AN: Forgot to update this here! In case you're looking for more of my stories, you can find a couple more on Archive Of Our Own! Thanks for reading! (And those that review - thanks extra to you! 3)
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"I just want to be the reason," Zuko growled, practically in her ear, "you're too sore to walk comfortably for a few days."
Katara gasped in a tiny, shocked breath as heat pulsed through her, down her spine, between her presently-overworked legs, and deep in her heavy abdomen. It radiated especially through her hips, where his palms pressed and his fingers dug in, his smallest fingers tickling the seams of her thighs when the eel-hound jostled.
Those hands had felt very similar that night he took her against the wall in the hold - hot palms spanning her bared thighs and butt, pulling her apart as he drove into her, just his breath and hers in the dark to drown out the roaring ocean in her ears.
She had been very sore indeed the morning after that time. She hadn't realized it if he'd noticed... but he had been watching her so very closely on that voyage...
"Tch," Katara said now with no small amount of breathy disgust.
It was a little better in the front, but the feelings were not gone. His hands, even just on her waist, had been a teasing distraction. Stubborn, unshakable, unfailingly staying put... despite how her mind provided possible places for them to stray. Her stupid, stupid mind. That sneaky force, pushing her towards what was obviously the worst impulse for her right now.
The stronger, smarter part of Katara had been thinking, when the waves were pushing her around so easily before, that she might as well just give it up and ride in back again. At least then she could just kind of hold onto him and relax for the most part.
But the second they had started up the mountain and she had slipped back against him, she had become determined that the front was hers. What really made it better was the knowledge that Zuko wasn't immune. If he was suffering too, then the added physical strain was worth it.
The feeling of... just how hard he was suffering... had been extremely gratifying.
But it could have been much more gratifying.
She had been wrestling an impulse - an absolute catastrophic near-compulsion - to lean even farther forward and feel that hot swell in his pants rub against the spot where she really needed it.
Luckily, Zuko had saved the day by being the disciplined jerk he was.
Well, mostly disciplined.
"I mean-! I didn't mean..." He huffed out a sigh and dropped his voice to a grumble. "No, that's a lie. I meant that exactly how it sounded. Sorry."
His tone was too petulant for him to really be all that sorry. Like she wasn't playing fair somehow.
She wasn't the one saying extremely provocative things that made him think of past events and experiences better left un-reflected-upon!
Well two could play at that game.
"Huh. Alright, Zuko," Katara said archly, turning her narrowed eyes over her shoulder at him. "I'll do your stupid exercises, but you have to help me with my waterbenders." She smirked. "They'll build confidence faster if they have a firebender dummy to practice on. That can be you."
She couldn't see his face terribly well, even from so close, but she could smell what was probably tea faintly on his breath. "What? No. Make one of the guards do it."
"I don't know them and neither do the healers. Besides, the point is-" She bared her teeth and hoped he could see her grinning in the gloom. "-if I'm gonna be sore, you should be sore, too. Fair's fair, Zuko."
For a second, the shadowy shape of him was silent. She could just barely make out his wide eyes. His hands held very still on her hips. He seemed not to be breathing.
Then his fingers twitched - the briefest clench into her flesh - and did not otherwise move. It shot a lick of fire along her nerves, had her pulsing where she was pressed against the saddle.
"You've got a deal - but not a very good one."
The moonlight brightened and she could see now that he was smiling that mean little smile he used to use when he thought he was winning some petty contest. Katara had not seen that look on his face in months and it struck her very suddenly as odd that he had never gloated quite like this when he had held all that power over her.
"I've seen your waterbenders. The worst they're gonna do is splash me and giggle about it." He let his teeth show, he might have been savoring her widening eyes. "You, however, are gonna rue the day I take charge of your conditioning."
She met his eye a second too long, breathing a bit unsteadily, then scoffed and turned away. "Phuh. We'll see who's ruing when they start practicing the water whip."
"Sure," he said, sounding way more smug and confident than he had any right to be.
It made Katara want to feel his breath on the back of her neck again - and his teeth - but he was sitting too far away now...
No! He was sitting at a proper distance and Katara did not want him breathing anywhere near her! She had made that deal so she could watch Zuko get beat up by her students, and maybe a little bit so that she didn't have to concoct her own strength-building exercises - not so he could boss her around and smirk about her sore muscles. And maybe growl more provocative things...
The thought shortened her breath. Then she huffed.
What was she doing? Had the last couple of months not been enough of a lesson to teach her that messing around with Zuko was a mistake? Letting her guard down around him wasn't safe! She should have shut him down with some snide comeback or shamed him for being intentionally inappropriate or slapped him with the icy wash he so clearly needed. Any of those things would have been more prudent.
But instead, she basically invited him to keep teasing her. Keep gripping her hips. Keep pitching that tent just inches behind her... where she might, given another sudden change in direction, slip in the saddle and encounter it again.
He would want more than teasing. He pretty obviously already wanted more. The way he had groaned and hesitated before moving her, the way the rhythmic motions of the eel-hound had rubbed their bodies together and the flex of his abdomen had continued with that long stride... If Katara had arched her back and lowered herself just a little more, if their clothing had not been in the way...
He would have slid in so easy through all the slippery wetness this ride had coaxed out of her.
He still could, she realized, her neck and back prickling.
And... if she wanted it, was that really so bad? She didn't need to trust him or let her guard down to get what her body was craving, did she? She was a warrior, after all, she was risking her life and warriors sometimes indulged their appetites. And if she pulled him down in the shadows of this forest, only she and Zuko would know. There was no one here this time to write a play about it. And besides, Bogara already thought she was giving him rewards! The sky hadn't fallen.
