Chapter Text
☾
“The little waterbender… How nice of you to join me.” Even from the door frame of the dimly lit dungeon room, she could see the glistening red plasma oozing from strategic slashes across the half naked Dai Li agent's torso.
“It’s Katara." The candlelight simmered a soft across her skin, warming her in the cruelly cool dungeon cell beneath the palace. She's cautious, making no sudden moves as if approaching a wounded animal. “And you are?"
“I know who you are, waterbender,” the man spat, ignoring her inquiry. “Your friends were– persuasive after your disappearance last time you were here.”
“I can heal you–” Katara quietly gulped, eyeing the freshly exposed skin that is supposed to hide below nails on the tip of his fingers. “Some parts of you.” Keeping his face towards the floor, the man peered up through hooded eyes and scowled. With his hands bound in chains there was not much he could do and honestly, with her broken wrist that he so lovingly awarded her she could not effectively heal him. Karma's a bitch , she thought as she bent a glove onto her non-dominant hand and started working on a nasty bruise to his liver.
“I don’t know where they took him.” Despite his menacing stare, the man seems rather eager to share. No wonder Kiri was so confident that the information he provided was accurate– this little piggy just loved to squeal. “I’m a hired hand with a shared interest. That’s all.”
“And what would that be?” She asked, moving on from the bruise and making her way over to the slash across his chest.
“Freedom, for all.”
"The secret to true freedom welcomes all," Suki's voice rang like an alarm in the back of her mind.
“How is Zuko a pawn in this game?” Katara slowed her healing until her hand came to a complete stop, leaving the gash partially open.
“We’re all pawns in their eyes, we just returned the favor.”
“In whose eyes?”
“The Earth King, your father and his Northern counterpart, and all the other so-called ‘righteous’ leaders that clawed their way into power to further push their selfish agendas.”
“Zuko helped save the world and ended the war,” she seethed, flicking the healing water away from the man’s half-healed chest. “And you deem that an act of selfishness?”
“You forget he nearly killed his own sister to do so. Despite the Firelord’s acts of ‘kindness’, he cannot escape the treacherous blood coursing through his veins. He is and always will be the worst of them all.”
Keeling over, the former agent squeals and hunches over at the clench of her fist. Katara learned many things from the Fire Nation’s medical scrolls, including a passage about fluid in the inner ears. She didn’t need a full moon to find the miniscule pond within the canal and make him suffer.
She only stopped after the man dizzily sways and throws up into his lap. Gripping his hair, Katara lifted his head, forced him to look into her eyes, and snarled, “tell me everything you know about the playhouse.”
Mistakes are costly in this situation and Katara somehow made the biggest one of all. She’s angry with herself more than anything. Angry that she was too distracted by her aching heart to notice the signs earlier; the unusually large bag slung over Xai’s shoulder, her blatant refusal to help, the way she used Katara’s name so confidently without any proper introductions. It was embarrassing that she missed the clear look of deceit behind Xai’s inquisitive gaze. How could she let herself be so easily distracted by the phantom limerence of him. Her denial of Zuko's abduction only lead her down a path of delusion. Reality was: he is gone and somehow this damned playhouse was a part of it.
How his mother played into the picture- she had no clue. Katara knew next to nothing about the woman, only the small hints that Zuko had shared with her. After reawakening the memory from his subconscious Katara does have a clue of what Ursa's voice sounds like, but nearly a decade had passed since she sung Zuko's name from the turtle duck pond. So much could have changed since then... Her best hope is that Xai ditched her and left her somewhere in the city. Then they could at least find her and gather everything she knew about the so-called Lotus member. If Ursa was in on Zuko's disappearance- well, she wouldn't even know where to begin with that thought. Best not to dwell...
Splitting the group was, once again, their only option. Aang and Ty Lee, being the members of the group that easily gained the trust of others, were sent to talk to the locals and see what information they could dig up about Xai and possibly search for Ursa. Mai insisted on investigating the hut, eager to search for clues of Ursa’s existence and after a disapproving glance from her boyfriend, Suki volunteered to join her. Sokka was quick to interrogate the members of the troupe, while Toph scanned the surroundings and Katara raided the dressing rooms in search of the promised information she acquired about a hidden doorway behind a rack of clothing.
