Work Text:
Katara has known from the time she could coherently think that she has wanted two children. He knows this. But once they had gotten to two, her number had changed to three, somehow, and now they’re at five and Zuko can’t tell their baby pictures apart anymore.
“Katara,” he says, one morning, as Hiro is jumping up and down on his stomach. “I love our family.”
Katara makes a noise that he interprets to mean, ‘I may have a different idea but I can’t say it in front of the kids.’
“It is wonderful and perfect and complete.” This last word is little more than an exhale of air as Hiro lands on his stomach.
“Yes, it is quite nice, isn’t it.”
“I want another brother,” Hiro says from on top of Zuko. Zuko looks at the child on his stomach.
“I guess we’ll just have to let Uncle Aang adopt you, won’t we?”
This does not have the effect he wanted.
“Okay!” He says happily. “When can we leave?”
Beside him, Katara snorts.
Katara has wanted children since she had been one but he had a country just waiting for him to fail and a hundred years of war to make amends for and half a world that still thought he stole the Avatar’s girlfriend. They were children. Children can’t have children. Katara knew this, and she respected it. Plus it took a while before she could go outside without being booed at. So they waited. They waited to get married and they waited to have children. They waited until the world accepted the child on the throne and they waited until Aang married a girl from the Earth Kingdom and the world forgot about the waterbender who broke his heart.
The first time she tells him she’s pregnant they have been married for two and a half years. She tells him nonchalantly over dinner and then watches calmly as one of the staff dislodges a piece of food from the Fire Lord’s trachea.
“What?” He says, as Katara stares in interest at the piece of potato lying in the middle of the table. She doesn’t seem too concerned that her husband and, apparently, father of her child, had almost choked to death in front of her.
Staring in wonder at her still flat stomach, Zuko belatedly realizes that the child growing inside of her would be his heir, now.
“Pregnant,” she says, lifting a spoon filled with the special, non-spicy soup prepared solely for the Fire Lady. Zuko can tell from the slight shaking of her hand and the way that the soup is staying on the spoon against all laws of gravity that she is not nearly as calm and composed as she is trying to seem.
“You?” She gives him the Look. “Right. That’s a stupid question.” He swallows, debates taking another bite and thinks better of it. “Oh.”
“You don’t seem too happy.”
This, he knows, is a Test. If he’s learned anything about being with Katara, it’s that there are a lot of a lot of capital letters. Looks, Tests; the Sex is his favourite. There is sex and then there is Sex, and he can always tell the difference.
“I’m… I’m thrilled, Katara. Truly I am. I’m… I guess I’m just…” She raises an eyebrow, and he realizes in horror that now Katara is Pregnant. That means nine whole months of Looks and Tests. “This has never happened to me before,” he finishes lamely. Katara snorts.
“I hope not, or there is going to be some issues about the future of the nation.”
Zuko stares at the bowl in front of him and then a smile spreads across his face. “We’re having a baby.”
“I’m having a baby. You won’t have to deal with morning sickness for the next nine months.”
Zuko ignores this. He has learned that ignoring Katara usually ends very badly, but he can’t seem to remember why; he can’t seem to remember anything prior to the announcement that he was going to be a father.
“Holy shit,” he mutters. Then he leaps out of his seat and pulls Katara out of hers, lifting her off the ground as he kisses her.
“Be careful!” She laughs. “We have a child to take care of now.”
“I know. Soon I won’t be able to do this,” he says, lifting her again.
That, he reflects, as all of the liquid in the room covers him from head to toe, was probably a bad idea.
Katara wants a daughter named Kya. He knows this, and is fine with this, and he would be honoured to be the father to a girl named after Katara’s mother. So he assumes that in a few decades, the Fire Nation will be run by their eldest child, Kya.
This, it turns out, is wrong.
“But –”
“She’s going to be Fire Lord,” Katara says, hands roaming over her steadily growing belly. “She should have a Fire Nation name.”
Water Tribe healers are, he thinks, magical. He knows this because one of them placed their wrinkled hands on his wife’s belly and had proclaimed, a few minutes later, that they were having a girl. They had explained it to Katara, something about fluid, he thinks he heard the word fetus, but Zuko doesn’t try to understand because all he can think about it the tiny little person who is his daughter. He wants to throw up in happiness, which he doesn’t really understand, but he’ll go with it.
“But the Fire Nation needs to understand that we cannot remain as we were, that peace is more than a word. What better proof is that than a Fire Lord with a Water Tribe name?”
Katara just smiles. “Trust me. I just know. It’s a… feeling. She,” she pats her stomach, “is not Kya. She is someone else. I can feel it.”
Zuko doesn’t understand, but there’s no way to argue with Katara that involves winning, even when he does happen to win.
When Izumi is born the Fire Nation throws a two day party and Zuko definitely does not cry and anyone who says differently will be declared a traitor to the nation. One of his advisors, an old man still loyal to his father but too powerful to simply fire (Zuko is basically just waiting for him to die) tells him it is unprofessional for the Fire Lord to be in the room during the birth. Zuko, feeling an amount of power and freedom he isn’t used, tells him to shove it.
Katara breaks his hand and calls him so many names he isn’t sure whether to be offended or impressed. One of the nurses tries to take Izumi, presumably to clean her off and wrap her in a blanket, but Katara glares so fiercely that a cup of water falls over. With no regard to his personal safety Zuko takes Izumi out of her mother’s arms – “She’s my daughter too, Katara.” “You didn’t do nearly as much work” – and then kisses his sweaty wife on the top of her head.