He had pushed her away before... but she sensed that resistance was a tenuous thing, perhaps just for her benefit. It probably would not take a lot of effort to break it...
But he was resisting. Even when she admitted - like a moron - that she had felt the same kind of troubling arousal riding behind him. The only change in him when she let that slip was his hands tightening on her hips and a long, tantalizing pause during which he evidently decided to just needle her rather than let her slide back against him and keep stoking the heat between them.
He wouldn't even have needed to do anything. Gravity would have done it for him.
And Katara knew with shameful certainty that, if he had let that happen, her own restraint would have crumbled pretty quickly. Her tired legs would have offered meager resistance. She would have slid back in the saddle until she felt it - him, his... parts, his... hardness - hot enough to penetrate through all their damp clothing. A few more strides of the eel-hound and she would have been face-down, trying to get that hard ridge right in her softest, most yielding place.
"We need to slow down," he said in a low voice. "We're getting close."
Katara heaved a deep breath and slowed Cudi as the lights began peeking through the foliage.
At the same time, she tried to push her heated thoughts along down the stream of her mind. Her fear was still there, smothered under all the enticements she'd been entertaining, and she took this opportunity to pull it out and shake it off and put it to work.
She was not going to be a fool again. She knew better now. She wasn't going to be tricked into that soft, sweet chamber of her mind and let him betray her a second time-
You told Bogara that wasn't going to happen. He isn't going to switch sides again. He's changed. Remember?
Changed enough to destroy airships with. Changed enough to let him watch her back. Changed enough to be an ally - an unwelcome guest who needed to be watched lest he try to make off with something of hers while he was in her house. Zuko could be trusted in the fight against his father. That was the extent of the trust between them.
They certainly weren't friends. They had never been friends.
She reined in the eel-hound as they came close to the yellow lights. Zuko leapt down from behind her before they even fully stopped and went to tie off the lead. Once again, Katara had to peel herself off the saddle and slide gracelessly to the ground. She was glaring pretty hard at his back, so she saw when he finished with the reins and paused to adjust himself.
And that didn't help her clear her head. At all. That just made her think about him running around this airfield, stiff and ready to give her what she needed. Any moment. Anywhere.
Here and now.
She didn't need him to be a friend to her - what she needed from him was as simple as two bodies fitting together in the dark.
He could do it from behind. He could pant and scrape his teeth on the back of her neck and she wouldn't even have to see the shape of him.
Zuko glanced over his shoulder at her and froze under her stare. It was too dark and too far to pick out each other's eyes or expressions, so for a moment they only watched the shadowed person across from them. For a moment, they watched each other through the muggy gloom created by the distant yellow lights, each hovering in an unspoken place.
Zuko turned slowly to face her, his shoulders appearing narrow and then wide again. Broad. Strong. His voice came quiet to her.
"Are you okay? There isn't a lot of time left before sunrise but, if you want a rest, I could scout ahead-"
"I don't need to rest," Katara said, kind of lying, kind of resenting the gentle note in his voice. "What I need-"
She hesitated for only an instant.
"-is to get this over with."
He nodded and led the way through the bushes and Katara followed, stewing.
She felt... so tangled up. Angry and resentful and hurting and sad... Like a pot of different kinds of noodles that shouldn't be mixed but were, and her desire was the flame underneath, driving the boil to disastrous levels. She could do it, reach out across the space separating them and make it happen, this thing they both clearly wanted. She had a feeling that, if she did that, all those noodles were going to fuse together into a knot that could never be untied.
And that maybe that's how it should be. Forever.
But right now, there was a vitally important mission to be accomplished. Life and death for hundreds, even thousands of people hinged on what they did tonight. They were so close to total success; not even one alarm had gone up yet and, if they could finish strong, then they could do even more good tomorrow. Everything else was unimportant. Everything else could wait until after the mission was done.
Until then, if Zuko could resist, by Tui and La, Katara was going to resist harder.
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Ursa slept the rest of the day alone in the cave after its occupants had departed and woke well into the night. She had thought she might wait there until morning, but felt herself drawn to get moving. A steady mist fell beyond the cave's mouth, but the moon occasionally spilled through the clouds and cast all the world in glistening cold light.
And Ursa knew now, at last, what she truly needed to do.
She packed up her new supplies and rolled up her new blanket - which smelled unfortunately rather strongly of the gallant prince who had given it to her without comment. It would appear no one in the Avatar's entourage was adept at doing laundry. But Ursa found herself too fond of the young man to hold his odor against him.
It had been on the tip of her tongue to tell him she had met his father, that he possessed the man's good-hearted chivalry. That the Captain had tried to leave her with rabbits much the same as his son had. But of course, if she had begun the story, she would have had to finish it.
So then I poisoned them all. Just a little, to make them sleep. No, they didn't actually do anything to deserve it...
Not like your father, Prince Iroh. He very much deserved the silent agony I saw in his eyes before the end-
There had been a moment as everyone was climbing aboard the - startlingly present the entire time - bison, when Ursa had stood with Iroh apart from the rest.
"You must be so very careful, Ursa," he said, earnest and entirely too kind to bear. "If my brother catches you, he will not let you escape a second time. I am not even certain why he let you go into exile the first time. Sentiment has never weighed very heavily in his decision-making."
Ursa had not told him the words Ozai said that night so long ago, smirking with his horrible, handsome mouth, but they had echoed through her memory.
