Chapter Text
They’re speeding over the crystal waves near Ember Island when he wakes. Katara’s left her post at the wheel and is bending with determination, her forehead covered in a thin sheen of sweat.
“Hey. Sleep well?”
“Decently.” Not entirely true—that’s something he hadn’t missed about living on a boat. “How was it up here?”
“Peaceful.”
Despite her lack of sleep, she does look rested, and her demeanor is noticeably calmer. Rise with the moon, Zuko remembers, and thinks of the North Pole, of the way he didn’t ever stand a chance against her ice at midnight. Still, it’s late morning now, and she’s obviously waning.
“You should take a break. We’re making good time already.”
“I’m fine.” She doesn’t sound very convincing; her voice is thin and flat. The waves rising behind them to push them forward grow a little smaller with each swing of her arm. To be this far already, she must have been amplifying the current for half the night.
“Rest,” he says as firmly as he can. “Make breakfast. I’ll steer.”
Katara looks for a moment like she’s going to keep protesting, but instead she drops her arms and the water falls mid-crescendo with a crash. “I would’ve been fine,” she says.
“I know.”
The waterbender can be strange, Zuko thinks. The strangest thing about her is how similar she can be to him.
He eats with her, sitting on the deck with their backs to the mast and their faces to the morning sun. It’s a humid day, the air thick with evaporated salt, and it clings to his skin and sticks his clothes to his back and sends Katara’s hair curling around her face. A true Fire Nation summer day like the ones from his childhood. He’d always liked Ember Island more than Azula—the palace got too overwhelming sometimes for a child, all that metal and black.
Ember Island, though—Ember Island was light and warmth and old wood and incense and even if they stopped going completely by the time he was eleven, it was one of his favorite places as a child. The water was always calming. For a Fire Nation Prince, Azula had always said, he liked the ocean far too much.
“What are we going to do when we get there?” asks Katara.
Zuko startles slightly. “When we get there?”
“Ba Sing Se.”
“Oh.” He hadn’t really thought about it. He’d been concentrating on getting there first. “Warn the army, I guess. They’ll have to fight off the invasion force again.”
“They won’t listen. We tried to talk to the Emperor before, when there still was an Emperor, and it was useless. We can’t depend on the Earth government for anything.”
“Who else is supposed to defend the city, then?” snaps Zuko. “My dad’s sending the Nation’s entire army, not just one battalion like in the North! A few warriors and benders aren’t going to be able to stop this!”
“I’m not stupid, Zuko.” Katara narrows her eyes at him.
He has got to stop yelling at her if this is ever going to work. They both need to make an effort. “I suppose if we could get the message out to everyone in the city, at least they’ll have the chance to evacuate. At least it’s something.”
“Do you think they’ll believe us?”
“They’ll have to,” Zuko says grimly.
-
The Fire Nation is made up of twelve islands arcing across the ocean like Momo’s tail. Each one is smaller, greener, and emptier than the last, and their boat passes nearly all of them in one day. Zuko says she doesn’t have to work so hard, that the wind is strong enough already, but Katara wants to feel useful, so she churns up waves behind them for as long as she can, only taking breaks when her shoulders complain from the heavy weight of her arms and the ocean and the sky blur together before her eyes.
She can’t help returning to the thought that’s been torturing her ever since the Cliffs, though: that it doesn’t matter how fast they go, because what they are racing towards is not Sokka and Aang and Toph, it is a looming question and a distant promise of violence and bloodshed and maybe, maybe, if they are very lucky a hint of something about where her friends might be. She isn’t even working so hard for the speed—she’s doing it to keep her mind off those thoughts. It works, for the most part, until she goes to sleep and their voices echo inside her skull on repeat—Katara, Katara, help, Katara. All of their voices melding together into a desperate chorus. And Hakoda, Suki, Yue and Jet, Haru, Teo, they all join in until she wakes up after mere minutes with the faces of the dead and lost blurring on the insides of her eyelids.
Sleep isn’t productive anyway. She doesn’t need it.
