Chapter Text
Katara stared at the masked figure.
The masked figure stared back.
Then the masked figure bolted, and even though Katara bent herself an ice ramp while it was taking the stairs, it was still gone by the time her feet touched the hard-packed snow of the street below.
As carefully as she looked, she couldn’t find its footprints in the shadows and the moonlight.
She’d heard the person speaking, though she’d been too far away for the words to make sense. But the voice had sounded... familiar.
There was a drainage hole, tucked down a little alleyway. She did not give it more than a glance.
---
The next day, Katara first heard the rumors of the dead prisoner. The young prisoner. The one a group of night guards just off their shift walked past her laughing about, like it was funny that someone who’d been fighting so hard to live would die by falling into an ice hole, cold and trapped and suffocating and—
And eaten by a leopard seal shark, and—
And she couldn’t help the dead.
Those guards had been laughing, because that wasn’t how they’d expected that particular prisoner to go. How did they expect their prisoners to go?
---
The prisoners with the best behavior, Chief Arnook’s council told her, with great magnanimity, could be adopted into the tribe once true winter came. Most were only support staff, after all: those in the full armor of soldiers had generally drowned.
(As Zuko’s crew were more inclined to dress code violations than the average soldier, they’d had the best survival rate in the fleet.)
Prisoners with good behavior could be adopted, eventually. The surly ones were in the spirits’ hands.
Katara did not immediately break into the camp to rally the remaining prisoners. Because she was more experienced now than she had been, back on that prison barge. Because she didn’t have an easy Appa escape route. Because she wasn’t a Water Tribe girl trying to free Earth Kingdom citizens; she wore the same face that these prisoners feared.
Because she had more than them to worry about.
Yagoda led her, smiling, past the patients in the main healing wards. Into the back, where advanced training classes were sometimes held.
The women inside weren’t smiling. Some of them were shifting nervously; some startled when the door opened; some were staring at her, with eyes she could have seen in a mirror.
“How are we getting out?” one such woman asked, before Katara could even start to convince them.
But of course, the first women Yagoda had gathered wouldn’t need convincing.
She took in a breath. Let it out. Rounded her shoulders, (and made sure the door was iced shut and sound-proofed behind them,) and spoke.
“Do you know what they’re building in the prison camp?”
---
Sirka and Sanna had wanted to learn to fight, just like her. Their instructors had let them, just as promised. Let them fight against the men their own ages—so as not to insult such strong women, by placing them in classes with mere children. Let them fight until they’d returned to the healing halls as patients rather than healers.
And when they and their fellow women had quietly dropped the lessons, one by one, that had been by their own choice. Women just didn’t have the drive for combat bending.
“They blamed us for it,” Sirka said. “When we brought it to the wives of the councilors, they blamed us for it. What had we been expecting, right?”
Sanna had lasted the longest. Her leg had needed to be reset twice to get it straight, but she’d kept the kink in her nose to remember them by.
“Probably a bad idea,” she said, rubbing a finger over it. “It tanked my dowery price a little too much.”
Katara had never noticed, before, how tight Northern betrothal necklaces were around their wearer’s throats.
Chagluak’s husband hadn’t even let her try the classes. That was a thing husbands could do, here. Not because he didn’t think she could learn, but because he was concerned for her. Because he’d known exactly how it would go for the rest.
“He wasn’t wrong,” Chagluak said, her hands balled into fists in her lap. “But that doesn’t make any of this right.”
Apayauq had wanted to see the world, but only married women and their husbands were being recruited to help repopulate the South. And the idea of marrying—of the expectations that would come with it—made her skin crawl.
“The single guys aren’t going to be pushing out babies, either, but that isn’t stopping them from going,” she said.
Women who wanted more. Women who wanted to choose. Women who wanted to choose no. The ones in this room were, as they say, only the tip of the iceberg.
Yagoda, personally, would just like to spend her remaining time with an old friend. There were plenty of women up north, ones she’d trained personally, who could take up the mantle of head healer while she pursued a harmless little antarctic retirement. And if she happened to found an entirely new school of healing while she was at it, well. There were better ways to be remembered by history than trying to slay the moon.
---
“Wait. Why don’t we just take that ship you came in on?” Sanna asked.
“It’s too small,” Katara said, and flushed a little as the women looked around at their own small group, then back to her. “I was hoping this would just be the start.”
“Me, too,” Chagluak said.
Murmurs of agreement.
“We could steal some of the fishing boats,” Sirka suggested.
“And leave the city to starve while they’re rebuilt?” asked Apayauq, whose family had helped build those boats for longer than this war had gone on, and who knew exactly how long it took to make them.