That's the way it's done with brood mares, is it not? Put out to pasture as a reward for their service once their age of usefulness is past.
"I think," she breathed through the old sting and humiliation, "he was just in a good mood. And did not believe I posed any danger once the throne was his."
"An arrogant miscalculation. He has made a number of them, but that is perhaps the most egregious."
Iroh's expression had shifted then, steady and sharp and penetrating. Knowing. The kindness thinned and beneath it was the great general, equipped with all the ruthless strategic cunning that had earned him his glory.
"After all, there are not many who could force a monarch to name a new successor, much less assassinate him in the same fell swoop."
Ursa had stood pinned by that stare, struggling to put any explanation or excuse or justification into words. He knew. He knew, he'd always known, of course he did, Iroh knew everything.
But after a beat, Iroh only shrugged and shook his head. The warmth and concern returned to his eyes.
"An oversight I imagine Ozai has realized by now. You must not be caught. And yet I..." He furrowed his brow, rubbed the back of his neck, and then peered at her earnestly. "I understand why you must go. Zuko truly does need you now more than ever."
Ursa hesitated, did not speak. She let her thoughts swim behind her secret eyes. Iroh went on, evidently not knowing everything after all.
"It is my belief that he is torn between the two halves of himself. The legacy of Sozin and Roku lives on in him, an endless struggle between evil and good. The good half came from you, Ursa."
Iroh offered her a faint, hopeful smile. It cracked a great fissure in Ursa's heart.
"Perhaps it really was destiny that brought us together here. If anyone could save Zuko, it is you."
Ursa had stared back at him for a long, silent moment, too stunned for words.
How could he believe such a thing? He knew what she had done, what she was, and he somehow still thought she was some kind of embodiment of goodness?
Or perhaps - a horrible shudder passed through her as the thought struck - he believed she was a conduit through which goodness could flow from a man in her lineage to a man she had birthed. For a shattering moment, she was a vessel again, a plain clay pot that could transport fine wine but possessed no such quality herself.
No.
No, the other brother would suppose such a thing. That was not what Iroh meant. What Iroh meant was just... so difficult to believe.
Her hands were so tainted with the baneful poisons she had administered to his father that she could never ever wash them clean - and yet Iroh believed they were somehow fit to comfort Zuko. More than that, he thought she could be some towering example for him, some grand force of Good.
Zuko had suffered so terribly, for years and years now, and it had all been Ursa's fault. She had run away to hide in her self-involved shame and devastation and had left him there with his father, had foolishly trusted that a weak and easily-circumvented promise could protect him from that beast.
Swear to me that my children's lives are safe in your hands. That you will always do what's best for them.
-what's best-
Had anyone ever been more stupid and desperate than Ursa?
And looking into Iroh's eyes now, she saw a lost version of herself reflected back; a gentle young woman snatched from her simple life to bear children for a wicked and ambitious man. Before she had sunk beneath his twisted depths. Before she had become a killer and a torturer and an instrument of his advancement. Before she had abandoned her children to his brutal keeping.
Iroh knew everything... but he did not know anything about who Ursa was now. Not really. What he believed she was was... impossible. Crazy. He looked right at her and did not see her.
The shivering pain through her chest might have been relief... but was not.
"I will do all that I can," she said with agonized honesty.
Ursa had laid a hand on his shoulder and, abruptly, found herself hugging him - found him hugging her. They had never embraced in that life before, not tight and fierce like this. But then, they had never realized in that life that they might be saying goodbye forever.
And perhaps Iroh did not really see her... but he was the closest she might ever come. He was family.
Presently, Ursa spied lanterns on the road ahead and veered onto a rutted track that climbed up into the patchy shadows of a thinner forest. When the moon was swallowed up by clouds again, she could see a faint glow ahead, the distant castings of whatever town waited at the top of this path. Better a town than strangers on the road.
But it seemed luck was not with her; the lanterns turned up the same track and Ursa found herself breathless with her effort to reach the top of what turned out to be a mountain. She emerged from the forest onto a switchback road that climbed the bare reaches of rock toward the pinnacle and only after making her way up and up to almost the top could she see that the light she had spied was not coming from a town, but from a guarded gateway. Lanterns hung from posts on either side of the entryway into the caldera, and by their light Ursa could see soldiers loitering, keeping watch.
There was no town, she realized. Just some military installation. A hidden one, which meant secrecy. And the lanterns coming up the path behind her were likely soldiers.
Best not to be seen here.
There would be no going back the way she had come until the road was clear, and with so little cover here, Ursa could not hope to hide by the road and backtrack. But there was a narrow goat-monkey trail she could just barely make out in the gloom, winding along the mountain's side. Perhaps she could get out of sight and then make her way back later or find another path down.
She picked her way carefully east along the trail until the road and the lanterns were out of sight, then sat beneath an overhang as the rain picked up again. The clouds kept thinning and the moonlight cast over the shadowy shapes of the rocky coast far below. The sea seemed to dance when the moon peeked out. Along the coast to the west, there was a cluster of lights. She would make for them and hope it was truly a town this time. A port where she could buy passage to Harbor City.
Somehow. She had no money, but perhaps she could trade some of the supplies she had been given. And if not that, perhaps she could offer remedies or cook for the crew. Or something. It didn't matter how she got to Harbor City, so long as she got there. Then she would climb another switchback road.
No - there was another, better way to reach the palace; the hidden passage Ozai had escorted her to that last night.
After she had done his evil for him and he had sworn on his life to always do what was best for her children.
