did not need to ask. She only nodded and left by the narrow servants' stairs.
The Crown Prince's suite was empty but for a pair of footmen, idling as if they did not expect him back any time soon. They watched Sian with lazy ambivalence as she forewent the linen closet and the dressing room and instead tucked away handkerchiefs at the Prince's bedside and in the drawers at either end of his sofa. One in his writing desk.
One under the book she had been reading, one at her bedside. Sian hesitated in the deserted companion's apartment, clutching the last handkerchief and at a loss as to where to put it. No sign remained to indicate where else the Princess spent her time. It was as if she was already gone, all trace of her cleared away.
At length, Sian tucked the handkerchief in her own pocket and slipped out of the suite. She had every intention of returning to the laundry room and folding the last of the sheets, so it was a shock to her when she discovered she had turned the wrong way. Instead of the stairs, she found herself outside the office of the Prince's majordomo. The door was shut and the room beyond was silent.
She knew all at once why she was here. The story had been all the maids whispered about last week - Pokui facing down the slave princess, taking away the last possessions she had. And Princess Katara had yielded, not because she was afraid for herself, but because Pokui had threatened Sian.
No one said it, but every maid who heard that story felt a tiny stab of compassion.
Not Sian, though. What she felt was a flood, a tide roaring back in. Before, she had served Princess Katara like a little girl playing a fantasy game. When she was demoted to laundress, the game had ended and she had set aside what silly notions of loyalty she had constructed for herself.
But then Princess Katara had given up her precious keepsakes to protect her. Suddenly the game was not a game anymore. It was a struggle, larger and more substantial than any game. More deadly. And Sian found herself inevitably drawn into it. Sian, who did not break rules or shirk duties, who obeyed without question.
She had come here to steal back her Princess's treasures, and when she lifted her hand to softly click the door open, she hardly trembled at all.
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The midday sun glaring off the sea raised up a steamy wind that lolled drunkenly up the mountain to ramble through the crowd of onlookers attending the Admiral's departure. Few paid any mind to the building heat, the promise of a truly sweltering summer to come. Their attention held fixedly on the spectacle of leave-taking, the Fire Lord and his royal heirs bidding farewell to Admiral Zhao.
Closer still, they watched the Prince. His comportment was entirely proper - stern, aloof. Of course, he had every right to begrudge the Admiral for his over-exuberance at the Agni Kai two nights past. Damaging the Prince's property was, to be sure, a faux-pas.
Yet - many recalled to acquaintances in undertones - his reaction at the event itself had been somewhat less dignified. Rushing to the girl's side and scooping her up like a crushed bird. Fleeing the arena without so much as a glance at the Admiral, or even the Fire Lord. Quite an underwhelming display. And now, look closely - is he especially pale and drawn today?
No more than is the norm. Your eyes play tricks on you.
Still others shrugged in response. And if he is? She is an important personage after all, a royal prisoner of war, and if the damage was as severe as rumor suggests, then the Prince's quick action may well have saved her life.
These whispers dwindled to thoughtful silences that squirmed in the heat like germinating seeds.
The sun gleamed dully off the ceramic rooftops of all Caldera and the smell of the harbor pooled in the royal city like the dregs of murky wine. Few remarked on what was, after all, an expected turn in the weather, but to the Prince who stood at the top of the grand steps, the very air was oppressive. Even as Zhao assumed his place below, Zuko's mind strayed over and over to childhood summers, deprived even of the escape of the academy.
He had not thought of those days once in the five years of his banishment. It surprised him a little, how vividly he remembered them now. Perhaps it was the sleeplessness.
He had not slept since the duel, had not tried. All through the night, and then the day and night that followed, Zuko had haunted the infirmary, waiting. Waiting for the healers to finish their work, waiting for his father to summon him to face dire consequences, waiting to wake up from this increasingly convincing nightmare.
None of that happened. Instead, Yotsu had arrived late this morning to coax him into fresh robes and hurry him down to the steps for this farewell ceremony. It was all very surreal. He knew that the Fire Lord stood just paces from him now. He knew that Azula was much closer on his other side. But they still seemed so distant, so insignificant.
