Chapter Text
Katara stepped foot in the village on a rainy day, with two Fire Nation soldiers and a legal officer. And her dad, and her brother. Hakoda set a hand on her shoulder, and Sokka shoulder-checked her and tried to smile, and they… went in.
They had the man’s home address, but it still took asking directions in the town. It was a small place, drained of its fighting-age citizens as much as every other small town they’d traveled through. In the Fire Nation, in the Earth Kingdom. It was doing much better than her village.
His home was up a path. His mother opened the door. She was old, older than Gran-Gran. Her face looked like it had outgrown smiling.
“We’re living on his pension,” she said, after she’d read the warrant.
“It won’t be affected, ma’am,” the legal officer assured her, and looked like she was going to say more words, to make the process of seeing one’s son arrested a less terrible thing—
“He’s out back, in his useless garden,” the old woman said, and closed the door in their faces.
Their group shared a mutual look. They went around the side of the house.
There was a little garden, well-weeded but wilting. There was a man, kneeling in front of it. This wasn’t how she’d imagined him kneeling.
“Can I help you?” he asked. His knees cracked when he stood. He rubbed at the small of his back.
“Yon Rha?” the legal officer asked, stepping forward. “Formerly of the Southern Raiders?”
“Yes?” the man asked.
“You’re under arrest, for crimes in contradiction to the honorable conduct of war.”
“There must be some mistake; I retired. Years ago, I retired.” He didn’t seem to understand, that the past could come looking for him.
“Do you remember me?” Katara asked, because she had to.
He didn’t.
* * *
Jun woke up hungover, in the cargo bay of a ship, with a Fire Prince. Her mouth tasted like riceballs. Her head, not to be confused with her conscience, felt like regret. She rolled over just enough to check that she’d made every mistake Drunk Jun remembered making.
The Fire Prince—Fire Lord? Fire Lord’s nephew? Not even sober Jun was up to comprehending Fire Nation royal politics. The Fire Prince was cuffed to the side of Nyla’s pen, because of course drunk-her thought that was a good idea.
“Good morning,” he said, which was pretty calm for a guy with a sleeping shirshu drooling on his shoulder.
“One of those,” she rasped.
Well, apparently she was doing this. What had she even said to get them on this ship?
* * *
They took Yon Rha north along the prison transport’s usual route, because Katara hadn’t wanted any special treatment, which meant no special expedited passage back to the capital. Aang had come on Appa to pick up Sokka and her dad, because they were needed for helping to draft proposals for the upcoming peace summit. If something truly catastrophic happened, they could come back for her, too.
She wanted this. Time out on the ocean, time for it to feel real. She didn’t know if ‘it’ was the end of the war, that she was safe openly waterbending in front of Fire Nation soldiers; or that Yon Rha was finally being brought to justice, and the Fire Lord was the one making it possible. All of that, maybe.
They picked up criminals from a few islands too small to have their own long-term prisons—long-term prisons were a thing the Fire Nation had for all kinds of criminals, as if separating people from their communities would make them less likely to wrong people again when they were tossed back out.
Their ship crossed the ocean at its narrowest, and went up the colony side, too. There were less prisoners at those stops than their captain had expected. Still, Yon Rha had plenty of company down in the cells, most complaining just as loudly as he was. Petty thieves side-by-side with a murderer, and she couldn’t tell by looking which of them would kill a little girl’s mother.
They had one more stop; then they’d cross the ocean again, and head back to Caldera.
* * *
This was how Jun had gotten them on board, apparently. This conversation, more or less:
“Is that Prince Zuko?” asked the captain.
“Sure looks like him, doesn’t he?” said Drunk Jun.
One of the smugglers had raised their lantern a little higher. They’d all looked. Squinted, a little.
He didn’t. Look like a prince, that was. With his scruffy hair and too many bones showing under his skin, slung over her shoulder in his under robes, because Drunk Jun had stolen his very nice outer robe. Which she’d still been wearing when she’d woke up, and if she’d learned anything in her life it was to own her actions, no matter how many men’s clothes she ended up stealing while drunk. It had a dragon on the back: she looked great.
“Did you kidnap a street urchin?” one smuggler asked, like he had standards.
“Stole from someone he shouldn’t. I was going to take him in anyway, but I might just swing by the palace first, see if I can get some money off the guards there before his uncle comes out to ID him,” Drunk Jun said.
“Good luck,” the smuggler said, “but his scar’s on the wrong side. I just saw a play about—”
Princey headbutted the man. Not too hard, but still. Pretty impressive through the paralytic. Nyla gave him another little love tap, and he went back to being too-light deadweight.
“This is my prison?” he asked, when she dropped him on the cargo hold floor.
“The very best, Your Highness,” Drunk Jun said, and switched one of his cuffs over to the pen’s bars.
“...Right. I’m going to sleep,” he said, like prison and sleep went together.
He was out before she’d scrounged up a blanket for him. Drunk Jun found that weirdly endearing. Drunk Jun had questionable decision-making abilities, as previously established.
* * *
The prison transport docked at the Shinchiheisen colony, their last stop. It did not pick up a thief with a scar on the wrong side. It wouldn’t have, but no one but Jun needed to know that. Katara certainly didn’t. And no one on board got past the bowing port officials long enough to learn of anyone else worth noticing in that particular town.
From the deck, she could see a commotion on the beach. Some kind of search, but it was too far for her to make out.
Still, she sent a brief prayer to the Ocean spirit, that he might guide the one they’d lost. She sent another to Yue, just because.
* * *
La would have shared the joke with Tui, but he remembered, at the last moment, that she wasn’t his Tui.
Yue would have shared the joke with La, but she didn’t know the ocean could laugh.
* * *
The joke was this:
Nine hours into the smuggler’s voyage, the Northern Tribe attacked.
“We’re not Fire Nation,” the smuggler’s captain tried to wheedle. “I just put that up to fool them. Look, we’ve got our Earth Kingdom flag right here—”
“Sink it,” the waterbender in charge ordered. He was a man. All their attackers were men, which was making Jun’s skin crawl under her fine new outer robe.
“Hey,” she shouted, drawing herself up as tall as she could. Her whip was encased in ice somewhere to the stern, but her tongue was still sharp. “My shirshu’s still in there, do you have any idea how much those cost—”
Because in Jun’s experience, most people responded better to money than to do you know how long I’ve had her, do you understand how long it took to train her out of licking my face, do you know how warm she is to cuddle up with on the trail.
* * *
Shirshu could claw through steel. This proved extremely useful in the minutes that followed.
They were less well adapted to artic swimming.
“Hey,” her master was shouting, somewhere her nose was too numb to smell. “Hey, you turn this boat around right now, hey—”
* * *
Three hours later, a certain prisoner transport met a similar fate, albeit to a different scout ship.
Or would have, if waterbending hadn’t been met by waterbending.
“What are you doing?” Katara demanded. “Are you trying to restart the war?”
“These are Fire Nation waters,” the ship’s captain said. “You have no right—”
The Northern Tribe disputed that. But in light of past friendship, they agreed to capture Master Katara’s ship intact, pending her messages to the Avatar and Fire Lord for further negotiations.
* * *
Zuko and Katara arrived in Agna Qel’a, approximately four hours apart.