She bends until she’s not even conscious of the movements anymore. The water seems like it’s getting thicker, or maybe she’s getting weaker, until she realizes the waves have become tiny ripples and she can barely get a grip on them.
All of a sudden, she is laying on the deck and her head is ringing and Zuko is crouching over her, his mouth set in a firm line and his good eye crinkled in worry. “Hey, no, stay down,” he says, and pushes gently at her shoulder when she tries to sit up. “You need to rest.”
She tries to say “I’m fine,” but the words come out garbled.
“You’re going to kill yourself if you keep this up,” he mutters.
He sounds so much like Sokka in that moment that she reaches up to lay a hand on his cheek as reassurance before realizing through her exhaustion-addled haze that the skin under her palm is tough and uneven and too warm instead of familiar day-old scruff.
Zuko jerks back as if he’d been shocked. Katara drops her hand and gasps “I’m sorry,” but he casts his eyes down to the deck and turns the ruined side of his face away.
“It’s fine,” he says roughly, even though it’s obviously not.
“I just—I wasn’t thinking. I’m tired. Really tired. And I was thinking of Sokka, and—“
“You don’t have to apologize.” Zuko runs a hand through his hair. It falls back to his face, his dark bangs obscuring the scar.
Katara tries to concentrate on his words, but all she can think is that he could use a haircut, even though he looks older and more mature like this. “I know you want to do something, but you need to sleep, okay? You’re not going to help either of us if you keep passing out.”
The thing is, she does want to sleep—she’s tired enough now that it actually hurts to keep her eyelids from closing—but she can’t bring herself to face the ghosts in her head, their accusing voices, their empty eyes. She wishes she could rest, but they won’t let her.
Zuko will think she’s weak. Maybe she is. She’s too exhausted to consider it more.
“I have nightmares,” she tells him.
He sighs and looks up at her. “Yeah. Me too.”
Then he disappears, and some time later a cup of tea makes its way into her hands and a cloak that is beginning to feel and smell familiar is wrapped around her shoulders and a voice that is trying its best to be soothing says “Just try. I’ll be here.”
She doesn’t open her eyes again until twilight. Zuko is sitting against the railing, watching the sky.
“Better?” he asks.
Katara smiles. “Yeah.”
-
“We should stop here for the night.”
He’d been counting the islands carefully all day, and the glowing ember to their left is the last one in the Fire Nation archipelago. They’ll have to go ashore to get food for the journey. Once they pass it, there’s nowhere else until they cross the ocean. Zuko had left the village with only enough food for a week, and that was when he assumed he’d be traveling alone. There’s almost nothing left in his satchel aside from the clothes he’d worn in the palace.
“I think I’ve been here before.” Katara peers out at the island as it slowly grows larger. “We stopped on one of these for a few days while Sokka learned swordfighting. Is this where Master Piandao lives?”
“Your brother trained with Master Piandao?”
She nods. “Why?”
“Piandao is the best swordmaster in all four nations,” exclaims Zuko. He sounds too eager even to his own ears. “My uncle had to call in a special favor to get him to train me.”
“Well, he agreed to train Sokka without any special favors,” Katara retorts, her expression both proud and smug.
From what Zuko had seen, Sokka is only a member of the group because of his sister, a powerless and undisciplined boy among some of the best benders in the world just along for the ride. But there must be more to him than it initially seemed.
“He came to the palace when I was eight. He taught me everything I know about swordfighting.” Instinctively, his hand flies to his back, where he expects to find the handle of a Dao sword. He meets empty air and his own shoulder blade. Without them, he feels naked, defenseless, even though his fire is a thousand times quicker and more destructive.
Almost all of the island’s coastline is deserted, and it’s easy to find a calm spot to moor the boat next to a low, grassy cliff. The water is deep, but a clear cerulean that reflects the emerging stars with the faith of a mirror. Katara uses her ice floe trick to bend them to shore. As much as his fire is a part of him, Zuko has to admit waterbending has certain practical applications and advantages that his element doesn’t. Katara’s getting better at controlling it—the wave deposits them to the edge of the cliff with the precision of a well-trained xirxiu hound.