Zhao bowed low to the Fire Lord, then turned slightly to bow again to Zuko and Azula. Even looking directly at him, Zuko could not seem to reach the hatred that had so recently bubbled like a tarry stew in his gut. Instead there was only numbness freezing him up from chest to gut to groin, a crippling physical ache that never seemed to let up. He couldn't eat. He couldn't sleep. It was all he could do to continue breathing.
Next to that, Zhao was nothing. Zhao was an ant stinging his ankle while this croco-lion chomped at his neck.
"My deepest gratitude for your understanding, Prince Zuko," the Admiral said from his bow. "As an act of contrition for my loss of control, please accept this humble gift."
He held out a rice paper envelope, sealed with his mark of rank. A footman hurried forward to accept the offering on Zuko's behalf.
Zuko only stared back at Zhao, unblinking, unmoving.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Ozai shift fractionally. Perhaps it was a signal, a warning. Belatedly, as if in slow motion, alarm flooded Zuko's chest. He nodded his head once in acknowledgement.
The Fire Lord spoke some final words of dismissal and Zhao bowed again and backed away. He did not smirk, but the scent of it hung around him like an arrogant cologne when he turned to go at last.
All Zuko could smell, though, was the hot salt and dead fish wafting up from the harbor.
He drifted beside Azula as their father led them back through the grand entryway of the palace. The shade just inside was momentarily blinding, a reprieve despite the stuffy stillness of the air. In the brighter light of the lofty foyer, Ozai abruptly stopped.
"Leave us."
At the Fire Lord's command, the servants scattered and vanished with the urgency of roaches. It filled Zuko with a horrible dread, as if he too was small enough to be crushed under a boot. Beside him in the doorway separating the entrance hall from the foyer, Azula stood still and, by all appearances, relaxed.
They were alone.
Ozai stood in the center of the foyer, resplendent in his long robes of office and his viciously gleaming crown. When he turned to face them, his mouth was curved slightly downward - the tiniest gesture bespeaking a wellspring of contempt.
"Your pathetic theatrics end now."
Zuko felt his father's stare as if he was still standing under the blazing sun - if the sun had a special reason to punish him.
"I was willing to overlook your weak display in the war room. I might even have forgiven your insubordination at the dinner, had you succeeded in landing a blow against your petty rival." He prowled forward, and though Zuko had grown close to matching him in height, the Fire Lord still seemed to tower over him more with each slow, unrelenting step.
"But even in that, you failed. Just like when you were a boy. Always trying so hard. Always failing."
Zuko's lips were parched, it hurt to force them open. "Father-"
"Do not speak."
Heat beat against every unscarred inch of Zuko's face. His father's mouth had thinned and spread into a scowl and his eyes seemed to punch through whatever they landed on. It was hard to meet that look, but Zuko knew better than to turn away.
"Yesterday, while you hid like a child whose favorite plaything was broken, a hawk arrived from the Boiling Rock." Ozai stood so close now that Zuko could smell traces of his soap - scented with a spice pillaged from some conquered land. "The Avatar and his allies evaded your trap. I will give you one chance to guess your miscalculation."
The room was spinning around Zuko, and he was spiraling deeper and deeper into a pit in the polished stone floor. Beside him, Azula was silent, impassive as a wall or a rocky coastline that was drifting ever farther away.
As vertigo sucked him down, he formed one solid thought. There was no safe way to answer. He knew nothing about Azula's trap, so anything he said about it could be blatantly wrong. And if he admitted to having no knowledge of her plan, not only would it look bad that she had excluded him, but her lies would obviously come to light and blow back on her. Then she would have another reason to lash out at Zuko.
At Katara.
"The archers were ineffective," Zuko managed in a steady voice. It was only a guess, but it clicked into place in his head, a familiar shape interlocking with what he knew. "The Avatar must have used his airbending to blow the arrows off course. We underestimated him. It won't happen again."
"In that, at least, you are correct."
"Father," Azula began. There was a measured quality to her voice that belied her confident appearance. "All reports indicate that the Avatar was weakening and would have been overtaken had the prisoners not escaped and rioted. We must finish this before he has time to recover his strength. Give me leave to hunt him down, and I will see to it that the Avatar has no chance to interfere with our plans."