It was only as she was stumbling empty-handed down that narrow path on the cliff - so similar to the one she had just walked - that she realized that what was best could be used to destroy her children all the same.
Because discipline for unruly behavior - that was best. Teaching the lessons a child needed to face the responsibilities of the role they were born into - that was best. It became clear before she reached the end of that trail in the dark that the only way Ozai could unequivocally break his promise was by actually killing one of them.
But by then it was too late. The promise was made. All Ursa could do was leave her children and her life and her name behind and hope that Ozai would honor the spirit of the promise he had made.
For all the six years she lived in the Earth Kingdom and grieved the loss of her children, she had comforted herself with the insistent belief that he had. It was only when she heard about the banished prince that she was forced to accept how she had deluded herself, how it had all been for nothing, how her instinct had been right from the start.
And yet, technically, Ozai might not have broken his promise.
There was nothing Zuko could have done that would have deserved it. Even if he had challenged his father to an Agni Kai as she had believed for years that he had, banishing him, burning his face was too much. There was simply no possible way for that to be what was best for Zuko!
You have ruined my son with your pathetic weakness. If he suffers and struggles to be a proper prince, it is your peasant blood and your simpering submission that has brought that fate on him. You are entirely ignorant of what it takes to rule, so do not presume to question how I raise him.
Back and forth, back and forth. Like the waves crashing against the rocks below, creeping ever higher as the tide pressed them in. So Ursa had pressed for years closer and closer to the palace. Closer and closer to what she knew had to happen, to what she was now finally certain beyond any doubt had to be done.
Ozai was going to pay the price for breaking his promise. Because even if he could justify what he had done by some convoluted argument based in the loose terms she had chosen, even if he truly believed he had kept his promise, he had not.
Iroh had said it himself. The boy Zuko had been was burned away almost entirely. Perhaps he was still alive - but the boy she had known, Ursa's child, her Zuko, had died on that dueling court. His father had killed him.
And now Ursa was going to do to Ozai what she had done to his father before him. Only this time, there would be no shred of remorse in the eyes that watched him writhe and squeal and succumb. There would be only Ursa, watching patiently as his body - the body that had used and tormented her for ten years of marriage and another ten of memory - devoured itself.
Ursa's seething, patient thoughts were so all-consuming that even though she was staring right at the coast, she did not notice the giant beast coming until it was bounding up the mountainside as if on level ground. Then, she blinked, and fear zinged through her.
It was coming right towards her.
Unthinking in her terror, Ursa scrabbled back on her rear, pressing hard against the back wall of the shallow overhang - but there was no space, no cover. That great animal was coming right for her and she had nowhere to hide, no chance of running-
And then it leapt right over her overhang and continued on up the slope, but Ursa still heard the voices that carried slightly over the beast's scrabbling claws.
"-not riding in back!" said a girl's voice, sharp and irritable.
"Rrgh! Katara, you can't seriously think this is better than-!"
And then the eel-hound had passed and Ursa could only hear the distant sounds of its leaping strides as it moved quickly beyond hearing. Then, the quiet of the night fell on her ringing ears.
Katara. There was only one Katara in the Fire Nation.
And arguing with her, making that particularly frustrated sound he had made when his sister had played another of her tricks at his expense, sounding so exasperated and disbelieving and put-upon...
His voice had grown deeper, a young man's voice now, almost unrecognizable... but it was him. Ursa knew it in her bones, in the blood beating furiously through her shattered heart.
That was her Zuko.
Ursa forgot her plan. She forgot her pack, which she had pushed off her shoulders while she rested. She forgot the dangerous secrecy of the military installation in the caldera above. She just started hurriedly climbing up the slope after the eel-hound, desperate to hear that voice again. To see the dear face she had not seen in so terribly long. To enfold him in her arms one more time.
.
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"Azula, you've really outdone yourself," Ty Lee gushed. "I had only just gotten back to Caldera when I heard from Chi Fong's cousin that you had commanded all the slaves returned to the palace. The whole court is so relieved that the Water Princess won't have a reason to come sneaking into their houses anymore!"
"Perhaps if the court was not entirely peopled with incompetent cowards who employ even more incompetent cowards to guard their households, I wouldn't have had to resort to such drastic measures," Azula sighed, leading the way down the long, torch-lined tunnel that was the only path in or out of her trap. "As it stands, this situation requires precision and control. With their nest burned, the rats have scattered. The surest way to catch them now is with irresistible bait in a single, inescapable location."
"You're so smart, Azula! They don't stand a chance!"
It was true, of course. The moon would be full tomorrow night. That scheming peasant would be desperate to use the best of her power while she had it, so even fully aware she was walking into a trap, she would not be able to stay away. Perhaps, when she discovered there were no slaves left to free among the noble houses, she would even be drawn into the trap tonight. Azula smirked at the thought. Victory was assured either way - down in these tunnels deep below the palace, there were no streams or lakes to draw from. The waterbender would be severely limited, full moon or not.
"It's actually pretty lucky," Ty Lee went on, her good cheer turning more muted, "that the Gan villa caught fire, huh? Do you really think Zuko did it?"
"Who else could it have been? He was probably attempting to destroy any evidence of his next moves. Now that he's decided to make a nuisance of himself on a grander scale, he will only grow more desperate and destructive. Honestly, I wouldn't put anything past him."
A silence hung between them as they walked. It was nothing to Azula to lie to Ty Lee and blame the destruction of the villa on Zuko. Ty Lee would serve her purpose and spread the misinformation, and the court would gnaw the bones of that gossip rather than digging deeper and realizing Azula's involvement.