“Here, Ursa is known as Noriko.” Sokka flipped through his makeshift notepad as she approached, unsuccessful from her endeavor. Annoyed by his appearance, Katara wanted to rip that stupid detective hat that he somehow kept from Kyoshi Island off her brother’s head and berate him for making a mockery of Zuko’s disappearance, but she knows that’s not how he intends it. He’s just trying to lighten the mood. The urge subsides and he continues, “most of them are simply hired hands and if they do know anything, they are well paid off.”
“Doesn’t matter, I bet they're useless anyways.”
“Rude,” Sokka mutters beneath his breath, which she quickly disregards.
“Have you asked about Xai’s office?”
“Office?”
Katara simply rolled her eyes, “c’mon.”
As they step into the open of the wooden stage they find Toph standing in the dirt-clad pit where the audience normally gathers, carefully sliding the soles of her feet through the ground. Regardless of her meticulous investigation she doesn’t seem to notice them until Sokka calls out to the earthbender. “Snoozles,” she questions, “is that you?”
“Yup, just me and Katara. Find anything good?”
“Maybe, but this place is too woody for me to get a good sense of anything.” Toph walks to the musician’s pit and slams her foot into the earth, “I can feel a disturbance deep beneath the ground over here. Can’t seem to get a clear read on it or tell where it’s coming from.”
Katara hardly pays attention to the conversation, immediately fixating on a randomly placed rack of clothes dazzling under the skylight to her left offstage. Walking over to the side wings and shoving an isolated costume rack aside, a sigh of relief escapes her. Finally, she found it. Calling her brother and Toph over, she opens the door that leads down a dark stair hallway.
“That’s not ominous at all,” Sokka says sarcastically as he approaches with the blind bender latched onto his arm.
“Let's go.” Before Katara can lead them down the passage, Sokka stops her. Her teeth grind in frustration at the familiar action.
“Wait a second,” he says with a squeeze, “we need backup.”
His plea quickly travels in one ear and out the other, this time leaving her with little remorse from the protective sentiment. She’s already had enough of that these past couple days. “What we need is time,” Katara fumes and rips her arm away. “They could be hours away from the city already. We have to go. Now.”
She is surprised at Sokka’s willingness to follow her down the winding staircase, though it could be the tugging grip of Toph who seemed to also sense the urgency of the situation. The light from above dims and nearly encases them in full darkness as they reach the bottom of the staircase. Lacking a light source, Katara lets her eyes adjust just to the point where she can hardly make out the open room and scattered objects in front of her. Frames and unlit candles on the walls, a chair, and a lonesome desk sitting in the corner. Katara feels her way over to the workspace, shuffling through its drawers.
“Katara,” Sokka hisses through a whisper, “what are you doing?”
“Relax,” she says with a sigh of relief after clasping onto the familiar spark rocks and venturing to the hanging torch on the wall. “Just trying to help us see a bit better.” With a spark the torch lights, illuminating the room.
“If you want us all to see better might I suggest a shovel or a large hammer,” Toph teases, tapping onto the wooden floor. “Then we can really get to work down here.”
“I don’t think that’ll be necessary Toph.” Sokka hands Toph off to Katara and crosses the room to a bookcase that had been impossible for Katara to clearly make out in the dark before. “Look here,” he points at a navy book that is much more worn than any other book on the shelf. Without warning, he wedges the book out from its resting place and the entire shelf thuds onto the floor with a groan. “I think we found the entrance to your underground disturbance,” Sokka says after creaking the hidden door open to reveal a dirty passage buried beside the office. The tunnel lights as Katara steps into the carved hole with Toph at her side.
“Woah, woah– wait, hold on,” Sokka barks. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“They clearly went this way,” Katara huffs, annoyed by her brother's insistent pestering. “I’m seeing where it leads.”
“Not without any backup– you don’t know if they’re still down there.”
“They already have a head start on us, we have to act fast.”