(She did not consider how much quicker that process might go, now that they had Earth Kingdom merchants to buy wood from, instead of waiting on the next humpback-clam hunt for the bones of a hull.)
The same went for the patrol ships: the other women didn’t want to cripple the North’s defenses. Not with the Fire Nation so unstable to their west, and the Earth Kingdom fracturing to their east. No matter how much Katara disagreed with how those ships were currently being used.
But the north had gone a hundred years without a steel fleet, and they could keep doing without.
“I know how our ships work,” Apayauq said. “But do any of you know how to sail those metal monstrosities?”
Katara took in a breath. Squared her shoulders. “The camp prisoners do.”
“You mean the soldiers,” Sanna said, deadpan.
And smugglers. And suspected criminals from her own literal prison transport. But that didn’t mean they deserved to be locked away for the rest of their—increasingly short—lives.
“That camp is wrong,” Katara said. “What they’re doing there is wrong. I want to take them with us.”
“...To the south?” Sirka asked.
“No,” she choked. “No, definitely not. But the nearest colony is only a week away by steam ship. We can leave them there. And on the way, they can teach us how to sail their ships.”
“Hmm,” said Sanna.
“And if they turn on us?” asked Apayauq.
“Then we’ll be surrounded by water. And I was already planning to teach every woman with us how to fight.”
That lit a fire in Apayauq’s eyes. “When can we start?”
“Right now,” said Katara, while she had them.
And in a classroom meant for waterbending training, if of a very different sort, Katara gave her first lesson to a very eager group of students. They didn’t learn as quickly as Aang, but they were significantly more focused.
Afterwards, while they chattered and bent the sweat off themselves and otherwise tried to look presentable before they left, Sanna approached her again.
“So we’ll get the prisoners out of there, and they’ll teach us,” she said. And paused, holding Katara’s gaze. “It’s a good deal. How are we going to tell them about it?”
---
Katara went to Arnook’s council chamber. Again. To ask, again, for permission to see the prisoners.
Because if she stopped asking, they were going to remember that she was a master waterbender. And their prison’s walls? Made of ice.
Katara was done asking Northern men for permission.
---
“Over there!” a guard shouted, as Katara hurriedly bent herself right back out. How had they noticed her so quickly—
“No, there!”
“It’s gone.”
“...It’s that kid,” said another. “I told you I saw him before, he’s haunting us—”
She let her forehead thump the ice in front of her, lightly. Contacting the prisoners. Was certainly going. Maybe she could—
A shadow leapt down from the unscalable ice wall and into the snow. Then it was running, and Katara was chasing after it, until—
Until it disappeared as thoroughly as any ghost. Katara stood panting near an open hole in the ice, where the shadow’s tracks abruptly ceased. A turtleseal arfed questioningly up at her.
...Katara waved a hand, bending away any trace of footprints before the guards could get out here to look for them.
Two sets of footprints. Hers, and the ghost’s.
---
The ghost was said to have twisted in death, its face now that of the snarling seal shark that had killed it, a classic symbol for vengeance in the stories the North told. It was said that Greenland leopard seal sharks needed to rest for weeks, buried on the beaches on which they were slain, so their restless spirits could be coaxed into returning to the waters. Any person who ate their meat while the spirit lingered would be struck down with illness.
...Katara squinted down at the stylized mask Yagoda had given her. It wasn’t easy to identify, for someone who’d grown up with entirely different carving traditions. But it did have fairly shark-seal-y teeth.
“Sorry,” she whispered to it, just in case there were any actual ghosts offended that she was imitating them.
The dead boy’s body was, presumably, inside one such shark. They wouldn’t be easing his spirit anytime soon.
---
Zuko’s mask was of a black fish with a white dot on its forehead. There’d been a white one with a black dot, too, but that would have been easier to see in the night.
The Ocean was extremely offended at the imitation. Yue was only mildly miffed at being passed over.
---
Zuko knew the ships weren’t ready. Knew there was nothing he could do to change that fact, not even as the nights got colder and colder. And even when they were, Zuko still didn’t know how they were going to get one out of dry dock. Not without a whole lot of firebending, or some random waterbender going oh you poor cold firebenders and deciding to help them.
“Stop!” whisper-shouted the person who kept running around in a mask. Which wasn’t something Zuko should be judging, but seriously, what was their excuse?
Zuko did not stop. Not even when the snow rose up to catch his running feet, which at least was better than them trying to trap him with ice or he might have broken an ankle. And his nose. He might have still broken his nose, between the ground and the hard mask on his face. He tried to bend it away, to heat the literal pile of snow until it melted, tried to remember the feeling of needing to survive because there were so many people (and a few seals) counting on him, but all he got was an even more pathetic palmful of sparks. The snow was far less intimidated by this than the leopard seal shark had been. So instead he kicked and kicked with his free leg, because even though his bending instructors had always discouraged it as plebeian, there was really a lot that just kicking things had done for Zuko in his life.