Ozai turned his penetrating stare on her. "You've grown accustomed to my favor, Azula. Do not make demands as if it cannot be lost."
Zuko sensed Azula stiffen in the same instant his own eyes snapped wide. He was used to Ozai criticizing and threatening him. It seemed almost natural, and certainly justified and right. But it did not seem right at all that he would speak so sharply to Azula. He very nearly stepped forward. A reflexive protest burned at the back of his throat.
She had it coming, though. Zuko would be a fool to defend her now, after all of her machinations, the way she had manipulated him and orchestrated her elaborate lesson. Zhao may have provided the fire, but Azula had been the one to see Katara roasted.
Ice crackled and pierced sickeningly through him, belly to chest to guts. Let Azula face their father's wrath. It was about time she had a turn.
But Ozai instead turned back to him.
"As for you, you've embarrassed me for the last time. From this point forward, your diplomatic visits among the Court will be overseen by Minister Chan Xu or one of his deputies. You will not leave the palace grounds without my permission."
Zuko, caught in the force of his stare, flinched when his father's hand snapped up between them. He held the rice paper envelope bearing the Admiral's seal.
"Tomorrow night you will attend this play as a show of good will to our Nation's hero. You will not mope like some petulant child. And you will be accompanied by your…" His lip curled and the word he spoke was not the one he meant. "-waterbender."
"She- Father, the healers are nowhere near finished-"
"Then it is a lucky thing you are so eager to carry her."
Zuko choked, his face heating anew under his father's knowing, unyielding look. Ozai dropped the envelope into his hands. The folded paper was sharp against his fingers, but he hardly felt it as he watched the Fire Lord turn to stride away. The strikes of his fine shoes on the palace floor were the only sound until they were gone.
"Do you exert effort into being pathetic," Azula asked in a tone that would have been bland had it not been for the underlying bite, "or does it simply come naturally to you?"
Zuko turned a fierce glare on her. It didn't occur to him that Ozai's criticism had cut her as deeply as it had cut him. He looked at his sister and he saw what he had been struggling for so long not to see. An enemy.
"What's the matter, Azula? Scared you won't always be Father's favorite?"
"Hardly," she said, baring her teeth. "My competition's greatest skill is making me look good by comparison."
She spun away and marched toward another corridor, and Zuko snarled after her. "I've had plenty of help. Thanks for that!"
She didn't even slow down.
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The world seeped back around her in slowed-down glimpses, and every time she opened her eyes, it seemed that hours had passed.
First, there was the soft yellow of candles. She saw only wood rafters high above, and an angled ceiling that vanished in shadow. The air stung her nose, the crushed herbal vapor was so strong, but it could not quite cover the scent of burned meat. There was no sound. Her ears - and most of the rest of her body - were submerged in cool water.
She hurt.
When she looked again, soft morning light streamed through the rafters, and everything it touched was glowing and new. Including the woman who stood over her. She was young, close to Katara's own age, and in the seconds before she noticed her patient was watching her, she wore a look of imperturbable focus. Blue light frosted her sharp chin and her thoughtful, lopsided mouth. Then her eyes met Katara's and widened at once. Something shifted, the blue light brightened. Her words seemed to come from some surface high, high above.
"Not just yet."
The next time she woke, it was afternoon, and hot, and they were waiting for her. The young healer stood where she had been before, but a more familiar face was on the other side of the healing tub. Katara grimaced.
"Loska."
With her ears underwater, the harshness of her own voice was amplified. She choked and coughed once, sharp in her throat. Loska seemed to hesitate, then primly addressed the other healer. Her voice was muffled as it came through the water.
"If she has a coughing fit, this little experiment of yours is over."
"She's fine," the younger woman said, then smiled down at Katara. "Aren't you?"
Her smile was peculiar, higher on the right than the left. It gave her face a bit of a trouble-maker's cast, like she was up to something and Katara could be in on the joke if she wanted. In fact, it made her think just a little, just for a second, of Sokka.
"Yeah," Katara croaked. She swallowed hard and her voice came out a little clearer. "I'm fine."
With a prim 'harrumph' Loska turned away and began busying herself with a mortar and pestle on a nearby worktable. The younger healer's smile gentled.