“Katara, you’re injured, you can’t fight like th–”
“I can fight!” Katara’s heart drops as the reality of the tunnel’s length becomes clear as her echoing holler eerily reverbs. “I can and will always fight, especially when you or Toph or any of our friends are in danger.” She pauses, allowing her echo to dwindle, then pleads, “you said three days.”
“She’s right,” Toph interjects, “this tunnel goes a long way… They could already be miles out of the city. We need to act now.”
“Stay behind and get back up if you’re really that concerned.” Katara states, “I’m going.”
As they walk down the path there's a silent pause from the entrance, until suddenly the pitter patter of footsteps run up to follow close behind. “I’m not leaving you.”
They pace hurriedly down the path for a while before Toph perks up, “I see it. There’s a clearing up ahead.” Her comment was made long before they reached an end, but eventually the tunnel takes an upward incline and hints of daylight peeked through. Just before they reach its end Toph slams her palm against the wall. “There’s someone waiting above the cave,” she whispers.
Sokka slips his boomerang out from its case. “Are you certain it’s only one?”
Toph nods, “no one else in the immediate vicinity. We can take ‘em.”
“Let’s not underestimate them.” Katara hurriedly glances around, “Toph, can you get to them from here and knock them down to our level?”
“Easy enough,” the bender says, encasing herself in rock. “Everyone ready?” Katara extinguishes the flame and they both nod at the muffled voice.
The rocky glove counts down from three and the teen leaps, crumbling into the ceiling. Katara and Sokka dash out of the cave and glance above ready to fight the falling figure, but it doesn’t come. Instead a flurry of quakes and flashes of flame flicker above their heads. Sokka glances at her worriedly and runs to the cliff edge to climb while Katara bends out a water bridge. As she sprints up, Sokka is suddenly whipped from the rocky outcropping with a gust of wind and the small boy from the raid flies with a similar staff to Aang’s from above and smashes into her bridge, effectively shattering it into pieces.
Is he…
Katara runs to Sokka who lays on the floor, clutching at his bad knee. The kid, still disguised in black cloth, stalks towards them and Katara summons the shards to surround his form. The child jumps, just about as high as Aang flew when they first met him. As that happens, the firebender leaps from above clutching onto Toph’s windpipe and the small figure bends a pocket of air to soften the blow under his feet and purposefully neglects Toph’s head, allowing the firebender to slam Toph into the floor.
Disappointed by the lack of water in the desert landscape, Katara can only make use of her pouch. She hardens the liquid and shoots daggers once again and Sokka tosses his boomerang from the floor. The airbender conjures a gust of wind that sends her brother’s boomerang in the opposite way and her own attack catapults back at her and Sokka. Quickly jumping in front of her brother, Katara takes a defensive stance, redirecting the blades. Before she can take the offense, a body is flung towards her. Toph’s unconscious body to be exact. She leaps towards her friend and her body slams to the ground beneath the earthbender, softening the blow.
Right as she is about to stand the firebender whips a flame into the circulating barrier and suddenly, a fiery tornado is being hurdled in their direction. Katara shields them with what little water she has left to conjure, encasing them in a bubble. Beneath the heat, her watery barrier evaporates just as the tornado passes through. When she looks back to continue her attack, they’re gone.
“Was that what I think it was?!” Toph wakes, yelling hoarsely.
“Does this mean…?” Sokka breathes heavily.
“Aang’s not the last airbender…” Devoid of her element Katara helplessly stares off to the horizon surrounded by her bloodied friends in search for any remaining signs of the deadly pair.
☀︎
“Dad?” Iroh squeaks to Zuko as they trudge through the wintry forest, hauling their fresh kill of an Arctic deer back to the village. “How come we can hunt deer and wolves, but not foxes?”
It’s the exact question Zuko asked Sokka on his first hunt when they first moved to the South Pole. Back when Iroh was merely a bundle of blankets and still strapped to his mother’s back at the hospital while she tended to her patients. “They’re useless,” Sokka stated plainly with that vague nonchalance that Zuko noticed the warrior only used when he wanted to sway people from dropping the subject. Then, Zuko accepted the answer and waited till they returned from their hunt to ask his wife.