It wasn’t until he was back in the safety of the turtleseal tunnels that he realized: the person in the mask. Was a random waterbender.
---
The person in the mask was a firebender.
There were very few explanations for that.
---
“Wait,” Katara called, loudly as she dared, the next time she caught sight of a figure in the night.
And it actually paused, for once; just the barest of moments, just on the edge of running.
“Let me help you,” she said, taking the chance. “This isn’t my first prison breakout.”
---
It wasn’t Zuko’s first, either.
And if he never took chances he’d... Well. Probably he’d have a whole face, still. But he didn’t think he’d like seeing himself in the mirror any better.
Zuko took in a deep breath, and did something even more stupid than following turtle seals: he opened his mouth.
“Do you want to steal some coats with me?”
---
The shadow’s voice continued to be familiar. Really familiar. But as it would be frankly insane for Zuko to be here, Katara dismissed the thought.
“Yes,” she said.
Divorcing “Zuko” from “completely insane” was a rookie Zuko mistake.
---
Zuko had no such difficulties recognizing Katara.
---
They settled on a rooftop overlooking the city and, farther on, the edge of the camp’s wall. She’d thought about taking off her mask, but he definitely wasn’t taking off his. And also he might jump off the roof if she moved too quickly. Or if she popped her cork again, and really, what was with firebenders and being able to hear that? Still: she took some advice from Toph, and moved her hands very clearly off her waterskin, lacing them in her lap so she wouldn’t give this one a heart attack.
“It seems risky for just the two of us,” she said, evenly.
“I’ve done more with less,” he said, and she could practically hear his frown. “You’re a waterbending master, aren’t you?”
She had no idea why he would assume that a Northern woman was a master.
Except that he wasn’t a Northern man, so why wouldn’t he? And he was right.
Also, he was still talking. “We can’t let them blame the prisoners for this. If we just snuck in and gave the clothes out quietly, they would think someone stole them. If they think a spirit did it...”
Katara knew a thing or two, about pretending to be a spirit. This time wouldn’t even involve ecoterrorism.
She stood up, making sure her mask of sharky vengeance was in place. “We’ll scare them so hard, they won’t even think of taking them back.”
---
The morning shift of guards approached an eerily silent camp. Not being idiots, they stopped approaching, and came back with twice their numbers. The walls seemed intact. The sun was shining brightly. The wind was still. The moon, who seemed to be clinging to the sky for just a few extra moments by her crescent fingernail, was still strengthening their bending.
They bent open the gates.
Red. Red red red, and bodies hanging with that same red lurching from their mouths, and teeth, such horrible horrible teeth—
It took a long moment to realize that the bodies were making muffled mfph mfphs behind the red gags tied over their mouths. And to realize that the man-sized shark-seal teeth pinning them to walls and ground and just above the gate GAH were just. Extremely detailed, extremely sharp ice sculptures, glittering in the sunlight, set in unmoving maws around their victims.
...Probably unmoving maws.
There was a great sigh of relief when the first set was bent back into the ground, with no more effort than regular ice.
The red everywhere was clothing. The spare Fire Nation shirts and pants and coats that had been sitting in storage were now draped and ice-pinned all over the camp with the unsettling tautness of flayed skin. Particularly over the prisoners’ igloos.
“Hello? Is anyone out there?” a voice inside one of them called, with the distinct sound of someone who really, really wasn’t sure of the answer. Or entirely sure they wanted to know.
...No firebender could have done this.
When they opened the igloos up, the prisoners were also in possession of new clothing. Particularly coats. Most were untouched, though a few shivering people were starting to pull them on, now that their doors were open.
“There was a lot of screaming,” one man told them, with disconcerting honesty. “Then they started falling from the ceiling. There was a hole.”
“...Like a mouth?” one guard asked. An educated guess, given all the teeth.
The man turned hollow eyes on him. “Have you ever seen a person get their arm bitten off?” He turned back to the igloo. Stared. “It bleeds slower than you’d think.”
They did not ask further questions.
Crewman Teruko gave Kyo a fist bump behind the Northerner’s backs. Helmsman Kyo, annual Wanyi spirit tale champion two and a half years running, bumped lightly back.
The attacked guards were brought into the healing halls, and examined thoroughly.
“There is no sign of physical injury to be found,” Yagoda reported, quite honestly. Any such signs had generally been to the back of the head, and had been quickly erased with a healing hand. Not to give up the ruse—and for no other reason—she and a select group of her healers had done very little to clear up the concussions underneath. She wasn’t entirely certain how Katara had done this, but the fact the girl had slept until noon was fairly telling.