“I think the town is inland,” she says. “I remember it being in a valley.”
“I know,” Zuko snaps without meaning to.
Instead of fighting back as he’d expected, Katara just draws the hood of his cloak up around her face and pulls the drawstrings tight. “Do you think anyone will recognize us?”
“Not as long as it’s dark and you don’t talk. You know too little about our culture—you’ll give us away.”
“I’m not stupid,” she sputters.
“I never said you were. Just leave the talking to me.”
She takes his orders a little too seriously, staying silent on the short duration of the trek into town. The path is pale sand against the wild grasses lined with obsidian, leading down the cliff and into the dip of the valley at the island’s heart. From above, the town glimmers gently like stars in the water, nestled in the crook of the mountains. It’s an old place, he knows. Quaint, more attuned to the ancient ways than the new. There are no factories or metal mines here. They probably still follow the outdated teachings of Avatar Roku.
“We’re here for food and disguises,” he tells Katara. “If we’re asked, we’re displaced Earth travelers pushed out by the Fire colonists. Not that you should say anything. Leave it to me if someone questions it.”
“What if someone asks me specifically?” she challenges.
“They won’t. Trust me.”
Like Shun Cho, the buildings are mostly quiet residences, but the streets are still bustling despite the hour. It’s not loud in the way the Capital always was—vendors are not shouting their prices, competing with each other to be heard, and the barks of guards are conspicuously absent—but there is a gentler productivity to the sounds: neighbors and friends going about their daily business, chatting as they pick over barrels of kumquats and moon peaches. Their clothing is sturdy and unembellished, plain tunics in muted golds and browns with wide-brimmed rice hats. Even in the clothes of a main island peasant, Zuko will stick out, and Katara even more so in her rich red cloak.
“Stay close and don’t make eye contact with anyone,” he hisses.
He tries to stick to the side streets, but in a town this small, all of the shops and street carts line the main avenue. Lanterns hang from lines strung between garrets, lighting everything with a soft glow that thankfully obscures detail from the faces around them, but Zuko still pushes his bangs to the left side of his face, covering the ruined skin. People here seem to have better manners than Capital citizens, though, or else they’ve learned not to pry, because they turn politely away after a quick glance at Zuko’s hostile expression and Katara’s shrouded form.
The storefronts are uniform dark wood, only differentiated by simple signs hanging over each door. Zuko picks one at random that looks a little less busy than the rest. A chime tinkles as he pushes open the door into a bright interior.
“Welcome,” the woman behind the counter says demurely, and inclines her head. Zuko nods back before pulling Katara to the very back of the store.
“Just stay quiet, okay?” he mutters. “This should be quick.”
Anything she tries to say is muffled by the cloak, but she shuffles a little closer to him in response.
He picked a good store. Everything is dried and packaged, sealed into bags sized perfectly for his satchel. There aren’t many customers, either—on an island this verdant, nobody would choose bland food like this unless they were traveling. Zuko scoops packages into his satchel at random. Katara lags behind, reading over the labels, and behind the dark fabric Zuko knows her eyes are probably wide with curiosity. They must not have places like this at the South Pole. He hadn’t spent much time in shops either until he was exiled—other people had brought him whatever he needed.
“What’s this?”
Katara is holding a clear mesh bag filled with purple-brown objects towards him. The label is small and handwritten in neat calligraphy.
Zuko wrinkles his nose. “Dried rock plums. Put those back.”
“I’ve never seen them before.”
“Well, they’re disgusting. You don’t want them.”
“How do you know that if I’ve never had them?” Katara challenges.
“Because they’re terrible!” He snatches the bag out of her hands and puts it back on the shelf. “Come on, let’s go. I don’t want to spend more time here than we have to.”
She grumbles under her breath, but follows him back to the counter at the front of the store. Zuko adjusts his hair over his scar nervously before approaching the shop helper. “Uh, hello,” he says, lowering his voice and hoping he sounds older than he feels.
“Did you find everything you needed?” the lady questions.