"What do you remember?"
Katara licked her lips. They tingled strangely, as if they had fallen asleep and were just now waking up. In fact, as she tried - unsuccessfully - to raise her head, she realized that other parts of her tingled the same way. Her cheek and jaw on one side. Her chest, with each breath. Her hands brushed against her hips, but in her fingers she felt only sparks and tightness.
Oh.
She threw up her hands at the last instant. Her fingers looked like charred sticks when the flames spewed through them.
Oh no.
"You remember," the healer said, but Katara barely heard her. She was imagining her hands floating beside her in the water, nothing left but sooty skeletal wreckage. If she was brave, she could lift one hand to see…
But she wasn't brave. She couldn't be brave. She would never be brave again.
Warm hands closed softly around her shoulders and Katara blinked the tears from her eyes so that she could see the healer peering down at her in concern. "Are you in pain?"
"Is there anything left?" she tried to ask, but hiccuped so hard that the words were strangled out. Instead, she took a long breath and shook her head.
The healer, however, seemed to understand. She slid her warm palms down to Katara's elbows, then her forearms, then lower. Gently, she raised Katara's numb hands up from the water.
The skin was perfect. Not a burn, not a blemish. Katara opened and closed her fingers, relieved tears streaming down from the corners of her eyes. It felt tight, like her skin had shrunk and the muscles underneath were weaker than they had been, but they were there, and they worked.
After a moment, the healer lowered her hands - which were, Katara realized, extremely heavy - back into the water. "It'll take a while for the feeling to come back all the way. You're going to be weak for a few days, too - a healing like that takes a lot out of your body - but there were enough of us to make a good job of it. And…" She seemed to hesitate as she gently expelled the water from her fingertips with smooth bending. "You got to us very quickly."
Katara looked from the young healer to Loska's ambivalent shoulder and back again. "Thank you. Both of you. I-"
Loska interrupted flatly. "We only did as we were commanded, Princess."
"Oh, would you quit being such a sour seaprune?" the younger healer scoffed. She looked back at Katara with that lopsided smile. "It was a pleasure to help a fellow Water Tribe woman out. We don't get a lot of chances to do that anymore. You know how it is."
A shiver of recognition spread down Katara's spine as she finally saw the steel collar around this woman's throat. She hadn't even noticed it.
"So you're some kind of big deal, huh?" The healer's eyes caught the light and she bent a little closer. "I heard a rumor you dressed as a boy and fought with the resistance. That must have been such an adventure. I wish I'd thought of that during the invasion."
"An adventure," Katara repeated dully. "Yeah. I guess so."
"The boys would have recognized me right off, though," the healer went on with a shrug. "It's funny how well they understand the unfairness when you confront them in private and then forget as soon as they're back with their pals…"
She went on, but Katara was no longer listening. Memories darted through the weary soup of her mind. Jeeka and his gang of bullies. Pakku's cruel training. The struggle to understand and fit in with the Northerners. Zuko. Playing enemy and ally by turns.
Zuko. Arranging the fight that could free her. And then…
The healer was peering at her hopefully, not smiling at all now. Katara blinked. "Sorry. I guess I'm not quite awake."
"Of course not. You need to go back into the healing sleep and here I am blowing smoke." The healer's face tightened in a way that reminded Katara of Gran-gran. Specifically, the moment when Gran-gran was getting ready to set the broken bone in an already agonized little boy's arm. Sympathy, but mixed with duty.
"We may not get another chance to talk privately," she said, her voice quieter now. "Most of us here have men in the resistance. We hope. No one knows who's alive and who's not. Except you. I'm going to list some names now. Just say if you recognize any of them."
She started listing names and Katara's heart dropped like a stone to the bottom of a pond. She didn't know any of them. The healer started slowly, a hopeful brightness in her eyes as she paused. The more names she listed, the more that brightness disappeared.
Finally, Katara interrupted. "I didn't really get to meet many of the Warriors. Those are probably all Warriors, right?"
"Um, right. Maybe the younger men, then? Um, Akita? Hanno? Te-"
"Hanno!" Katara lurched slightly as she recognized one name, finally. Her skin throbbed in response, but she went on anyway. "He was in waterbender training with me."