“And in your opinion, Healer Yagoda, this was...?”
“Oh yes,” the woman who’d helped birth most of them said, with a tight smile. “It was certainly a spirit.”
One didn’t get to be as old as Yagoda without learning to lie lie lie.
One coat remained pinned to the ground longer than most, over the exact spot in the ice a certain teenager had fallen through. The guards stood staring down at it, despite it being rather in the way of their prisoners’ work.
Their prisoners were not doing much work this morning. Just standing there, looking equally as uncertain about this windfall of clothing as the guards were.
“Do you think he’s still cold?” Helmsman Kyo asked. “Do you think that’s why he gave these to us?”
The guards did not take back the clothes.
---
Katara was called before Arnook’s council.
“What is the meaning of this?” one of them demanded, before the doors had even finished closing. But close, they did. And maybe she could take all of them, but she certainly couldn’t do it quietly, not without her mask buddy running around knocking people out in the shadows as she terrorized them from the front—
“Why,” Chief Arnook himself asked, “are we receiving a summons to peace talks, to be hosted by the Southern Tribe?”
...Oh.
“Because... that’s where they’ll be?” she answered.
The wrong answer, as it turned out.
“And how,” Chief Arnook asked, looking directly at Katara, “was your home village selected?”
Because it gave Iroh an excuse to help them begin rebuilding out of the royal coffers immediately, no arguing with his council required. Because of all the surviving nations, the Southern Tribes had been hit the hardest. Because her village was where the end of the war had started.
Those weren’t reasons that would interest the North.
“It would have been hard convincing the Earth Kingdom generals to attend a meeting in the Fire Nation,” Katara said. “And we couldn’t have guaranteed Iroh— Fire Lord Iroh’s safety in the Earth Kingdom. I guess we could have picked Kyoshi Island, but we didn’t think of it, and we didn’t have anyone from there to ask if they would be willing. The South just made the most sense.”
“So the Southern Tribe—” Arnook started.
Tribes, she didn’t correct him.
“—Is to be vastly overrepresented in the talk of reparations?”
If her people were overrepresented in the peace talks, that was only because so many of them had been killed.
“There’s no limit on how many representatives you can send,” she smiled, sweetly.
“As if such a backwater could even host a large party,” one of them scoffed.
“Excuse me?” she asked, less sweetly.
“Come now,” the same man said. “Water has always been one nation, and the North is where our culture still survives. Why else would you have needed to come to us for your training?”
She couldn’t argue about the training. But she could certainly argue about it being her culture. Maybe a hundred years ago the tribes had been closer, but—
...Was that why the North had closed itself off? Because it didn’t matter what happened to the South, as long as the Water Tribe survived?
“We should contact Pakku,” someone else was advising. “He’ll know more about what accommodations they can actually provide.”
Katara was dismissed. This was a broader statement than just this instance.
---
The Ocean nudged the waves. A little more. A little more. And suddenly, a turtle seal tunnel usually dry at low tide started to hear the lapping of waves, just as it also heard a certain face-stealing firebender’s footsteps—
In the Spirit Oasis, a white fish bumped into a black one in the midst of all their circling, thoroughly ruining the Ocean’s concentration. Yue wanted to see where this was going.
...The black fish bumped back. That had been the first time this new Tui had acknowledged it. On another plane of existence entirely, the water started rising around Yue’s viewing cloud. It came higher and higher, until it should have spilled over, but very wobblingly did not.
She blinked at it.
And patted a spot next to her. A glob of water rolled out of the rest, and blobbed down next to her to watch.
La did not understand what its other half found entertaining in this. But it would try.
...Maybe Yue could try, too.
She let the tides rise just a little bit. The blob next to her wiggled in watery delight.
(Fire Lord Prince Zuko had apologized to her. But until she got that shrine, she figured she was entitled to some gentle reminders.)
---
“...Why are you so wet?” Katara asked.
“I’m not,” the firebender huffed, drawing himself up. “I’m just... damp.”
“Damp,” she said.
“The tide came in fast. It must have been later than I’d thought.”
“Uh-huh,” she said, and pulled the remaining water out of his pants and boots, before he lost the feet inside. She gathered up the water in a little blob between her hands, Which sent him stumbling back, and her efforts to reach out and steady him just made him flinch harder.
She tossed the water behind her. Held up her mittened hands.
“...Could you,” he asked, “not bend around my body? Or on it? Without permission?”
“Okay,” she said. And, “can we talk?”
So they did.
He was a prisoner. He was, in fact, the dead prisoner. Who wasn’t so dead, so she didn’t have to feel even a little bad about her mask.
He did not tell her his name.