He upends his satchel onto the counter. Packages cascade out in a heap; a few skitter to the ground, where Katara silently reaches down and hands them to him. The woman’s eyes grow large.
“Will that be all?” A vein jumps above her eye.
“Um. Yeah, I think so.” Zuko pulls out his coin purse and pours a handful of coins out. A stupid move, he wasn’t thinking—if possible, the shop hand’s eyes have grown even larger, turned into golden-brown suns in her round face. He tries counting the right amount, loses count twice in his nervousness, and shoves the whole handful at her.
“Here. That’s enough, right?”
She’s peering at him in disbelief now, staring at Zuko too carefully to be comfortable. “Do you want your change?” she asks, her tone shocked.
Behind him, Katara snorts in a way he knows means she’s suppressing a full-blown laugh.
“Keep it.” The food can’t get back into his bag quick enough. He probably misses a few of the packages, but they really have to get out of here now before the lady recognizes him or Katara bursts out laughing or he sets the whole damn place on fire.
He can feel the woman’s gaze on his back as he all but runs for the door, but they make it out onto the street without anyone calling after them, and he sags against the door frame in relief. Katara’s not bothering to hold her giggles in now. She doubles over, the cloak pooling on the street in a great dark mass so she looks like a lumpy wolfbat.
“I see you handle stress well,” she coughs out between peals.
Zuko scowls. “Shut up.”
“You’re a master of disguise. She didn’t suspect a thing.”
“Is this really necessary?”
“Well, was any of that?”
“You are insufferable,” he grumbles. “Come on, we still have to find you a real disguise.”
Clothing shops are more difficult to find. There seems to be only one in the town, but it’s crowded and loud, and after the last incident, crowded is the last thing they need. But after they pass it three times, Katara grabs hold of his arm and stops him.
“We have to go in there,” she says. “We could’ve been done by now if you weren’t so stubborn.”
“It’s busy!” he hisses.
Katara rolls her eyes, and then does something that very nearly makes him set the nearest string of lanterns ablaze: she lowers her hood in the middle of the town’s bustling main street. “Then let me handle this one.”
Zuko had forgotten how strong she is for such a skinny wisp of a waterbender. He can’t do anything but feebly protest as she drags him into the shop by one arm, the other hand clutching the front of the cloak closed tightly over the telltale blue of her tunic. Almost as soon as they set foot in the shop, they’re assaulted by an overly enthusiastic girl in a shade of pink too close to Ty Lee’s signature color for his comfort.
“Hello!” she chirps. “How can I help you two today?”
Katara clears her throat and grins bigger than he knew she could. “It’s my birthday tomorrow, and my boyfriend—“ she jerks Zuko’s arm not too gently, and he winces—“is going to buy me a dress! Right, honey?”
“What—“ Katara tightens her fingers on his wrist, and he swallows. “Uh, yeah. Right. Yes, sweetheart.”
“Aw, that’s so sweet!” the girl coos. “Well, we’ve got Shu Jing’s largest range of fine apparel here—I’m sure you’ll find something both of you will love.” She gives him an exaggerated wink, and Zuko feels blood rush to his cheeks.
“Yes, I’m sure we will.” Katara grins breezily at her and pulls him away, waggling her fingers at the enthusiastic girl over her shoulder. She points at an ornate gold kimono shot through with shimmering gold thread. “Ooh, I like that one!”
“Are you crazy? You’ll never pass for—“
“Zuko,” she hisses, and squeezes his wrist again before slipping her fingers between his.
“Oh. Right.” He clears his throat. “Sorry, honey, but that one looks a little too expensive.”
Katara purses her lips into a pout. “Okay. What about the green one?”
He has to admit, Katara’s plan attracts much less attention than his did. Most of the customers glance at them, smile fondly, and pass right by without another thought. Katara’s dark skin, her blue eyes, her too-expensive clothes seem not to matter to them—or maybe they just don’t notice. Slowly, they work their way to the back of the store, Katara playing her part with a surprising degree of enthusiasm and Zuko trying to keep up. Her hand is small, he notices as she brushes the fingertips of the hand that isn’t holding his across a beaded hem. Small, but very soft.
