Chapter Text
They rise the next morning with the sun’s first rays scattering gold across the mountaintops. Despite the rocky ground, Katara feels surprisingly well rested, maybe due to the previous day’s exhaustion or the fresh, cool air. Maybe it’s because she’s beginning to feel the pull of the ocean just beyond the mountains.
Zuko, too, seems to have perked up from the day before, running through firebending exercises and sun salutations with vigor. He offers Katara a small but genuine smile when he finishes.
“Big day today,” he says. “Are you ready to scale the mountains?”
“Isn’t that what we’re already doing?”
Zuko shakes his head. “These are just foothills. It looks like the real peaks start just over that ridge.” He points to the north, where in the misty distance, Katara can make out the vague form of taller mountains.
“They look a little intimidating,” she says doubtfully.
“I don’t know about you, but I’d take mountains over the desert any day. And we’ve got ostrich horses now.”
“Do you think there will be snow?” She perks up at the thought.
“Maybe. I hope not. We’re not really dressed for that.” A visible shiver runs down Zuko’s arms.
So close. Just over those mountains. It might not be her father or her brother or her friends, but it’s closer to hope than anything Katara’s had in weeks. It’s people she knows—maybe, if she’s lucky, somebody she loves.
-
There isn’t any snow, but Zuko’s still shivering. The farther they climb up the ridge, the thinner and colder the air gets. The ostrich horses are doing surprisingly well for now, but he doubts they’ll be able to keep up the pace as they keep ascending. He’d studied the map from the oasis thoroughly, but the details in this corner of the world were lacking, the outlines of peaks sketched out in lieu of actual paths.
He’s starting to see why: there isn’t much to map. The mountains roll on into the distance for as far as he can see; he knows that somewhere beyond them, there’s a brief strip of shore before the sea, but he can’t see it.
The ostrich horses at least make it easier for Katara and him to talk as they travel, now that they aren’t struggling up the rocky terrain themselves. Katara has been regaling him with one of the many adventures he’d missed out on while he was chasing them around the world: they’d found themselves in a town full of gullible citizens, living their lives by the word of a stubborn old fortuneteller.
“…And then she told me I was going to marry a very powerful bender,” Katara is saying. “And then, of course, she was wrong and the volcano did blow up, but Aang used his Avatar powers to save the town, not that we got any thanks for it—hey, what do you think that is?”
They’ve just crested the first real peak, and the mountains spread themselves out before Zuko and Katara like a painting, sprawling down into mist and up towards the clouds. Katara is pointing slightly to the west at a glimmer atop one of the peaks, too bright to be water or snow.
Zuko squints. He can’t make out any details, but he can tell by the brilliant reflection of the thin mountain light that it must be metallic. “Whatever it is, it’s not natural.”
“We should go check it out.”
“What? Why?”
“It’s on our way, isn’t it?”
“I guess,” Zuko says doubtfully. “I mean, it’s in the right direction. But that’s a tall mountain. Who knows what it is? It could be nothing. It could be dangerous.”
“And it could be a secret city full of benders, for all we know.”
“Don’t you want to get to the North already?”
“Oh, come on, Zuko. This is barely even a detour. It could be useful.”
There’s an undercurrent of strange desperation in Katara’s voice, and it takes Zuko a moment to locate a source for it. Katara, ever hopeful, might think it’s a clue to the location of her hidden friends. He does have to admit it’s a good spot to hide; there is nobody here for miles, no reason to come up to this forgotten corner.
“Okay,” he says. “Let’s check it out.”
-
The ostrich horses are quickly tiring of the mountainous terrain by the time they reach the foot of the glinting mountain. Katara admires them for making it as far as they had, old and malnourished as they are; the first crest had been the hardest one by far, and they hadn’t had much time to recover after.
To her surprise, there’s a narrow path cleared of rocks winding its way up the mountain; rubble and scrubby plants have filled it in over time, but it’s still devoid of the large rocks and irregularities characterizing the rest of the terrain. Her eyes follow it up until it disappears into the low-hanging fog.
“Should we walk it?” she calls out to Zuko, whose ostrich horse lags behind hers.
Zuko shades his eyes with one hand as he surveys it. “Sure,” he answers. “It definitely looks like a footpath.”