“Are you just... helping us, to help?” he asked. Which was actually kind of nice, that he could be locked up in there, and still think a waterbender might help him with no ulterior motives.
It would have been nice if she could just say yes.
“I do want to help you. All of you. But,” she said, and her own mask hid her wince, “We need your help, too.”
“ ‘We’?”
So she told him. Without any more names or identifying information than he himself had given. Because at the end of the day, all he needed to know was that they were just as committed to getting out of here as his people were. They could make this work, together.
He nodded, slowly. And in the waxing light of Yue, Katara could see the glint of gold eyes through his mask. Which might have been important, if she hadn’t been realizing something else at the exact same moment.
“Wait. Are you living in the drainage tunnels?”
“Uh,” he said.
And bolted.
She did not overlook the storm drain, this time. But she didn’t follow him down, either. This time.
---
Zuko did not understand why there was water in this tunnel, which had always been dry, it was just there for extra canal drainage during storms—
He had no way of hearing Yue’s giggles. High above and somewhere entirely to the left of the physical plane, the Moon was playing tug-of-war with the Ocean over whether or not to drown him.
As this was their first game, the Ocean went easy on her. This time.
---
Katara had been getting invitations to spar since she’d arrived, mostly from her former classmates.
It wasn’t until one of them, fresh from picking himself up, asked if she’d like to come to dinner with his family that she realized they might not just be spars. But really, who wouldn’t want a girl who could kick their butt?
(Katara’s mental model of the typical teenage male brain consisted of: Sokka. End list.)
It was flattering, even if she didn’t really have the time or the interest.
It was flattering, until she realized their fathers were watching her, too.
Katara was the daughter of the Southern Chief. They were sizing her up for marriage, for connections, just like they would have with Princess Yue. It didn’t work that way in her tribe, they wouldn’t even have a chief standing above all other chiefs once their war fleet disbanded, but it hadn’t always worked that way in the North, either. There was a reason Arnook was a chief and not a king.
Maybe they didn’t care about how it worked or didn’t in her tribe. Maybe with enough Northerners moving South, they’d just overwrite her own tribe’s history, and make it matter. Make one of their sons into the chief of the entire South, using her as their princess.
Katara pulled on her mask that night, and felt relief that no one could look at her.
Her mask buddy found her. “I need your help,” he said.
“Yes.”
---
A prisoner had been injured. One of the sledges carrying steel sheets had tipped over—had partially cracked through that same place another boy was said to have died—and pinned the man. His leg had been broken, badly.
This was not usually a death sentence. But he wasn’t a bender, and he couldn’t work, and frankly, the guards didn’t like the guy. He was spooky.
(Helmsman Kyo, spirit tale champion two and a half years running, somewhat regretted his choices.)
“Huh,” her mask buddy said, as they walked towards the camp in the near-darkness. He wasn’t even trying to provide them a light; maybe the cold was affecting his bending.
“What?” Katara asked, maintaining the bubble around them. Another confused turtle seal swirled past on the outside, peering down at them.
“I thought this tunnel was longer.”
...Katara had questions.
---
Helmsman Kyo somewhat regretted his choices. But, like any good member of the former prince’s crew, he knew how to double down.
He hobbled his way to the sledge tracks, and just... stared. And stared. At the spot another prisoner had supposedly died.
“Am I going to be next?” he asked.
No one answered him. He seemed content with this. And with staring. And staring. And staring.
The guards side-eyed each other, but frankly, their economy was only just beginning to transition to arbitrary coinage and they were not being paid enough for this.
The prisoner stared up until the next sledge passed, and the ice cracked. And though the person pulling it was fast enough to jump clear of the spreading hole, the man with the broken leg certainly wasn’t.
He was swallowed into the ocean without so much as a scream.
The guards. Continued to be spooked.
---
“Wow,” Kyo said, as he rode piggy-chicken-back on her mask buddy, peering up at the glowing gulper eel jellies floating gently around them. “This, uh. Sure is a long tunnel.”
“It was fine,” her mask buddy snapped.
Katara. Continued to have questions.
---
“Arf. Arf arf.”
“You’re living with turtle seals?”
“Arf.”
---
So now they were hiding an injured Fire Nation soldier—
“I was a helmsman. So. I didn’t actually fight much?”
—An injured Fire Nation helmsman in the back of the healing ward. With her mask buddy awkwardly hovering at the edges, like the turtle seals would be preferable to social interaction. Katara was making up a bed for him. She snapped a blanket straight, then punch-fluffed a pillow, maintaining direct eye-to-mask-contact the whole time, because anytime she glanced away he was a step closer to the exit.
“So what’s it like out there?” Apayauq asked.
“Out where?” the helmsman asked.