Of course, Father knew the truth. Azula had very briefly seized on the notion of concocting a story about Zuko fighting and somehow escaping her - but she had immediately realized that that would have been even more shameful than the truth, that he had predicted the attack and relocated to a now unknown base of operations. At least in the truth, she had not allowed him to beat her in combat, too.
No, in truth, it was only being too slow, too late, not quick enough. Just thinking the words, thinking of Father's terrible cold silence as he listened to her report, had Azula's heart pounding harder in her chest.
"I did hear this other rumor," Ty Lee finally said in almost a whisper, "that some of the royal guard was there when the fire started..."
Azula stopped short. A guard had dared speak? She would have that one flogged. No, all of them. She would have the entire garrison flogged!
"Nonsense," she said, smooth and easy and meeting Ty Lee's wide, uncertain eyes. "If the royal guard had been there, don't you imagine I would know about it?"
"Oh! Yes, of course you would, Azula!"
"It must be a ploy by Zuko's supporters to spread lies and insulate him from the consequences of his rash actions."
"That makes so much sense," Ty Lee cried with a huge grin.
Azula carried on along the tunnel, carefully hiding her disquiet. She liked Ty Lee. Ty Lee was agreeable. Ty Lee made herself useful. Not like Mai, who had become basically worthless as soon as she began procreating. No, Ty Lee had her priorities straight; everything in her petty little life came after Azula. Because Azula was powerful and beautiful and perfect, and the only real glory available to Ty Lee was to ensure her princess's success.
It felt good to be confident in that, especially now, with Father's favor not so certain as it had always been before. Azula didn't need Ty Lee or any of the other insignificant lackeys that flitted around her, but having her here settled a wild, frayed place in her mind and heart.
Perhaps that was why, when the attendants opened the steel doors to reveal the chamber packed with kneeling slaves - over a hundred all-told, every slave that had remained in the noble houses and every one the palace had kept tucked away - and when Azula watched Ty Lee take in her gathered bait with satisfaction, it did not occur to her that her friend's wide eyes were indicative of more than just awe and the fear that was correct for the humble to feel for the mighty.
"Oh, Azula," Ty Lee said, her heart crashing into her stomach at all those downturned faces, at the stench of their gathered fear, at the dark and seething auras of all those captive, tormented women, "you've really outdone yourself."
Ty Lee had not actually met any of the slaves, apart from Princess Katara. She, like many minor members of Fire Court families, had known about the slaves mostly just in the abstract. Her family had had one floating around the house somewhere, periodically healing someone, she supposed. Meeting Katara, if anything, had deepened Ty Lee's misconceptions - because the princess had come off as a bit withdrawn and somber, but she had not been... like this.
Unlike Azula, Ty Lee was not able to continue seeing other people's misery in the abstract when she came face-to-face with it. What she was seeing in this moment undermined her comfort in the life she had been living here in Caldera. It made her long desperately, so much more than usual, to be back in the circus.
"When that peasant princess comes to free her people," Azula explained in a clear, ringing voice, "she will either surrender or she shall watch as hidden archers cut down every last one of them." With an elegant hand, she indicated the murder holes set in the ornate walls around the room. "Meanwhile you and I will engage her here in the entryway. The longer she attempts to resist us, the more of her people will die. I doubt she will put up much of a fight."
Azula cast her eyes over the silent room, knowing these helpless fools would all be even more afraid, even more desperate to cling to their miserable lives. They were unrestrained and so very numerous - waterbenders, each and every one - yet they all just knelt there obediently. Defeated by their own barbaric culture. Pathetic.
That impression did not change for Azula through the long hours of the night. She and Ty Lee strolled the tunnel or sat with hot cups of tea in an antechamber, just waiting for one of the runners to come in with news that any of the alerts had been set off. But nothing happened. None of the guards or servants Azula had planted with directions to the chamber had spotted the waterbender. No one did.
The waterbender hadn't come at all.
In the end, Azula felt the rising sun flare hot as the acid in the pit of her stomach, and she stalked back into the chamber full of bait. Many of them were lying down by now, some curled together, grabbing what sleep they could on the stone floor after the exhausting hours of fear the previous night had brought them.
Perhaps it would take more than just knowing her people were captives to draw the waterbender in. Perhaps they needed to suffer.
"Get them up," Azula snapped at the guards. "March them around the room. No. Take them up and march them around the palace drive. Let the city see how many of her precious people the Southern Princess left behind."
Ty Lee stood in her place behind Azula's shoulder, watching with her own tired, burning eyes.
.
.
Zuko kept to the shadows and watched for guards and tried to think about exercises that would benefit a waterbender. He was not trying to think about exercises that would be enjoyable to watch Katara perform. But that also seemed to be happening with increasing frequency. There was a certain hip-opening stretch he repeatedly caught himself trying to justify including in her training program...
He let out a sharp breath through his nose, almost wishing a fight would break out so he could work the edge off his energy. That would be terrible, of course - they would lose the element of surprise tomorrow night - but it would certainly feel better in this moment.
Enduring the agonizing struggle of the present in favor of long-term success was kind of becoming a theme tonight.
Katara was so confusing. She had been afraid of his desire a few days ago and now she was... not? Suddenly tonight, she was willing to let him get away with making stupid double-entendres. More than that, she let him get away with touching her, grasping her hips and waist and - he was still shocked it had happened every time he remembered it - grinding his hard-on against her butt.