Katara slides off her mount, her muscles cramping up from disuse. The poor ostrich horse shudders with relief, and she loops the reins around her wrist as she waits for Zuko to catch up.
“If it’s something dangerous, at least we can bend at it,” she says brightly. “There are definitely no Fire Nation soldiers this far north.”
“What are you supposed to bend? We’re miles and miles from the ocean.”
Katara quirks an eyebrow. “Who says I need the ocean?”
She reaches a hand up towards the sky and feels her chi coalesce in her sternum, pooling raw energy before twisting her wrist. The cloud vapor swirls down like a vortex, coming to twine around her wrist in a bracelet. It feels so good to bend out in the open again, and Katara grins, pulling more water from the clouds until it coats her whole arm.
Experimentally, she lunges out, slashing the water across a boulder to the side of the path. It cleaves in half almost immediately, and Katara’s grin grows even wider. Yep, still got it.
The air grows thicker around them as they climb. It’s almost unnatural; the fog hadn’t been nearly this thick before, and even though the steepness of the path reminds her how high they’re climbing, she doesn’t think they could actually walk into the clouds.
Then, all of a sudden, the fog dissipates from the path in front of them. Katara stops dead, her breath catching in her throat and not just because of the effort of the climb.
“What is that?” Zuko gasps, coming to stop beside her.
“It’s a temple,” Katara murmurs reverently.
-
The only word Zuko can think of is magnificent. Spires tower over their heads, made out of a pale golden rock that gleams against the dull mountainside. The glints they’d seen earlier must have been from the mirrored panels inlaid in some of the spires; here above the layer of mist, the sun pierces the gloom to illuminate the structure, making it seem like it’s glowing.
“One of the temples?” he asks. “The four Air Nomad temples?”
Katara shakes her head. “It’s much too small. Aang said the Northern temple was around here somewhere. This must be an outpost of some kind, like a shrine.”
“It’s…surreal.”
Zuko cranes his neck, following the towers up to their points. Despite the damage of age, the architecture is still intact, soaring beyond anything he’d ever seen in the Fire Nation—or anywhere else in the world. The technology the Air Nomads must have had, the vision and imagination and creativity, is leagues beyond the rest of the nations.
And now they’re all gone.
“Should we?” Katara asks, gesturing towards the open doorway.
A thick wave of anxiety suddenly washes over Zuko, paralyzing him. He’d passed over Air Nomad sites during his search for the Avatar, but he’d never gone inside one. He’d never confronted the destruction his nation had committed against the race.
“You go ahead,” he says weakly.
Katara slides off her mount and starts towards the door, but then turns back. “No, let’s go together. It’s okay.”
“I just need a minute.”
“I’ll wait.” Katara smiles at him, gently taking his ostrich horse’s reins.
He watches her tie them to a post at the end of the path and tries to calm his breath. There’s no reason for him to be reacting this way. He’s seen the skeletons enough times over the course of his travels. He knows what’s probably waiting in the shrine. When he was younger, he thought it was justified. Necessary.
He tears his eyes away from the dark entrance at the sensation of a slight pressure on his arm. Katara is resting her hand there, looking up at him.
“Are you ready?” she asks.
Zuko swallows, gently slides his hand into hers, and nods.
-
Even the air inside the shrine feels ancient. It’s cool and dim in the passage, dust motes swirling in the filtered light, and deathly quiet. It would have felt almost eerie if she was alone. She clutches Zuko’s hand a little harder, taking comfort in his warmth.
The entryway ends in an intricately carved wooden door. There’s a thick layer of dust on the handle, but the door gives way easily when she pushes the handle, lighter than it looks, and suddenly her vision is flooded with light again. Katara has to take a moment to let her eyes adjust, the scene before her fading in from the edges.
The walls are painted with bright images punctuated by alcoves where serene statuettes rest. The ceiling vaunts high over their heads, windows stretching open to let fresh air and light flow through the room so that it feels as if it isn’t abandoned and ancient, but still alive.
And then, finally, the center of the room fades in: worn furniture, prayer mats, scattered books. It looks like it could have been lived in yesterday were it not for the dust coating the whole scene.
“Hello?” Katara calls out, her voice ringing upwards.