Apayauq twirled her wrist, in sort of an all-encompassing gesture. “The world. Or even just the Fire Nation. Wherever you’ve been.”
The helmsman sat up a little straighter in his own bed. “I’ve been pretty much everywhere. My ship was, uh. On special assignment. What do you want to know?”
“Everything.” said Apayauq.
“Walk us through the route south from here,” Sanna said, more practically.
...Katara had been watching them. And not her mask buddy. A cold draft still moved the hangings by the door.
She rage-bent a blanket down the next storm drain she saw.
---
“Arf.”
Zuko was not jealous of the turtleseal with the extra-warm-looking fur blanket. He wasn’t.
---
One of the councilors wanted to speak with her about the preparations to go south. He walked with her, asking perfectly reasonable questions on potential climate differences and what flora and fauna he should avoid to not look like a fool by getting himself inconvenient rashes and/or mauled. Katara found herself unreasonably pleased to answer him, given that he was the only one who’d bothered asking. He segued into which animal hides and/or supplies would trade well, which she could also respect, because at least he was continuing to acknowledge that the South was different than the North.
And since he’d taken up so much of her time, would she like to join his family for dinner. He had a daughter around her age who he was thinking of bringing south with him.
She half suspected that he was going to surprise her with a son around her age, too, but he really only had the one child. And his wife had been experimenting with the newly imported Earth Kingdom spices in a way that was by turns delicious and atrocious, which made for more laughter than she’d had around a meal since she’d left Aang and the others behind.
His daughter was really curious about how the South treated its women, and his wife kept nudging him as Katara spoke of women on the elder’s council and all the hunting they’d had to do while the men were gone, and how she was going to make sure the bending lessons she brought home were taught to everyone equally.
“It sounds incredible,” said the daughter, whose name was Naviyuk. “Where would you recommend building?”
“Building?” Katara echoed.
“Our trading house,” the daughter said, excited. “Dad and I have been talking. I’m going to run our branch down South, while he handles the Northern end. We want to make sure to get set up someplace really good.”
The Northern capital had been built up so long ago that not even a rising family like theirs could secure a better place; they could bend their house as fancy as they liked, but hadn’t she noticed the long walk to their house from the palace? All the older families had chosen the best spots years ago, and passed them down to their children. But in a newly budding city, with the advice of the Chief’s daughter, they could be one of those older families.
And they could, was the thing. Because in the South, she’d never heard of there being so many people in one place that all the “good spots” were already taken, before anyone else got there. And land just... staying in the same family. Forever.
“That’s... not really how it works, in my tribe,” Katara said. “We have a village, but we aren’t there all year. Some of the herding tribes do it differently, but we travel around a lot. There wouldn’t be enough food if we stayed there all year. ”
“Well,” Naviyuk said, “a proper trading port would fix the food problem.”
“So would a proper fishing fleet,” her father reflected. “Should we invest...?”
“One life-changing project at a time, dad,” Naviyuk laughed, before turning back to Katara. “I’m really looking forward to working with you. The way you stood up to Master Pakku, how you just... just came in, and made them deal with you like an equal— You’ve been an inspiration to all of us. I can’t wait to go South.”
“Wow,” Katara said, “This is going to be... such a change. For you.”
The daughter beamed at her, radiant in her hopes of a future where she would be her own person, the equal of any man.
The equal of any Northern man, building up the South just how she’d been taught.
Katara smiled back, and tried not to feel sick.
---
Tragically, the winter illnesses had come early this year. Healer Yagoda had dedicated an entire hall—one of the larger ones—to isolating the patients, trying to curtail the spread. Only a select few healers were allowed access.
The Avatar’s waterbending master was, of course, on this list. Particularly as she was still going back to that Fire Nation cruiser to sleep, and no one was particularly fussed on whether she got those people sick.
It wasn’t even a lie, really; she was sure the Northern council would consider women who wanted to live their own lives a disease. And it was awfully contagious.
They’d cleared the beds from the center of the room. In the newly opened space, women—most of them young, but some certainly not—were practicing the moves she’d shown them. Ice cracked in the water basins they’d brought in, splintering and separating; a small scale test of what they’d need to pull off on a far grander scale, on the day they stole a ship.
“Hey,” Sanna said, with a touch to her sleeve. “Can we talk? It’s about my fiance.”
“Oh no,” Katara said, “don’t worry, we have enough beds, you can stop being a healer and start being a patient—”
“That’s not it,” the other woman interrupted. “Turns out he’s not really into this marriage, either. Or marriages in general. He’s talking about us laying low on the next merchant ship south, and trying to start over in the Earth Kingdom.”
“Oh,” Katara blinked. “Are you... going to?”