The healer's face shone for one gleaming instant. Then there was a distant sound, boots in the hallway. She looked away anxiously, then looked back at Katara and leaned closer. She spoke the last name softly, almost a plea.
"Attuk?"
Katara smiled. "Yeah, he's there."
The healer beamed, her pale blue eyes glistening with sudden tears. Her grin was just as lopsided as her smile. And Katara remembered that private conversation she'd had with the big guy during their training exercise. He'd mentioned a girl, his betrothed.
"Are you... Iyuma?" she slurred.
The healer grasped her shoulder and nodded excitedly. She opened her mouth to speak, but another voice filled the infirmary instead.
"Is she awake?"
Fear flashed across Iyuma's face an instant before she assumed the blank expression of a servant and stepped back from the tub, withdrawing her touch. Footsteps approached rapidly now.
"She- she rose from the healing sleep too soon, Your Highness. I was about to-"
Zuko loomed suddenly at the foot of the tub. His good eye was heavy and smudged with sleepless bruises and he looked at her as if it caused him physical pain. Or perhaps agonizing relief.
"You're awake."
Katara struggled inwardly, not sure what to say. She wished Sokka was here. He would say something clever and funny. Did I win? It would be both reassuring and ridiculous. It would make the man peering down at her laugh, or at least drive away that tortured expression on his face.
But Katara hadn't won. She was painfully aware she hadn't won. She'd had her one chance to earn her freedom and she had blown it. Now the weight of that defeat, of that failure, pressed down on her. She felt like she was trapped deep underwater, breathless in the pressure.
"Your Highness," Iyuma said very quietly, sparing her from the silence. "A Water Tribe maiden doesn't entertain male visitors in her underthings."
"Burn modesty! She's alive," Zuko sputtered.
It was highly improper for a slave to offer even the gentlest reprimand to royalty, but Katara was too tired to feel any way about his response. It only seemed natural that he would scowl at the healer even as his cheek burned pink just under his eye. He slowly, pointedly raised up one hand in front of his face - glaring at the healer the whole time - to block off all but Katara's head. When he looked back at her, he was just two angry eyes and one angry eyebrow.
It shouldn't have amused her. He wasn't trying to be funny or reassuring. He was just playing ally for a moment. He would swing back to enemy before long. Still, it was kind of funny, the way he could scowl with any one part of his face.
Kind of comforting, actually.
"I'm glad you're awake," he said grimly. "We have to go to a play tomorrow."
Iyuma made a shocked noise that probably meant she was about to tell him just what her medical opinion was on that score, but Katara only smiled sleepily.
"Joke's on you," she slurred, sinking back into sleep even as she spoke. "I like plays."
.
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Zuko helped Katara settle into her seat in the box at the front of the royal theatre and tried not to worry about her lack of resistance. He couldn't remember the last time she had allowed him to touch her, much less actively held his hand. Yet here she sat, unresisting as he laid a blanket over her lap and offered her a sip of the herbal pain tonic the healers had sent along in a crystal bottle.
There were servants for these kinds of tasks, but Zuko had dismissed them. Maybe, if they had the box entirely to themselves, Katara would get some enjoyment out of the play.
She declined the tonic with a silent shake of her head. She didn't look at him, which was normal enough, but she did look out at the theater as it slowly filled with people. That was encouraging. She was weak and weary, and hardly spoke, but at least she was awake. At least she was alive. And at least, even though they were forced to be here, she liked plays.
Zuko tucked the tonic away in an internal pocket and looked out on the theater, trying to see it as if for the first time. It was elegantly appointed, and old, with gilt flame motifs all around, lovingly restored. Would she think it was gaudy? A relic from his great-grandfather's time, the theater had stood in Caldera as a monument to the Fire Nation's rise to high culture. Before the wars, there had been a great surge in the arts that coincided with rising prosperity.
Or so Zuko was learning in his lessons. He had liked theater well enough as a child but had come to think of it as a frivolous diversion. It was something he did on vacation. Or with his mother. Certainly not something a banished prince seeking to end his banishment would indulge in.
