Author's Note: As always, A:TLA-compliant but completely independent of LoK/comics/any other source material beyond the original show.
Chapter 7: Justice
Aang gritted his teeth, slumped against one of the two long cedar benches outside Zuko's audience chamber. Every nerve ending in his body was tense.
You can join at a later date, Aang, Zuko had informed him moments before those heavy doors slammed shut in his face. But not today.
He should have turned away with whatever dignity he had left, but he'd settled sulkily onto a seat instead. He probably looked like a child throwing a tantrum. He felt like a child throwing a tantrum, shoulders lowered and one foot dangled on the arm of his bench - he certainly had been treated like one, dismissed as Zuko and Katara ushered past him with the last of the attendees.
Zuko, he'd said. Demanded, really, pulling on the edge of his friend's heavy red sleeve. Let me come.
His friend had arched one eyebrow, saying mildly, This isn't about the world today. It's about them...they don't need the Avatar right now.
He heard the implication of they don't want you here.
Zuko was so calm as he shut the doors. As he shut Aang out, the Fire Lord's head piece winked in the lantern light like a taunt.
What raged beyond the closed doors was a meeting between the Fire Lord, his personal advisers, the Ministry of Justice, and a select few members of the Northern and Southern Water Tribes from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And Katara. Katara, who hadn't even glanced back at him. Katara with steel in her blue eyes, every one of her movements as strained as his own. Like she was headed into battle.
That look in her eyes scared him. He thought, sometimes, that he barely knew her anymore. Or maybe that he never had. Sometimes, when he reviewed the details from the past three years like an archaeologist pouring over the ruins of their relationship, he wondered if that hardness in her was the key to everything. Maybe it was that all along, and not her love for Zuko at all.
You love him, and you can't even see it, he'd said.
I love him, she'd said. But lately Aang realized that was only a single piece of it.
Too many days he wished he'd kept it to himself. Wished he'd never heeded the thread winding slowly into knots at the back of his mind, tickling his senses whenever he saw his two friends together. It was never obvious, not really. Not until he had sat with it for weeks, months, nearly a year as he slowly felt himself being pushed to the edges of their trio. Not as he realized everything Katara shared with him – plans, ideas, dreams – had been shared with Zuko first.
All the years of knowing her, he'd seen Katara as water. As the element that governed her, as something beautiful and peaceful and calm. As something that could soothe and heal, that did not know the violence of fire. But that look in her eyes was someone he didn't know. It dazed him, even now, to learn he was perhaps wrong.
What else was he wrong about? Aang sunk farther into the bench.
After an hour of brooding, the doors at last opened up with a great groan. The first of the officials poured out like schools of fish freed from a dam as they wandered down the hall in neat groups.
"Not today," Katara said at Aang as she stormed past, eyes and voice and every movement about her sharp. Like anyone who touched her would look down to see rivulets of blood where they dared reach for.
Zuko followed quickly after, only raising a hand as Aang stood to meet them.
"Hold on, Aang," he said, "Now isn't a good time."
In a blur of red and blue, his friends rushed past him. As always, he was pushed into third. As always, he floated beside them untethered, completely outside their private orbit. Cold in the darkness of the empty bit of space they left him in. He'd once thought they danced around each other like the moon and sun, but he didn't feel generous enough today for that.
It would flatter them, he thought, that kind of pretty dichotomy. But would they care if they knew how he felt – that he was a lonely and isolated star beside them?
Sika, a delegate for the Northern Water Tribe and the only woman from the North, was the last to empty out of Zuko's meeting.
"How did it go?" he asked.
She cut him a look as if to say, How do you think that went? But she just sighed and fell into step beside him. Like Zuko often did, she tucked her arms into opposite sleeves. It made her look wise and patient, so he tucked his hands in too.
She and Aang were what remained of the hearing's crowd, the others rushing off to next appointments or pressing duties, he supposed. Apart from the dragons carved into the walls beside them, they were alone.
"It's terrible," she said to him gravely. "Truly terrible."
Truly terrible was an understatement. Today's meeting between Zuko's ministers of justice and the Water Tribes was the first in a series to begin addressing the crimes of Sozin, Azulon, and Ozai against the waterbenders. It was another agenda Katara had spent the past few years working toward – she wanted justice and she was not afraid, had never been afraid, of demanding it.
It had placed her at odds with countless in Zuko's cabinet, Aang knew. Those who wished to step into the future with blanket pardons in place of the justice that would take decades to even begin to sort out. But she demanded and pushed and was unyielding. And thus, her enemies stacked up year after year.
And not every member of the Tribes was happy to see someone like her, so young – and female – holding such influence. Her place beside Zuko left every side uneasy. Sika, and so many others, had made that opinion clear.
"Walk with me, Avatar Aang."
Aang obeyed as they moved beyond the hall and into one of the inner courtyards with a single koi pond and small shrubs and succulents that would prickle the skin if you went too near. Aang almost smiled as he thought how much like Zuko those spiny plants were.
He almost told Sika but she said to him before he could, "I cannot move the world in the direction of my will. Things would be different if I could. I can only nudge it, Avatar."
Aang frowned at that, sure this was somehow headed out of the direction of the war tribunal and into meet-your-destiny territory. He drew in a long breath and, for a small moment, contemplated sitting on the largest plant and ending it all.
Instead, he continued his path beside her as they wended from the small garden and into another hallway. Zuko's palace really was a warren, with its halls turning around on themselves, its side rooms and tunnels.