They manage to lose the assistant quickly and get to the emptier back of the store, where the clothes are plain and cheap, and Katara lowers her voice. “See, that wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“No,” he admits.
Her fingers slip out of his, and she pulls away to rifle through a rack of brown skirts. “Help me out,” she says. “I don’t know what I’m looking for.”
“Something that won’t get you noticed.” Zuko tries to think of what the peasants living in the outermost tier of the Capital used to wear: sturdy, unembellished, lightweight garments. He doesn’t know anything about girls’ clothing—Azula had never been one to play dress-up—and he has no idea what Katara will feel comfortable in, but when he hands her a simple brown wrap top that fastens behind her neck, leaving her arms bare, she nods approvingly.
“And pants. If we’re going to be walking, I’m not going to be wearing one of those horrible short skirts.”
“Fire Nation girls don’t wear pants.”
“Ty Lee does,” Katara points out. “Your sister does.”
Ty Lee and Azula would murder anyone who criticized their fashion choices, Zuko wants to say, but doesn’t.
Katara manages to find a modest pair of knee-length breeches and a maroon sarong to wrap over them. They look secondhand. It won’t help her obviously foreign skin tone, but she can pass as a colonist, maybe, or a mixed-nation descendant. “You have to take your necklace off,” he observes.
Her hand flies to her neck. “No way!” she exclaims, clutching the blue charm protectively. “It’s an heirloom! It’s all I have left of home!”
“It’s so obviously foreign you might as well be wearing a sigh that says ‘I’m Water Tribe, ask me about it.’”
“I’m not taking it off. I’ll feel naked without it.”
“Well, you can’t wear it! It defeats the whole point!”
“I won’t not wear it!”
She’s standing on the tips of her toes, trying her hardest to get in his face and look fierce. The effect is somewhere between mildly imposing and hilarious. The fact that she can’t bend without giving both of them away lessens her authority severely. Still, he’d been doing so well at not angering her. They’d almost been getting along.
Zuko rolls his eyes. “Fine. I’ll buy you another necklace. One that won’t get us imprisoned in a heartbeat. Happy?”
“No.”
“Good.” He stalks off towards the jewelry case.
All of the Fire Nation accessories are vastly different from hers. Most of them are heavy gold, inlaid with expensive red or black gems, and she passes right by them, scowling in distaste. He’s all too conscious of the way the clientele’s eyes are back on them. Tentatively, he lays a hand on the small of Katara’s back, and she stiffens before seeming to remember why it’s there.
“See anything you like?” He bites his lip and adds ‘darling’ to the end of the question when a pair of women glance over curiously.
“Not really.”
Why does she have to be so difficult? “Just choose one,” he mutters. “People are staring.”
Katara scowls at the jewelry as if it’s personally offended her before stabbing her finger at the furthest corner of the case. “Fine. That one.”
It’s a web of fine bronze chains laced together into an intricate choker, touched slightly with tarnish. Five tiny black pearls hang like teardrops at perfectly spaced intervals along the bottom chain. It has to be the oldest and plainest item in the whole case.
“Seriously?” Zuko raises an eyebrow. Katara stares him down without a word. “Whatever. It’s your neck.”
Next to them, the old ladies cough in disapproval, and Katara starts. She reaches up to pat Zuko’s cheek, realizes which side of his face she’s about to touch, and awkwardly pulls away to smooth his hair down instead over the scar. “Thank you so much, sweetie,” she gushes as someone wraps up the necklace for her.
He keeps his hand on her back while the shop girl tallies up the cost. It makes it harder to pay her, but he manages to count out the coins properly this time on the first try while Katara leans into his side and chatters blithely about her ‘birthday plans,’ which apparently include a midnight party at his house and a three-tier mango cake. When the shop girl tells her she’s lucky to have such a generous boyfriend and Katara beams up at him, he only hesitates slightly before pressing his lips to the place where her braid meets the back of her skull. He feels her back go tense beneath his hand.
“Sorry,” he whispers.