A disgraced prince, on the other hand, was probably right at home wallowing in the theater. He'd finally managed to sleep last night and had awakened early, intent on addressing his duties with renewed vigor, only to find that there were no duties. No tea appointments. No hearings or informal lunches. It was as if his father had wiped his schedule clean of responsibility.
That wound ached. The only solution, Zuko figured, was to work harder at the few tasks he had remaining and make whatever desperately slow progress he could. He had spent most of the day in the library, studying all he could stomach. When Master Tak began clearing phlegm from his throat too frequently - which was a sign that the old man needed a break and a drink - he would walk to the infirmary and look in on Katara.
She had remained deep in the healing sleep all night and all day. The healers finally roused her just in time to dress for the evening. Zuko wasn't sure, but he suspected they had been the ones to fix her hair. The long part on top was pulled back in a shaggy wolf tail, and the blue beads were worked into subtle braids at her temples. He didn't want to look at them too long in case she noticed, but the pattern looked like waves.
The firebender in charge of lighting dimmed and extinguished the soft flames burning all around the room, then cast the spotlight on the curtain. The people below applauded as the red velvet split and opened on a winter mountainside where a man and his servant climbed with determination.
"Lord Azen," the servant cried against the gusting wind, "we have journeyed so long! Can we not rest?"
"Never!" Lord Azen turned to face the audience, his steely look cast far into the distance. "Until I end Winter's brutal hold on this land, I shall die before I rest!"
As he continued to climb, the servant turned toward the audience and shrugged. "My Lord is brave and virtuous. Oh, but for the mistakes of his youth! He has vowed to make war on Winter itself to win his redemption. I do hope none of the Winter Spirits come upon us!"
Of course, the Winter Spirits immediately appeared on the mountain ahead. Zuko rested his jaw on his fist and watched the flurry of well-financed effects as the fight scene played out. And then kept on going. Wasn't this the same play Lady Pi Mai had recommended to him? Yes, it was - but the royal theater's version hadn't appealed to her. Which made a lot of sense, now that he was seeing it.
The story wasn't terribly interesting. Lord Azen came up against Yuka, the ferocious Spirit of Winter Storms, and despite his mastery of firebending she thrashed him pretty brutally until he fell off the mountain. The servant conveniently disappeared. The next scene opened in the valley as night closed in on Lord Azen, trying to escape from the ice Yuka's attack had trapped him in. The Spirit arrived to kill him, but as a final request he demanded to know why she made war on his village. Yuka removed her war mask, revealing her stunning beauty. (Azen had a whole monologue about it.) It turned out the village had imprisoned her brother, the Spirit of Soft Winter Sun - which Yuka tearfully explained as she grasped pitifully toward the empty sky - and she refused to rest until he was freed.
Zuko sighed and glanced at Katara. She had a peculiarly pained look on her face, and was watching with rapt attention. The story was pretty familiar to him but maybe she hadn't seen anything like it before.
Finally, Yuka decided to keep Lord Azen prisoner until her brother went free. The curtain swept closed, the lights came on, and a Winter Spirit danced across the stage with a large "Intermission" sign.
This time, when Zuko offered the tonic, Katara accepted. She sipped twice from it, and her hand shook as she passed it back.
"It's awful," Zuko said quietly as he tucked the medicine away. "The play, I mean. Half the lines feel like they come from a comedy and the other-"
"It's us."
She said it so quietly he had to look at her to be sure she had spoken. She didn't just look pained - she looked ill. Zuko shook his head. "What are you talking about?"
"A noble hero out to redeem himself for the errors of his youth, a girl warrior trying to save her brother, the mask, the ice, the fire. Explain to me how that's not us."
"This may come as a shock to you," Zuko said dryly, "but the heroes in Fire Nation plays are usually firebenders or nobles or both. And I'm pretty sure there are plenty of legends about people fighting to end a magical winter. You're reading too much into this."
Katara just turned her head and looked at him. Her eyes were hollowed out and deeply shadowed. Zuko opened his mouth to argue more, to dispel the worry eating her, but the gong sounded, signaling the end of Intermission.
"Just wait," he said. "You'll see."