Presently, she emerged from one airship and, with a quick glance around, proceeded to the next. Zuko followed at a distance, still watching for guards but also kind of watching the darting dark shape of her.
In the night, wearing her discreet clothing, he couldn't really make out any details of her figure... but that didn't stop his eyes from sliding downward - and then snapping away.
He had rubbed up against her for a solid minute - maybe, he wasn't sure, time had become fuzzy - and there'd been no reprisal at all! She hadn't even called him a creep. She'd been... She had been aroused by it. Instead of tearing into him or physically attacking him, she gave him the power to plan her exercise regimen just so her waterbenders could practice on him. Instead of punishing him for his audacity, she just... just teased him back.
If I'm gonna be sore, you should be sore, too. Fair's fair, Zuko.
It had instantly become a personal goal of his that she would always be the sorer of the two of them. He was going to work her so hard she-
Zuko drew a breath and checked all around, then darted to a shadowed spot under a different airship. He wanted her. Fine. That was nothing new. What was new was her reaction. Her tacit permission.
She was letting him get closer.
So why did it make him feel so... anxious? He should be excited. Happy. Encouraged by the progress. Surely this meant he was kind of succeeding in what he set out to do-
Only, no. It didn't mean that at all. Katara could get hot enough to beg for him (his mind went on a very brief but intense tangent that had him tugging his pants to ease the returning pressure) but it didn't mean she was any closer to forgiving him.
Which was the point, he reminded himself firmly.
This development didn't mean he was any closer to redeeming himself, just that there was a fresh new opportunity for him to screw everything up again. A desperately tempting opportunity. Which Zuko was determined he could resist. He was going to resist.
Something had changed for Katara, and as he watched a distant patrol pass - security was especially lax here, probably due to the remoteness of the base - Zuko bent his mind toward trying to understand what it could be.
The likeliest explanation, he decided at length, was that this night, this mission... it was so similar to the training exercise. Before it had become so deadly, with Sokka captured and soldiers' throats cut in the mud, it had been just them and the Water Tribe boys. Rescuing real prisoners in the night. Waking pressed together in the tent. Making out against that tree just out of sight of the others, where Zuko had really ground against her and she had hooked her leg around his hips so perfectly...
Katara emerged from the last airship, checked that the coast was clear, and made some big gestures. Zuko couldn't see the icy needles fly, but he heard the chorus of low pops as they punched through the steel balloons again and again.
If he pressed her up against that wrecked airship, would she wrap her leg around him that way again? Would she let him kiss her neck and rut against her and whisper how it made him feel to watch her destroy his father's fleet?
Zuko shook the thought away and followed her to the next airship - carefully, at a distance.
They had come so far from those days. So many jagged pieces lay between them now. But the excitement was not so different. The thrill of adventure. Cleverness and subterfuge, bringing down the stronger foe. Maybe that was it. Maybe she was just remembering a time she had enjoyed working with him, a time when she didn't hate him so much.
It gave him a soft and warm and painfully tender swell in his chest. She was so very close and still so terribly far away.
If she wanted to do that... well, Zuko could appreciate that. If he needed to be the one to make sure nothing happened between them that she would regret, then he would. It wasn't easy to endure all the temptation and desire and anxiety... but this was a scant portion of the hardship he owed her.
He could take it.
.
.
Ursa found the eel-hound before even the soft gloom of dawn - but only because the creature kept shaking its head, jangling the bridle. She came upon it tied to a tree, its long neck hanging low in weariness. Whatever Zuko and the Water Princess were up to, they had ridden long and hard through the night.
The eel-hound raised its head to watch her approach, its ears twitching toward her and eyes going a little round.
Ursa spoke the sort of soft nothings she'd learned as a girl to speak to the draft animals in the village. She let the eel-hound sniff her, then worked up to stroking the creature's neck. She idly plucked burrs from the halter that had evidently been chafing.
She couldn't believe she had found it. The cliff had taken so long to climb. Ursa was not a tracker and the forest was not easy to navigate in the dark. It was incredible luck that she had managed to get here in time. That at any moment, her son would return. She would meet the man he had become. She would-
She would have to explain where she had been.
Why she had not come to him sooner.
Why she had never tried to reach him when they were both banished and she might have provided true comfort, she might have still been a mother when he truly needed a mother.
And now, instead, she would present herself to him in the middle of nowhere, as good as a stranger for all the years she had been parted from him. He might look at her face and not even recognize her at all. Or it could be worse. He might know her on sight - and look down at her as his father so often had, a prince regarding a peasant who dared meet his eye.
A rustle in the bushes was all it took to startle her and send her darting behind a tree. Ursa pressed her back to the ridged bark and all but held her breath as their footsteps came within her hearing. She did not see them, stared wide-eyed out at the dark forest instead, but the weariness in Princess Katara's voice was evident.
"-almost be easy if there weren't so many of them to destroy."
There was a pause, and then Zuko's voice came from startlingly close to Ursa's hiding place.
"Are you in any pain?" he asked quietly.
From the corner of her eye, she could see the eel-hound's lead come loose from where it was tied around a neighboring tree - but Ursa did not really notice that. She was listening to her son's strange new voice. Probably, if he had been any other young man, she would not have heard the emotional undercurrents of such a question asked in such a mild tone. But like a ripple in a still pond, it echoed back over years and Ursa could see his puckered brow as he asked one of the thoughtful questions that hinted at the empathetic slant of his young mind.
It was him. It was her Zuko-
"No, I'm not in pain," the Water Princess shot back witheringly, as if the very suggestion offended her. "I told you, I'm not frail."