To her disappointment, but not her surprise, there’s no answer.
She feels Zuko relax beside her, his hand loosening around hers. When she looks over at him, he’s staring around the hall, his eyes wide with wonder.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he says.
He lets go of her hand and steps forward tentatively. He looks almost afraid to disrupt the peaceful scene. Katara follows a few steps behind him, watching carefully.
The first thing he investigates is the painting on the walls, a sprawling cosmic mural done in ethereal purples and blues. There are seven statues interspersed in the alcoves throughout it, identical except for the placement of their hands on different parts of their bodies, and Katara remembers what Aang had told her about Guru Pathik’s lecture on the seven chakras.
“Do you know what they mean?” Zuko asks her.
Katara nods. “I think it has to do with achieving spiritual enlightenment. The Air Nomads believed there were seven different locations in the body that corresponded to different emotions or kinds of energy. Aang used them to try and get control over the Avatar State.”
“We didn’t learn anything about other cultures when I was young,” Zuko says pensively. He runs his fingers over the star-studded mural, his fingertips coming away purple with flecks of pigment. “I snuck into the royal archives with Uncle a couple of times, though. There was a history of the Avatars before Roku. It said that the Avatars coming from the Air Nomads were always the most powerful, because they innately understood the power and the purpose of the Avatar more than all the other nations.”
“Aang never had a chance to learn most of that. He was so young when they told him. Too young.”
“And now there’s no one left to teach him,” Zuko mutters.
He turns away from the statues abruptly, striding to the center of the room and beginning to leaf through one of the books. “What do you think this place was? I thought the army wrecked the temples when they killed all of the Air Nomads, but it still looks so peaceful here.”
“I think it’s a shrine for the Northern Air Temple. An outpost for meditation, sort of. Aang told me a little about the ones where he was from; they would come out here for days to commune with the spirits without being disturbed.”
“I never heard anything about these when we studied the history of the Hundred Year War.” Zuko furrows his brow, still squinting at the book. “Katara, come look at this.”
She kneels next to him, peering over his shoulder. The pages are filled with a large picture of two figures: a woman with dark hair tied in a knot at the top of her head, draped in elegant red and gold, and a bald-headed man with distinctively familiar arrow tattoos. They’re shaking hands, both wearing serene expressions on their faded faces.
“It says this is from five hundred years ago,” Zuko says. “Avatar Yangchen was just born. The two nations are peacefully solidifying the transfer of the Avatar power.”
He turns the page with a careful hand. Katara can’t parse the characters—it’s written in a traditional script, one that’s not common anymore—but Zuko reads it aloud without hesitation.
“The Fire Nation and the Air Nomads were great allies. Together, they developed new bending techniques, the firebenders teaching the airbenders how to channel their boundless energy and the airbenders teaching the firebenders how to unlock their full potential. The powerful combination of the nomads’ love of exploration and the Fire Nation’s innovation allowed them to reach corners of the world never before seen…”
Zuko’s voice trails off, but his eyes continue to hungrily scan the columns of text.
Katara doesn’t interrupt him as he reads. Zuko is utterly absorbed, and she takes the time to watch him, observe the wrinkles in his forehead and the ridges of his scar, the way he silently mouths the words to himself as he reads. Warmth radiates off his back towards her, and Katara is hit with the irrational urge to drape her arms around his shoulders and fold herself into that heat, to breathe him in.
Finally, he closes the book and sets it on his lap. “I can’t believe I never knew about this,” he says, his voice barely above a whisper. “They trusted us. It was a shock. We completely betrayed them. Their whole culture.”
“It’s not your fault,” Katara says.
“It’s my family’s fault, though. I have to be the one to fix this. The world can’t lose their culture, their history.”
He turns his head to look Katara in the eyes, his face entirely too close, and Katara’s breath sticks in her throat. “When this is all over, when there’s peace again, will you help me do it, Katara?”
“Of course I will,” she whispers. “We all will, Zuko.”
She imagines Zuko swathed in red robes and ornamental armor, his hair tied back, standing on a balcony before citizens from every nation. She imagines him declaring peace, embracing Aang, describing his plans for restoring balance.