“There’s lots of reasons buddy.” Zuko explains to his teenage son the same way she had all those years ago. “They hunt rodents, which keeps the amount of stolen foods and diseases down in the village. They’re meat is hardly enough to feed our family– much less the entire village, and their fur is too thin and not large enough to make functional pelts. Compared to wolves, they’re peaceful with humans and don’t attack unless provoked. Remember what I taught you about unnecessary kills?”
Iroh hums in acceptance beside him, but Zuko can feel the kid roll his eyes with the same sass that plagued his own adolescence. “All life is sacred,” Iroh quotes his father with a murmur, “and any kill that isn't useful for the betterment of the tribe counts as murder.”
Iroh is the perfect blend of their two families, physically and personality-wise. His long brown wavy hair is exactly like Katara’s, grown out in honor of his Fire Nation heritage and neatly braided down the length of his spine. The teen’s eyes are the same as Sokka’s in shape and in color. He remembers the first time his wife told him how Iroh and her brother shared her mother’s gaze; playful and cheerful, yet unyielding. Zuko often catches his wife smiling wistfully when looking into them. He believed her judgment, but in all honesty he never quite saw how they were any different from her own unrelenting oceanic orbs.
Apart from their son’s hair and eyes, Iroh looked almost exactly like Zuko. Nearly a perfect replica. Both of them had to be careful with being in the sun too long without any protective balm, otherwise their pale skin would burn under the unrelenting sun that reflected off of the snow’s surface. Iroh was nearly as tall as him now, matching Zuko’s tall and lean frame that Sokka, who’s chest and arms had grown wider than Chief Hakoda’s, but somehow stands at a height that that often prevented the warrior from reaching the top cabinets comfortably, teases him about. (He would always toss back a quip about Sokka’s lack of growth, both physically and mentally.)
Anyone could tell that Iroh was his son at first glance, apart from the distinctive water tribe features that mimicked Katara and Sokka’s. But personality-wise Iroh was most similar to Azula. That scared the shit out of Zuko.
He had first noticed Iroh’s tendency for violent acts when he was a toddler; purposefully knocking over pots in rebellion at formal events, throwing over exaggerated tantrums when he didn’t get his way, even bringing home small creatures that he had brutally dissected for the sake of experimentation. The actions were miniscule and insignificant in comparison to his sister’s, but were still very much there. Katara always tried to ease his worries with appeasing remarks of how Sokka was the same way as a kid. Zuko was never quite convinced. He did everything he could to raise Iroh differently than Ozai raised Azula which was simple enough, but Iroh never fully retained the teachings that came from the person the boy was named after.
The night after Iroh bore his first blue flame, Zuko sobbed.
He did his best to try and act excited for his son, remembering all the times Ozai had disregarded his achievements out of comparison to his sister’s, but after an entire day of anxiously pretending Zuko could not keep in the burden of his worst fear coming into fruition. So once they returned to their hut and Katara had retreated with their son to put him down for bed with her worried eyes trained on Zuko, he retreated to their room and cried. It wasn’t long before his wife joined him in bed, pressing her chest to his back and enveloping her arms around him. He was quick to fling himself around her familiar frame and bury his crying eyes into the crux of her neck as silent tears stained the fabric of her wool nightshirt.
“He is not her.”
“What if he turns out to be?”
“He won’t.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“He has us. He has you.”
Though her words comforted him that night and Zuko did all he could to put his faith in the boy, he wasn’t quite convinced that he’d ever be any help to his son. Besides, he was useless to Azula’s condition. What made this any different?
Zuko sighs. “One day,” he says, “I hope you’ll carry my lessons with more enthusiasm.”
Iroh scoffs and hoists the rope over his shoulder with an angered conviction as they slosh through the freshly powdered snow.
After a while the sun begins to disappear along the horizon and Zuko signals for them to stop. “Let’s camp here for the night,” he says with a sling of the carcass onto the ground. “We should be able to make it home tomorrow if we leave at daybreak.”
“I thought the plan was to get home tonight,” Iroh whines. “Mom will be worried.”