Then she has her arms full of shiny red paper and they make it back out onto the street while the assistant waves them out. The moon is up now, the street that much darker without the last of the daylight, and the spaces between the lantern strings hang in shadow that hides them better than any disguise they could come up with. Zuko drops his hand and Katara edges away.
“You certainly got into that role,” she says.
He shrugs. “Well, it worked.”
They duck through the streets like spirits. If anything, the town seems busier now that the sun is down—maybe because the heat is tolerable now, or maybe because the street glows elegantly with a gentle life under the lanterns and shopfronts. The street carts are doing a thriving trade, and everyone is so busy talking to each other that they don’t have time to notice the two dark figures passing from shadow to shadow. They’re nearly at the edge of the town before Zuko glances up and a silvery, familiar flash catches his eye.
“Wait.” He pulls Katara to a stop and stares.
“What is it?”
The cart is surrounded by a crowd three people deep. There are two men behind it, dressed in the simple red robes of students, and the swords drip form the thatched roof and wooden beams.
“Never mind.” He shakes his head. “It’s too busy.”
Katara’s eyes flicker from the sword vendors to his face, where they linger, searching. “Are those Piandao’s?”
“Those are his students selling them.”
“They took those swords you had before in prison?”
“Yeah.”
He’d been trying his best not to think about them, but now it’s impossible to ignore how strange it feels without their weight over his tunic. They’re the only thing he’s had—that’s been entirely his, that no one, not even Azula, had tried to take away from him—since he was nine and he finished his formal sword training, and now they’re locked away somewhere in a dusty back room of the Imperial complex where no one will touch them for generations.
There’s sudden pressure on his arm and he glances down to find Katara tugging on it. “Well, we can’t very well leave you defenseless,” she says firmly, and pulls him out of the shadows.
-
Zuko doesn’t take long to choose his sword. She would’ve thought he’d agonize over them, weighing their benefits, because that’s the kind of person he seems like, but as soon as they get through the dense crush of bodies he’s pointing at a sliver-thin piece of silver and saying ‘that one’ to one of the students.
“Are you sure? That’s a Dao sword, they’re very hard to handle—“
“I’m sure,” Zuko cuts in.
“It’s two hundred yuans.”
He goes slightly pale on the side of his face where the skin isn’t mottled before pouring out what sounds like almost all of the rest of the money in the purse. The student unhooks the sword, and Katara gets a better look: the weapon is slim and tapers into a wicked point that catches the gleam of the lantern light. A tiny black stone lays at the base of the leather grip. It’s half again as long as her arm, but the student handles it as if it’s light as bamboo.
He slides it into a plain scabbard and pushes it towards Zuko.
Then they’re elbowing their way through the final thick of the crowd and trading the lanterns’ light for the stars’ clear glow, and Katara tips her head back and breathes deeply.
“Okay,” she says. “We did it. Okay.”
Zuko doesn’t respond. She looks over. He’s running his fingers absently over the flat of his sword, tilting it to watch the way it reflects shards of starlight.
“I shouldn’t have bought this,” he mumbles. “It’s too expensive. It’s a Piandao sword. I shouldn’t have gone near it.”
The look on his face is an inscrutable mix—anticipation and regret, happiness and loss. He trails his fingers over the sword’s sharp edge before drawing it up and plunging it back into the scabbard that rests loose at his hip. Invariably, Katara thinks of Sokka again and the way he treated his space sword with the same reverence.
“You’ll have to defend yourself somehow. Now you can.”
“I don’t need an expensive sword to firebend.” He frowns at his feet. “You, though—Katara, you’re not going to be able to bend.”
“Huh? We’re traveling on a ship at sea. Of course I am.”
He shakes his head. “Around people, I mean. If we pretend to be Fire colonists or Earth refugees or anything, you can’t bend water. It’ll give you away in seconds.”
“You want me to stop bending.” Her voice is dull and flat in her own ears.
Zuko sighs. “I don’t want you to. You have to. There aren’t that many waterbenders left, especially not loose in Ba Sing Se—it’d be a dead giveaway.”