But now that she had pointed it out, Zuko couldn't stop seeing it. He watched, sickness roiling in him like a handful of worms, as Lord Azen offered Yuka a bargain; she would become his servant and he would see her brother set free. She refused initially, but he cajoled and seduced until finally, breathlessly clutched in his arms in the moonlit valley, she conceded. She turned on her own people, fighting the other Winter Spirits to return Lord Azen to his village. The play ended there, with Yuka hanging off Lord Azen's arm and gazing adoringly up at him while her brother gamboled across the stage and went soaring on a wire up into the sky. The curtain closed on the audience's chuckling applause.
Zuko did not clap. For a frigid moment, he could not move at all. Then, as the cast emerged to take a bow, he hustled Katara out of the box and down to the palanquin before the other viewers began dispersing. Only when he was seated and they began their journey back to the palace did he fix on a clear thought.
He should have known Zhao would look for a way to get in one final dig. And if Zhao had seen the parallel between the play and reality, then others did as well. All or at least a lot of those people applauding had just seen Zuko on stage, ruthlessly redeeming himself through trickery and ransom and strength taken from an enemy. And they had seen Katara…
A toothless dupe despite her power. A traitor to her people. A willing and enthusiastic slave.
Rocked by the palanquin as well as the whirlwind in his head, Zuko thought he was going to be sick. He swallowed hard against the cold writhing up his throat.
"I told you so," Katara finally said. Her voice was so quiet, so tired.
Zuko turned to look at her. She kept her eyes down and her posture proper, but there was a bend in her back that hadn't been there before. Her shoulders were dragged downward by more than weariness. It took him a moment to identify what he was seeing.
Defeat. There was no defiance left in her. Not for him, not for anything.
Zuko wasn't sure what came over him. A crushing, desperate wave. A certainty that he had to stop her, stop her now. He lunged for her and grabbed her shoulders, startling her into looking at him at last.
"That wasn't you," he snapped. "It wasn't us. It was someone's idea of us, and it was just a terrible play."
She stared at him, her eyes rimmed in tears. "What about public perception? Reputation? The…" her mouth twisted bitterly, the tears rolled down, "…humiliating things I've done…"
"We don't let them tell us who we are, Katara." He unthinkingly dabbed the tears off her chin. "We tell them. Not the other way around."
She looked down, away. Her mouth was a rictus of pain and disgust. "Art is a mirror held up to the world, Zuko."
It was nearly a direct quote of something else Lady Pi Mai had said at tea. Zuko didn't pause to think about it, but his chest ached when he remembered Katara that day, sitting silent and listening, biding her time for the escape he had promised her.
He had only just won back some fraction of her trust. And already he had let her down. He had failed her by throwing her blindly into a fight she couldn't win.
But that was just the latest of his crimes against her. Because she was right. The play was a reflection of the truth. The entire time he had known her, he had either threatened her or coaxed and cajoled her to betray her people.
"Am I-?" he choked off the question. He didn't want to hear her answer.
Am I Lord Azen? Is that how you see me?
Of course it was. How else could she see him when that was the face he had shown her again and again? Even on her father's ship, when he had been so in love with her and had clutched her to him each night in the hold, he had always been trying on some level to win her over to his side.
Katara looked up at him now, and he saw the old bruises in her eyes, layered under the new ones.
"I'm so sorry," he said faintly with the last wisp of his breath.
She stared back at him, and he could read the question in that look as clearly as if she had said it out loud.
For which part?
He knew he needed to say more, to explain somehow. But the apology had ripped out of him like losing a lung. There was nothing more in him. Nothing left.
At length, Katara pulled gently back and Zuko realized he was still gripping her shoulders so she would look at him. He released her and moved gingerly back to his place among the cushions, staring at the closed curtains straight ahead while his mind spun.
"They knew about the valley," Katara said softly, as if it hurt to hear the words out loud. Zuko looked at her, but this time she wouldn't meet his eyes. She just blushed deeply. "They had a water sound effect in the background. Didn't you hear it?"
"Coincidence," he tried, but she was already shaking her head.
"No. They knew. How did they know?"
It was as if the realization hit them both at the same time. Katara looked even more shaken, more sick. Zuko embraced the rising fury.
"I'll find him," he said through his teeth.
And this time, when he summoned Private Tyno to face justice, he wouldn't be denied retribution.