“Actually. I was wondering,” Sanna said, each sentence more reluctant than the last. Until they weren’t, and they came tumbling out of her mouth. “If I could let him in on this. He’s a good bender, and he’s really not interested in marrying. Or women. Or men. Or— And he could help train the others, when you can’t be here.”
“He’s...” A man. Which really didn’t need stating.
So was the helmsman sitting there with Apayauq, his broken leg stretched out in front of him, walking her and some of the other women through how to read naval charts.
So was her mask buddy, holed up as close to the door as he could get, drawing ship diagrams so she didn’t feel the urge to sneak back in and see them for herself.
“...Do you trust him?” Katara asked.
“Yeah,” Sanna breathed. “Yeah, I think I do. I’ll feel him out a little more. But I think he’d be wasted, disappearing into the Earth Kingdom.”
“I trust you,” Katara said, which was all they could do. Trust each other.
Something in Sanna’s shoulders relaxed. She smiled, a little ruefully. “And while we’re at it, my little sister’s a non-bender. Are we... allowed to invite those? I know you’re trying to rebuild the South, and obviously it’s benders you’re missing the most of—”
“Of course you can,” Katara said.
It wasn’t about men or women, or about learning combat bending. It was about...
About not wanting this.
Which. Was maybe something she needed to address, before she brought a whole ship of Northern-raised women (and fake fiancees, and non-bending little sisters) to the south.
Katara stood in the center of the room. Cleared her throat. “...Can I talk everyone?”
So she told them about her dinner with the councilor and his daughter.
And she told them about her fears of what Pakku and the other men who’d gone South, with the best of intentions, might have done with months of lead time.
“I know,” she said, “that you didn’t grow up in the South. Not even I grew up in the South, not the way it used to be—so much of what we did was different from the stories I heard, because we were trying so hard to hide from the raiders. I never saw the cliffs where we were supposed to welcome the salmon-seals, because the Fire Nation catapulted them. I never crossed to Whale Tail Island for trading, because the Fire Nation decided they owned it. But. But we still have the stories, while our elders are alive. And we don’t have to do everything like it used to be, some of that won’t make sense with how the world has changed, but— If you’re willing to listen to the stories, too. If you’re willing to learn from the people who are already there. If you’re willing to try to make something better, together—then when you come South, you’ll be a Southerner, too.”
She took in a breath. Let it out. “And if you’re not willing to listen. Then you’re just a Northerner, trying to make a colony in someone else’s home. You can come with us still, but please. Find somewhere else to settle. We could try to find you an island up north, or you could explore the Earth Kingdom, or you could even stay and help, until you figure out what you want to do. But I’m not bringing you with me to found a Northern colony; I’m bringing you with to rebuild the South.”
“I admit,” Apayauq said, “I have no clue what that really means. But I can try.”
That’s all Katara could ask for.
“Why don’t you tell us more, about the South.” Sanna prompted.
And Katara smiled. “The first thing you need to know, is it’s not just one South. It’s—it’s the Seal Fox Tribe, which my village is just one part of. We stay mostly to the coast...”
She told them the story of the cliffs the Fire Nation had destroyed: how they would light fires every fall to welcome the salmon-seals back to their home rivers, and celebrate their return for three days and nights before catching the first. How she’d met members of the Honey-Reindeer herding tribes in the same fields her own tribe went to collect the plants only found there; how they’d taught her that you should always ask a plant before harvesting it, and even then you should never collect the first of anything you found.
(And how the elders of both tribes had argued long into the night over whether certain plants should be harvested by pulling up the roots or only taking the leaves, and which resulted in thicker patches. Little Sokka had tried to lay out a Very Scientific research grid to test both theories, and he’d yell-reminded the harvesters for two years running that they could only pull roots from that patch and only cut leaves in this one, as he muttered over whether sunlight and relative rain on the slopes was affecting his data. The third year their mother had been killed before they could make the trip; they hadn’t been back since. She wondered if the sticks he’d dragged into place were still there, marking out his grid. She wondered how the plants were doing, with so few people to tend them at all.)
She told them she wasn’t a princess. That you couldn’t marry someone to become a chief, because when a chief stepped down it was the tribe that chose its new leader. That chiefs could be women, even though it was rare.
“I bet we could fix that,” Sanna said, with a smirk. “Chief Katara.”
...She liked that better than princess, at least.
---
Katara heard rumors of the ghost again. She crossed her arms, and tapped a foot, and glowered through her mask the next time she spotted her mask buddy.
“...What?” he asked, freezing, half-way onto their roof.
“You worried me. Take backup next time, okay?”
That was her. She was backup.
“...Oh.”
---
So maybe the guards were still a little twitchy. So maybe she should have waited a few more nights before sneaking in to check on the ships. But she knew they were being modified for waterbenders, and she needed to see how, so she could start training herself and the other women on how to work with them—
Her mask buddy was waiting for her the next night, his own arms crossed.