Katara looks down at her hands. Her palms are turned upwards, towards the sky, so that moonlight highlights the deep lines etched into the pale brown skin. These hands are the hands of a waterbender, of a citizen of the South Pole. These hands know how to harm and how to heal. These hands are hers, just like the water they shape is hers.
She hasn’t seen the South Pole in a long time. She’s walking through the Fire Nation in a red cloak beside the enemy’s prince. Waterbending is all she has left.
“It’s the only way I know how to protect myself,” she says quietly.
Zuko stares at her—not at her, really, more like through her—as they crest the hill and begin the slope down to the ocean again. He stops suddenly in his tracks and pulls his satchel off his shoulder.
“I knew there was a reason I bought this,” he mutters, rummaging around at the bottom. Triumphant, his hand emerges with something small and gleaming. “I got it in Shun Cho. Take it.”
Katara reaches out. Cool metal brushes her palm, rough with rust but still sharp along the crease of her thumb. A dagger. She doesn’t like to fight at close range—she can be clumsy; her isolated attempts at using Sokka’s sword had damaged her more than anything she was trying to hit. She’d much rather have ice daggers she can send flying across a room at a moment’s notice.
But she doesn’t have ice. She has this old chunk of metal.
Katara rubs her thumb across the glint at the hilt. Her skin comes away smeared with dirt; the bit of glass embedded into the dagger shines blue.
Against her will, she smiles.
“Thank you.” She reaches inside the cloak and slides it into her belt, where her water skins would normally fall. It’s the wrong shape entirely, but the weight is nearly the same.
The temperature isn’t falling, even though the sun set some time ago. It’s just as muggy and warm as it had been all day at sea. When Katara breathes, salt coalesces on her lips. The cloak is too warm, but she keeps it tucked around her shoulders, even though her tunic clings uncomfortably to the small of her back.
They don’t get back on the boat; instead, Zuko goes through his now-familiar ritual of gathering sticks and dry leaves into a pile at the edge of the low bluff. “You should go, um, change,” he says gruffly.
“Oh. Okay.” She finds a secluded spot where the grass grows up to her waist, sheltered by rock on two sides, before dropping the cloak to the ground and for the first time in a week pulling at the tie that keeps her tunic closed. It’s so dirty that she can barely tell it’s supposed to be blue. She hasn’t exactly had time to do laundry like she did when she was traveling with her friends; doing chores when there are only two people to be on guard is much more difficult, and she’d burn before she undresses in front of Zuko.
Now, though, she wriggles out of the tunic and leggings with a twinge of regret before turning to the new clothing. The breeches and sandals are simple, and she manages to fasten the gauzy sarong around her waist with only a bit of trouble, but the top is hopelessly complicated. It seems to tie in two separate places, and she has to pull at it and pick out the knots two or three times before it sits right over her chest. It seems smaller on her body than it looked in the store. Her stomach is bare, which hadn’t bothered her before, but before the only people seeing her on a daily basis were two twelve year olds and her brother.
It’s obvious why Fire Nation women dress like this, though. The fabric is silky and porous, not stifling like her tunic had been. She might not like it, but it has its benefits.
Zuko looks up when she steps into the circle of firelight. He seems startled for a moment, because his jaw works for too long before he says “you look nice” in an oddly rough voice.
“Thanks.” She smooths her hands over the skirt at her hips.
“You, um—“ He looks like he’s blushing a little. “You still look like yourself, though,” he finishes, apologetic. “It might not be enough.”
“Well, there’s not much else I can do.”
“There’s your…” He trails off and gestures vaguely at her head.
She frowns and reaches up. “My wha—oh.”
“You could tie it up, I guess. But girls don’t really grow it that long here. Not peasant girls. Long hair is kind of a status thing. The only people who keep it that long are the royal entourage.”
“Like Ty Lee and Mai.”
“Yeah.” He coughs and looks intensely uncomfortable.
Honestly, Katara should have expected it, after everything else that she’s already had to give up tonight. Compared to her bending, her hair is only a small insult.
“Fine,” she says.