“The sun has gone down and there’s no way we’re finishing this journey while lugging a buck this big. It’s not safe.”
“I’m not sleeping in the snow again,” Iroh retaliates. “I want to go home and sleep in my bed.”
“So do I son, but you know how dangerous it is.”
“We’re firebenders,” that menacing blue flame dances between Iroh’s fingertips with the fluid puppetry that Zuko taught him and says, “no one will try to mess with us.”
“People are not what we have to worry about,” Zuko groans, “you know this.”
“You are a coward.”
“And you are a fool.” Zuko sighs, immediately wincing at the degrading phrase Ozai had said to him years ago. Before he has the chance to apologize Iroh turns his back and walks off. “Where are you going?” He calls out, ready to rush after the boy and into the wooded forest.
“Relax,” Iroh says with that same nonchalance of his Uncle’s. “You said we’re camping. I’ll find dry wood for a fire.” Without turning around, his boy disappears into the trees.
Leaving the teen to cool off, Zuko sits resting against the tree bark. He stares at the dead creature sitting in front of him. The hole from the arrow Iroh had shot him with is now plugged with frozen blood and a trail of dried blood drips down its fur. They had performed the necessary rites and thanked the gods for providing, yet something still unsettles Zuko about the creature. Then he realizes: its eyes are still open. He could have sworn he saw Iroh close them while muttering a prayer to Tui and La after killing the magnificent beast.
Crawling to the creature, Zuko rests its limp head on his lap once more and softly speaks the divine words that Sokka taught him on his first hunt. As he finishes, Zuko lightly drags his fingers over each eyelid and shuts them one by one before marking the symbol granted to him during his coronation into the Southern Water Tribe between its eyes.
Suddenly, a trill of curious chirps erupts from Zuko’s former spot against the tree and he jumps to his feet, whipping out the bone knife from his holster.
A red foxantelope sits, staring back at him with wide eyes. It’s shocking for a multitude of reasons, the most prominent one being that red foxes do not exist in icy landscapes. In fact, Zuko immediately recognizes the creature as one from his home in the Fire Nation. He had never seen one alive, but they were a sought after commodity that was often used for expensive gifts from rich noblemen wishing to decorate their wives with fur scarves to show off their status. Regulating hunts to protect the foxantelopes’ untimely extinction was another law Zuko wished to write into law as Firelord.
“Firelord Zuko,” an unfamiliar disembodied voice rings in his head.
The epiphany slams into him. This is not who he is. Something is wrong, this is not where he should be. Zuko is not meant to be in the South Pole. He is not a father and Katara is not his wife. Where is he? Is this a dream? If so, why doesn’t he wake up?
Why can’t I wake up?
The foxantelope barks once, then turns and runs towards the same direction Iroh went. Zuko sprints, running after the fox, weaving through the trees with a flurry of twists and turns until it stops. It stops nowhere in particular. Iroh is nowhere to be found and there is nothing special or significant about the trees that stand at attention around him. Unsure of how to proceed, Zuko squats and submits to the animal, holding out his hand. The fox stays still and glances behind it.
That’s when he noticed it. Only when crouched down low enough to be at eye-level with beady black eyes with strikingly blue iris can Zuko see the strange void between two trees as the snowy reality splits and flutters like the opening of a tent. Zuko completely disregards the foxantelope as he creeps beside and swipes the torn fabric of reality aside, until the void grows just large enough for him to crawl through.
Zuko doesn’t remember the rattling of the bouncing wood beneath his back.
“He’s waking up.” A forgotten voice orders from beside him, “give him another dose.”
A pinprick on the inside of his right forearm and his eyes open. Still practically closed from the drowsiness that overcomes him, but he can peer through his eyelashes just enough to gaze at the looming face above him.
“M– Mom?” He croaks.
“Hush now, Firelord Zuko.” The familiar visage soothes with an indistinguishable tone he had never heard from his mother before. “Sleep now.”
Zuko’s eyes unwillingly shut once more and his mind returns to its fantastical safe haven and buries the memory of his broken reality into the recesses of his brain.