"I'm not saying you are," Zuko returned, irritable now. "Deep burns like you had just... they can seem healed but still hurt for a long time."
His had, Ursa instantly understood. His burned face had hurt long after it should have healed. His dear face-!
"Well, mine don't." There was a pause, then she sighed and went on in a less sharp tone. "My fingers sting or feel numb sometimes. And my face and chest... Iyuma says it's normal. Otherwise, it's like it never happened."
There was a creak of leather, a grunt - and then a scrape of a boot returning heavily to the ground. The sequence repeated twice more. Then there was a long beat of silence. Neither of the voices spoke. Then, finally, Zuko heaved a breath.
"Do you want a leg up?"
"I can do it! I've been climbing up on my own all night!"
"Then do it again," he huffed, exasperated. "It's just one more time."
Ursa was not certain whether this was intended to encourage or disparage, but Princess Katara just growled something too low for her to hear. Leather creaked and no boots hit the ground.
"Hmph," she said, superior and higher up than she had been. "And don't you mean five more times, workout chief?"
She said the title with faint mockery and an audible, not-very-nice smile.
Leather creaked a second time and Zuko's reply was quiet, low in a slightly different register. Gloating.
"I'm told five can be daunting. But don't worry; I'll work you up to it."
"Humph!"
The eel-hound wheeled and tore off through the underbrush and for a long moment, Ursa only stayed with her back against the tree, breathing. She raised her hand to her chest and was shocked it did not tremble.
Her regret was a living, raging thing. She could have met him. She could have looked him in his eyes and told him she loved him, told him she was sorry. She had just had a miraculous chance - and had spoiled it because she could not master her fear. She'd just hidden here like a coward! The time for hiding was over - and yet here was Ursa, still hiding!
All these years had passed, but some things remained so pathetically unchanged.
Ursa leaned against the tree for a long while, feeling her heart pound against her fingers and cursing it and herself.
And yet, a longer-held fear at last was dying its final death. Princess Katara was not the cowed and ensnared girl that Ursa had been. And Zuko was not callous and controlling in the way of his father. They did not talk to each other like a prince and the girl he had enslaved. They talked like-
Stupidly into each other, Prince Sokka had said.
-young lovers who had quarreled and parted ways and bickered now with a tense, loaded energy building between them. The timbre of their voices, the prickling energy in their silences... The words they had exchanged had seemed largely innocuous - but Ursa had lived for ten years in the Fire Court. She had earned a survivor's keen sense of tone.
Princess Katara was of course furious in the enduring way of the deeply betrayed. And Zuko was courting her forgiveness and, despite something of a surly attitude, appeared to be meeting with some success because Princess Katara, likely despite herself, evinced the faintest signs of thawing.
The Water Prince had been so insistent that Zuko was not exactly the man his actions made him seem to be. So much of what Ursa had heard around the Avatar's fire had warmed her, offered a measure of reassurance... but it hadn't been real. It was just more second-hand information. It was a portrait painted in sand; a sigh could rearrange it.
Now his new voice was in her heart, aching with the knowledge that this part of him had truly survived. The boy he had been had burned away but, like a torchwood tree charred down to a brittle skeleton, enough of his root remained to sprout again and grow. Compassionate and persistent and...
...sneaking around a military installation with a foreign princess, destroying things in the night.
Ursa understood in a crashing rush that Zuko had outstripped his uncle's wildest hopes. Perhaps he was not openly defying Ozai, but he was working against his interests. Prince Sokka had been certain that he would not dare to free Princess Katara, but by some unclear means, Zuko had elicited her help to enact sabotage against the Fire Nation war machine. He was taking direct action to put an end to the war.
And if Ursa was caught here, she would risk exposing their efforts.
She picked her way through the forest back as she had come as well as she could judge in the dark and then the rising light of day - but there were few landmarks and no jangling bridle to draw her back out. The sun was high in the sky when she finally managed to climb her way back over the ridge of the caldera and start making her way down the mountain.
Likely, that was when she was spotted. There was no loud alarm - no horns or bells that Ursa heard, so it was terribly surprising to find soldiers waiting for her on the goat trail where she had dropped her pack in the rocks. She very nearly tripped and fell down the mountain... But, when the guards' hands cuffed around her arms and steered her back toward the gate, it quickly occurred to her that it would have been better for everyone, including her, if she had simply fallen and broken her fool neck.
.
.
The sun had not yet risen, but the sky was pale by the time they rode down to the sea and swam the eel-hound out to the sandbar that marked the westernmost reach of the island. Beyond it, a sailing craft waited at anchor.
Quite unlike the fishing boat, this ship was massive and fast-looking, with elegant filigree detailing along its sides and three towering masts. It sat low in the water, clearly heavily loaded with cargo.
Katara steered the flagging eel-hound toward it and, once they were close enough, bent a swell to heave them all aboard. She barely had the strength to raise Cudi level with the deck, but luckily the eel-hound was able to scrabble her way up over the railing.
Zuko leapt down the second he could, but Katara dismounted more slowly and gave the eel-hound's gusting flank a final appreciative pat. A couple of sailors came to take the reins and guide the spent mount down a large ramp that let into the hold. Katara watched them go, feeling as exhausted as Cudi sounded.
And yet also filled with a fierce, hungry ache that gnawed viciously at her temper. She glared at Zuko's stupid, straight, broad back. He was facing the aft deck, where two finely-dressed figures made a stately descent, arm-in-arm.