“Katara, you don’t have to—“
“No point pretending to be someone else if I only do it halfway,” she continues wryly. “Besides, it always gets in my face.”
Zuko stands up. His satchel clatters to the ground. “Uh, how do we want to do this?”
“How short does it have to be?”
“For a peasant?” He holds his hand to a point just above his collarbone.
Shorter than she’d expected. Shorter than she’d ever worn it before, even as a child. “I can’t cut it like that on my own,” she says, forcing herself to focus on the task at hand instead of the thought that Water Tribe women do not ever cut their hair above their shoulders. “You’ll have to do it.”
If Zuko had looked uncomfortable before, he looks downright mortified now.
An odd serenity overtakes her body as she walks to the edge of the bluff and kneels, facing out towards the endless expanse of water rolling away into a distant starry horizon. It sings to her, just like it always does, but Katara can’t allow herself to hear it. Water isn’t her element anymore. Not for the next few weeks, at least.
She feels Zuko come to stand behind her. He lifts her hair away from her back with one hand, and then she feels the cold press of his sword against her neck.
Suddenly, she wonders if she was wrong about all of this, wrong to trust him, and any second she will feel the bite of frost into her skin because all it will take is one slight movement and everything she’s worked for will be gone and the last thing she will see is the glint of Yue against the waves—
There is an audible swish, and a weight falls from her shoulders.
Katara reaches up to press a hand to her hair, Zuko’s blade singing as he slides it back into his belt. Her neck straightens automatically without the thick tresses pulling it down. Where she expects to feel coarse tangles, she instead finds a smooth fringe.
Her legs tremble as she stands. Zuko reaches out to steady her before she topples into the ocean. “It looks good,” he offers weakly.
She’s not sure she can say anything. Around her feet, brown locks lie like fallen birds.
“One more thing, though.” Katara’s about to ask what else she has to give when his hands return to her neck. He fiddles with a clasp, and the chains clink softly together until the necklace falls around her throat, the largest pearl settling at the hollow between her clavicles. “There.”
She resists the urge to fiddle with it. She surveys the scene one last time, feeling the wind against her exposed belly, her bare neck, cooling the copper at her throat, before turning her back on the moonlit water and following Zuko back to the fire.
-
She looks strange.
It’s not just her hair, or her clothes, or the lack of waterskins on her belt. It’s all of it together—the way she walks differently now, her head held infinitesimally higher without the excess hair, her shoulders coiled in defense and ready to reach for the dagger she’s strapped to her thigh under her skirt. Together, it works. He barely even recognizes her himself.
Zuko knows that he is an entirely different story. For the most part, he could pass for any peasant Fire youth—except for the scar. Anything he does to hide his identity will be immediately overruled the second someone recognizes that scar. They hadn’t before, in Ba Sing Se, but that was before he ran away from prison and became an international fugitive.
“Katara?” he asks softly. Her back stiffens before she glances over at him.
“Do you remember Ba Sing Se…”
“Well, I can’t exactly forget.”
“No, I mean what you said to me. About…” He waves his hand vaguely in front of the left half of his face. “About being able to heal it.”
“I can’t.” She turns away.
“I don’t mean just because I want you to! Well, I want it gone, of course, but also everyone will recognize me with it and—“
“I can’t, Zuko,” she repeats. “I used the spirit water on Aang when your sister nearly killed him.”
“Oh.”
He doesn’t try to bring it up again. Before they put the fire out, though, Katara leans over him and draws her dagger and hacks at his bangs until they fall to cover the entire left side of his face. It’s far from perfect. He can barely see out of one eye past the dark fringe, and he knows that when he moves too fast, it flutters and the mark is visible again.
“Just don’t give people enough time to recognize you,” Katara offers.
They don’t speak as they haul up the anchor and pull in the ropes mooring the boat to the beach, and when Katara takes her place at the stern, Zuko takes his cue. It’s hot below deck. Katara’s waves are rhythmic; they make a regular pattern of rocking and rolling, and once he gets used to the sensation of the ground no longer being stable again, he fades from the ocean into his dreams seamlessly.