And then, unbidden, her mind adds another detail to the picture: Katara by his side, dressed in blue, smiling up at him. By his side as he rebuilds the world from ashes. Beyond that, always by his side.
She hasn’t allowed herself to consider what the world after the day of the comet will look like, too focused on surviving it first, knowing how many ways it could go wrong. But for just that moment, she can’t help herself—a lifetime lays itself out in front of her.
Zuko, amber eyes holding hers as they do right now, dressed in blue, standing next to Hakoda, holding a necklace between his hands.
Oh, Katara thinks, and then, of course.
-
They spend the afternoon searching the rest of the shrine, but there isn’t much to search. A few bare bedchambers and sunny terraces turn up more books, statues, and what seem to be religious relics, but no sign of other people, alive or dead. Katara, to Zuko’s relief, doesn’t seem too disappointed that her friends weren’t hidden away here after all. She must have known how farfetched it was all along as well.
Still, it’s far from a waste: Zuko keeps the book detailing the history of the Air Nomads and Fire Nation’s alliance, determined to study it more closely when he has a chance. He takes another one as well, outlining the idea of the seven chakras that Katara had explained. He hopes that when he finally meets Aang that the last airbender can teach him more about the spiritual beliefs of his nation, that together, they can find a way to continue those traditions.
He understands now why he hadn’t been taught about the history or traditions of any of the other three nations when he was young; it’s hard to wrap his head around the genocide of the whole people now that he knows their way of life is so diametrically opposed to violence, that once upon a time, they had been allies. He thinks of all the vitriol and prejudice the population of his country has towards the rest of the world and how much that could change if they just understood the other cultures.
He’s incredibly thankful for the shrine’s emptiness—not just of any other living beings, but of the remnants of them, as well. He’s not sure what he would have done if he had come face-to-face with the devastation his nation’s army had wreaked on the monks. As it is, the shrine is disorganized, but peaceful; it simply looks like its inhabitants have left in a hurry and could be back at any moment.
When they’ve thoroughly searched the building for any sign of life and determined it well and truly empty, they return to the main hall, where Katara sits down on a mat with a sigh. “Oh well,” she says. “I wasn’t really expecting them to be here, but…still.”
“I’m glad we came.” Zuko finds himself drawn back to the statues depicting the chakras, pacing back and forth in front of them. The serene faces stare out at him—not judging, just observing.
At the corner of his eye, a flash of orange catches his attention, tucked into the alcove behind the seventh chakra statue. Zuko reaches behind the statue, curious, and feels something cool and smooth that fits perfectly into his palm.
When he pulls it out, he sees that it’s a pendant. It’s engraved with a triangle of careful spirals, dangling from a string of orange beads. A strange feeling of peace washes over Zuko as he stares at it.
“Katara?” he calls out.
She looks up from the scroll in her lap. “What’s up?”
“Do you know what this is?”
He walks over to her, dangling the pendant in the air. She rises and rubs her thumb over the carving.
“Yeah, I’ve seen these before. The monks in the paintings at the Southern Air Temple were wearing them. And their—” She breaks off and lets the pendant fall. “They’re for the monks,” she finishes lamely.
Zuko watches the stone sway on its string between them, catching glints of light. The same feeling as before fills him again—peaceful, relaxed, meditative.
He thinks, watching the gentle, even sway of the pendant, that he understands a bit better what the Air philosophy is. Constant motion, but always perfectly in balance; each sway a perfect mirror. The forces don’t oppose each other, but reflect each other.
“You should keep it,” Katara says.
Zuko looks up. Her ocean eyes are glassy, staring up at him. “They would want you to have it,” she continues. “Aang would want you to.”
“Are you sure?”
Katara reaches up and loops the beads around him, her hands brushing the sensitive skin at the back of his neck and sending shivers cascading down his spine.
“Think of it as a promise. Next time you come back here, you’ll be with him, and you can start to fix what’s been broken.”
Zuko tucks the stone carefully into his tunic, letting it settle against his skin.
When he sees the airbender, he’ll give it to him. It’ll be the first step in the long, long process of rectifying his nation’s atrocities. But it’s a step, and it makes him anxious to reunite with Katara’s friends—a new reason to push through the rest of their journey, to make it past the end of the world, to make sure he’s there to rebuild it.