"Ahoy!" said Lord Gan as he and Lady Gan performed one of their synchronized bows and smiled their genteel smiles. "Welcome, your highnesses, aboard The Ruby Kestrel."
"Accommodations are awaiting you in your cabins below," Lady Gan said with easy graciousness, "though we would be delighted if you should choose to grace us with your company for breakfast."
"It's been a long night," Zuko said sourly. "We'll be retiring directly."
Katara shot him a reproachful look as she came to stand beside him. Maybe he was unaccustomed to being civil after staying up all night and running around, but she could do it just fine.
"That sounds lovely," she said, smiling politely (and with just a hint of superiority), "but I'm afraid I'd probably doze off at the table. Maybe this afternoon? I would certainly like a chance to catch up."
She looked especially at Lady Gan as she spoke and found the sentiment was actually genuine. It was kind of nice to see her, this unexpected ally who had put a map to her people in her hand.
Lady Gan smiled that proper smile right back, but a flicker of true warmth lit in her eyes. "We do have a great deal to discuss, Princess Katara. Daga very much wants to meet you - she will join us later, at what she has informed me is a decent hour. And there is the matter of your new wardrobe as well! My seamstress has only just finished. Perhaps once you have had a chance to rest, I might entice you into a fitting?"
Her eyes had a special sparkle to them, a hint of something very near playfulness. Katara felt leery - her conversation with Bogara still hung at the back of her mind and she was not about to forget the woman before her was a Fire Noble - but she also felt weirdly... excited. She hadn't tried on new clothes, clothes made especially for her, since back home in the village when Gran-gran had sewed her a new dress last fall. The thought of an entire wardrobe of things made just for her coaxed a thrill to bloom in her chest and throat.
"That sounds... really fun, actually," she said, fighting back the sudden urge to grin. She was clearly dangerously close to exhausted hysteria. "But for now, I can't imagine anything past getting to bed."
"Of course, Princess. Please allow me to show you the way to your cabin."
Lady Gan's expression did not change, but her eyes flicked slightly and Katara became aware of Zuko beside her, watching her with a smoldering side-eye. She glanced directly at him and felt herself briefly pinned by what seemed to be equal parts irritation and hunger.
He was clearly imagining a few things beyond getting into bed.
Katara tipped her nose up into the air and pretended the unsettling pulse between her legs was not pounding as hard as it had against that accursed saddle all night. "Goodnight, Zuko," she said primly. "Lord Gan."
They said some parting words, but she did not really hear them. Instead, she marched off with Lady Gan, trying to act smooth as the other woman escorted her down the stairs into the interior of the ship.
"His highness seems to be in something of a mood this morning," Lady Gan said in an amused undertone.
"A real snit," Katara corrected icily. "And I can't say that I care. His highness is his own problem."
"How intractable you are! I positively adore it." She said it somewhere between scandalized and jubilant. "If he looked with such heated intent at most any unattached woman in the Fire Court - and a fair few of the attached, to be sure - he would have her at his leisure."
Katara let out a startled snort, then covered her mouth and nose and stared at Lady Gan, sure she had to be joking.
But, by all appearances, she was not. Lady Gan smirked faintly back at her. "You thought he was not desirable?"
Blushing hard and huffing in her shock, Katara sputtered. "He- I- He's not that good-looking!"
"A great many would debate that point to breathlessness," the lady said with an artful twitch of her shoulders that conveyed her own ambivalence, "but it is his power that makes him such an enticing potential lover. Countless young women of the court have plotted to entice him, yet none manage to draw his eye. Since his return, there has been only one woman to preoccupy him, but she has ever been... intractable."
Katara made a disgusted noise and remembered why she had so disliked Lady Gan on meeting her.
"If I believed you were inclined toward pretense or manipulation, I would commend you," she went on, apparently idly as they strolled. "A young man of power can find himself embroiled in the keeping of cunning mistresses, who oft times expect extended favor that can complicate his later dealings for years to come. But, with all his desire fixed on one held forever just beyond his reach, one to whom he owes a great debt of honor, Prince Zuko has thus far handily sidestepped any such political pitfalls."
"Well, he should get me a nice thank-you card," Katara snipped.
"Indeed. Though it may be some years before his highness possesses the wisdom to do so, I should think." Lady Gan stopped walking and turned her full scrutiny on Katara. "They improve, you know. Men. Much like wine, time ripens the bouquet of their offerings."
"Yeah, well, time ripens fish, too," Katara said, raising her chin. "But that doesn't make it more palatable."
Lady Gan's eyes sparkled. "Adore it."
A servant swept open a door at her wave and she showed Katara into a lavish cabin with a bath already waiting in a deep enameled iron tub. A bed sprawled on the other side of the room, some very soft-looking sleep clothes laid out upon it. Great windows filled one wall, revealing the shining morning sea beyond - but already heavy brocaded drapes had been half-drawn to limit the dazzling light that poured in.
"I thought perhaps privacy might best please you, but simply pull this cord if you find yourself in need of assistance. A maid will answer your bell at once." Lady Gan pointed out a few other amenities and then returned to the doorway. "I do look forward to our afternoon, Princess Katara," she said with a tiny, not-quite-so-performed smile. "I think it shall be great fun."
Katara politely agreed and then, once the door was shut, she stripped down immediately and climbed into the tub. The hot water was perfect, soothing aches she had not even realized she had. And if, as her hands drifted like languid fish across her skin and teased between her trembling thighs until she gasped her way to a long-awaited and much-needed release, if in her steamy repose her mind was filled with visions of a man she wished she hated, it didn't matter.
There was no one writing a play about that, either.