“What happened to bringing backup?” he asked.
“...Oh,” she said.
He was also backup-shaped, now that she looked.
---
“I’m starting to think this job is cursed,” one guard said.
“I swear, it wasn’t the dead kid, the one I saw had the face of the Ocean—”
“...Do you think its angry that we took those ships back from it?”
“...We do not need a new Spooky Guy.”
---
The women were leaving for the night, the ones of them that weren’t too sick. The rest were murmuring quietly as they settled in.
Her mask buddy was still here. He hadn’t crept off while she was focused on training. He had, in fact, fallen asleep on his ship diagrams.
She reached for his shoulder...
But he slept with turtle seals.
She draped a blanket over him, instead, as gently as she could. He shifted; she held her breath.
“I have enough blankets, Uncle,” he muttered, and pulled it closer, one hand gripping it tight.
His sleeve had shifted. She could see the skin underneath. The burn underneath, still healing, like he’d tried—and failed—to deflect a fire blast.
He was in a room full of healers, and he still had a burn. He knew she was a healer, and he still had one.
Katara aggressively piled blanket after blanket on top of him, until he was a big toasty pile of grumbles that kept pulling each one closer. And she didn’t try to sneak a peek under his mask, or heal him, or do anything else to break the trust in her she’d thought he had.
He was still gone by morning.
---
“I’d like to heal your burn,” she said, the next time they met.
His shoulders jerked.
“Before it scars,” she said, and for some reason he relaxed.
But he was still hesitating, and she didn’t know why.
---
She’d offered to heal a burn of his before. He hadn’t gotten to answer her, then.
She hadn’t given him a choice, the next time. Not with Iroh holding him down and—
And would she still be offering, if she knew who he was?
She’d been working with him for days. She did know who he was. Taking off the mask would just make her think she knew.
“Thank you,” he said, and offered out his arm. She took it, her hands on his bare skin still mitten-warm, and pulled out a stream of faintly glowing water from the waterskin at her hip. He watched, making sure he kept breathing, as that water seemed to wash the puckered skin away. Like healing really was that easy.
He still didn’t know what he would have answered her, back in that cave.
She moved her water upwards, scowling as she realized how far the burn stretched, pushing his sleeve up once and then again and finally tugging down the collar of his coat and shirt to finish up at his neck. He held still as her hand hovered just above his skin, just below his mask.
Something above them flickered. His head jerked up. There was something wispy, like clouds, but it had been a clear night a moment ago. He squinted in suspicion, and—
And the sky burst into vibrant color and movement, blues and greens, ribbons of light that rained from the sky but never touched the ground. The northern lights.
He’d never seen them before. His crew had—the southern ones, at least—but no one had wanted to wake their shouty prince over a few pretty lights. They’d never come the nights Zuko had stayed up, training late and keeping one eye on the sky. But he’d read about them. Entirely inadequate accounts.
He wouldn’t have been able to put this into words, either.
---
Her friend tilted his face up to the lights, and she didn’t need to see under the mask to know his eyes were wide. She didn’t need to see under his mask at all.
He didn’t notice as she finished healing. She tugged his coat back in place for him. Turned her own face up.
“Do the spirit lights visit the Fire Nation?” she asked.
“No.”
“I knew the poles were better,” she said.
He huffed next to her. But he never turned his eyes away.
They were as beautiful now as they had been back home. When she’d been a child, watching from her mother’s hood. They’d been beautiful a hundred years ago, before the war had even begun. They would be beautiful a hundred years from now, when her tribe was something she wouldn’t even recognize, but thriving all the same.
“So,” she said, “what’s our next move?”
“Food heist?” he offered.
“Food heist,” she nodded.
They were going to pull this off. Together.
This was a broader statement than just this instance.
---
Meanwhile, a certain blob of salt water was casually hiding behind Yue. She squinted at it, then back at the aurora. It was very beautiful; as a spirit, she had a view of the lights she'd never before seen. It was so much... more. More colors, more all-surrounding, more... giving the distinct impression, somewhere in its waggling lines, of someone pointing two fingers at their own eyes and then back at her.
Agni's messages always had a noticeable lag time. For instance, on the day of a certain Agni Kai, the more observant sages had noted a brief dimming of their patron approximately sixteen minutes and forty seconds after a loss in firebending power would have actually been helpful. For a solar flare slapped across space, a few days' lag would be about right. The timing would, in fact, match up exactly with when a certain game of drown-the-ex-prince tug-of-war had begun.
(It was rather inconvenient, living in a different celestial timezone from one's sibling. ...Had Tui changed her hair?)