"Most can do nothing, most become nothing. A nudge is only possible if they are blessed by the spirits. A mere nudge takes the maneuvering of a lifetime. "
Aang didn't tell her what he thought of the spirits these days.
"You should understand," she stopped and turned the full force of her gaze upon him. He halted to a stop beside her. "You have the power to change the world more than once in your lifetime. To move the pai sho tiles across the board at will, where others have only a single move."
"Your friends lobby, they dissent, they fight with their councils," she gestured toward where they had come from. Toward Zuko and Katara. "And what have they done but nudged? All of those years for a nudge or two."
She pulled down the collar of her blue robes to reveal a choker not unlike Katara's. From it hung a heavy bit of carved stone, decorated with two debossed waves. A betrothal necklace of the Northern Water Tribe.
They were now definitely in the realm of meet-your-destiny. Aang tried not to look too disgusted.
"Sika," he said, not liking how desperate he sounded. But there it was. "I don't want to talk about this."
And like everyone else for the past few months, she ignored him.
"It's our way in the North to be married by the design of others," she said as she pulled her robes back into place. The necklace was swallowed up by layers of blue fabric. "There are sometimes love matches, but often we tie together our families in alliance. To me, it's a duty and it's an honor to be placed on the pai sho board."
Aang grimaced at the words that made the foundation of his nightmares. Duty. Honor. Responsibility.
"I want you to understand we are not asking you to do something we haven't done. Things we do not ask of ourselves, of our children. You'll find many who sit in that room stood in your shoes with far less to gain and did so proudly. It is not all sacrifice."
Once again, all he felt like was a child. Escaping his destiny in a fit of panic, lost in a downpour of rain, frozen in place for a hundred years.
Sika had shown the proof of her own betrothal, likening herself to a pai sho token cast on a larger board. He knew she was right, people like Hata and Imnek and so many others from strong families, had been forced to make those families even stronger. They didn't even have a world to save, a people to restore. The fate of the Northern Water Tribe wasn't dependent on Sika's marriage or her children. It was simply the maneuvering of culture and tradition.
Aang felt hot with shame as they walked into the halls beyond.
Zuko held back Katara's heavy braid as she retched into the planter. He wasn't even sure which side room they had disappeared into, only that it was dark and they were safe from the prying eyes and judgement of his courtiers and staff.
The only light in the room came from the inconstant firelight from the hall just beyond.
Katara threw up again, resting her temple on the cool edge of the clay. He hoped the remnants of the rice, porridge, and jasmine tea they had shared over breakfast this morning didn't do the ferns too much harm.
"I'm sorry," was all he said, over and over again as she was sick over the ferns and clay and small ornamental stones.
When she was done, they rearranged themselves so her head rested in his lap. He stroked a hand over her cheek and brow, like his mother had done when he was sick.
She leaned into his gentle touch.
"You should talk to him, Katara," he said after a while. She opened one blue eye to regard him.
"I get it," he said quickly, "you know I do. But he cares about you and wants to be part of this. And he wants to be there for you too."
Katara frowned at that, closing her eye again. What she couldn't tell even Zuko was whose shadow dogged at her heels. Whose old and bony hands, like some haunting spirit, wrapped around her neck and squeezed so tightly she couldn't keep her breakfast down. Whose whisper of justice for the waterbenders tickled her ear as each side of the tribunal laid out their beginning points.
She could almost see Hama's specter in the distant firelight even now. She would probably smile, Katara thought, that awful and terrible smile.
"He's not just the Avatar. He's our friend," Zuko continued softly, a hand running through the tendrils of brown hair that had fallen from her braid. It banished the last of Katara's fear. "He's your friend and he loves you."
Katara nestled deeper into him, allowing herself to be soothed by the kindness in his murmured words. Kindness that had taken years for him to reclaim.
The last he said of it was this: "Beyond all this mess between us, he loves you."
Hata tapped his fingers impatiently against the front desk of the Royal Library. A line was beginning to form behind him.
"Can I please have your records on On Ji?" he asked again.
Her name was Yori, per the name plate at her desk. She was a woman with perhaps a few years on him, with sharp, angular glasses that framed dull gray eyes as she peered at him down her nose. "Records?"
She was proving to be a nuisance to Hata, whose jovial manner usually charmed whomever he approached. He found that an easy demeanor and harmless flattery opened doors everywhere. It was how he always conducted himself – whether negotiating down the price of peonies for his wife at the market or arguing with the Earth Kingdom regarding management of exports from the colonies. The illusion of a friend was a powerful tool.
Yori, the head woman of the library's front desk, apparently did not want a friend. Or the banal chitchat of a government worker with too much time on his hands, or so she'd said.
He was admittedly starting to run short on patience. "Yes, the records of On Ji, whose family name I believe is Ogino. What she has checked out previously, what she has checked out now, as far as back as you can provide."
"By whose authority?" The look she gave him was biting. She acted for all the world like the Fire Lord of the library's front desk.
"The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, if you please," he had already told her that bit, but he angled his shoulder toward her to flash the badge that marked his ministry of employment.
She frowned. He smiled back at her anyhow, like they were the oldest of friends. He drummed his fingers, she drummed them back.
It seemed like she wanted to refuse him, just so she could. But there was no turning away a viscount from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and they both knew that.
"We can have them ready for you at the end of the week," she said caustically, waving him away.
He said, "I was hoping for them today."
Somehow her frown deepened; that quite impressed him.
"End of the week. And not a day sooner."