“I love you,” he says. Katara glares up at him.
“Don’t start with me, I am not happy with you.”
“What did I do?”
“You go through labour for hours and then get back to me.”
“I would if I could.” He is lying. He knows this. Katara knows this. His newborn daughter probably knows it.
Katara punches him in the stomach.
It isn’t until the fourth pregnancy that Zuko’s initial reaction to the news is, “Again?”
There’s soup on his head again. They always seem to be having soup.
“What does that mean?” She asks. After three pregnancies Zuko has learned that they have moved far past capital letters. The looks Katara gives him when there is a person growing inside of her go beyond mere upper case.
“I –” The other day there had been a half-hearted attempt on his life; they happened occasionally. Zuko would rather have dinner with his attempted assassin than have this conversation with a pregnant Katara. “I just meant. Three’s nice. You always wanted three. I thought we were – three’s a nice number.”
Katara stares at him for a very long time. Zuko wonders whether the man is still imprisoned of if he’s been executed yet. He wonders briefly if they could switch places.
“I’ll be sure to tell our newborn,” she pats her stomach, “that you said so,” she says icily, before storming out of the room.
Izumi looks up from the book she’d been reading. “You’re in trouble.”
Zuko looks at the door Katara has just slammed behind her. “It’s that kind of keen observational skill that will make you a good leader,” he says absentmindedly. He looks at Karu, who is trying to steal Kya’s carrots despite the fact that not only are there more than enough for all of them, but Karu doesn’t even like carrots. “Looks like you’re getting a new brother or sister,” he tells his youngest. Later Katara will tell them all that she is having a boy, and he won’t argue. He doesn’t doubt that Katara is right about the gender. Katara is two for two so far.
Besides, he learned very quickly once they started dating that Katara is never wrong.
“How come I won’t be Fire Lord?” Karu didn’t talk for a very long time. Him and Katara had taken him to a multitude of healers who had all told them not to worry, he was just a late bloomer.
Now he won’t stop talking, and Zuko looks back on those times with fondness and the occasional wave of yearning.
“You weren’t born first.”
“Why not?”
He’s not sure what to say to this. There are a few levels to that question and he isn’t ready for any of them.
“Because Izumi was,” is all he says.
“But it’s Fire Lord,” Karu says. “Izumi is a girl.”
Zuko looks at Katara, who smiles at her son. “It doesn’t really mean Lord. It’s just a title. You don’t have to be a boy.”
Karu thinks about this. “Can I be first born?”
“It’s not really up for discussion,” Zuko says drily.
“But –”
“Karu,” Katara says. “Come here. Do you want to feel your brother kick?”
Sometimes he thinks Katara should be running the country. Sometimes he thinks Katara should be running every country.
Of their five children, four are benders. Izumi is a firebender, which he is secretly immensely relieved about. The Fire Nation wasn’t initially very pleased that he was marrying a Water Tribe women; he can’t imagine what would have happened if there was a waterbender on the throne. Kya, true to her name, is a waterbender, as are Naoko and Hiro. He and Izumi usually hide out during fights, whispering about those damn crazy waterbenders. A tiny part of him is a little upset that Izumi is the only firebender of his children, but then Katara is bombarded by three kids simultaneously begging her to show them this or that and he sits back and watches and thinks that maybe it isn’t so bad. Besides, he fell in love with a waterbender and uprooted her from her home; at least she was able to bring parts of the South Pole with her.
Karu is the only non-bender. When he is young he is upset about this, constantly, always feeling left out and less important, until Zuko has the brilliant idea to tell him he’s just like his Uncle Sokka. Karu loves Uncle Sokka, and Katara even manages to get Sokka to visit and teach Karu the “Art of the Boomerang,” as Sokka determinedly calls it. After that Karu tells anyone who will listen that he’s the only non-bender in a family of benders, and that made him more special than anyone.
Zuko thinks back to that day when Katara had told him she was pregnant with Izumi and tries to remember if he had slept well the night before. He can’t remember if it was his job or his children who were the cause, but he’s been tired for at least ten years and he would like someone to blame.
“I’ve been tired since you were born,” he tells Izumi. She raises an eyebrow and sets his sandwich on fire.
All of their children are Katara’s, he thinks, poking at what is now his toast. It’s like a bunch of mini Katara’s have invaded his life and there is no way to escape. Not even Izumi is his. Even the firebender takes after her mother.
He is entirely surrounded but he really doesn’t mind.
“Five is my favourite number,” he says one day at breakfast. They have been married for fifteen years; quiet is only a five letter word.
“I liked three,” Katara says. He looks at Karu and Hiro, the two youngest.
“D’you hear that? Your mother wants to send you back.”
Karu thinks about this. “Can we stay with Uncle Sokka?” Hiro, still a baby, spits.
“If I retire now do you think you could handle being Fire Lord?” He asks Izumi, only slightly desperately.
“I’m thirteen,” she says.
“Uncle Aang was only twelve when he saved the world,” Katara says.
“I’m not Uncle Aang,” Izumi points out.
“That,” Zuko concedes, “would be very weird.”
They are past I love you’ s. They say it to their children and their family and their friends, Zuko says it to pudding and Katara shouts it to the sky every time they get an authentic Water Tribe meal, but they don’t say it to each other anymore. The words aren’t big enough. They can’t encompass all they need to, can’t stretch over a war and five children (two wars, really).
He tells his children he loves them and then he collapses into bed, exhausted down to his very bones, and Katara will curl up next to him and all his worries will fall into the darkness. It doesn’t really matter that as soon as the sun comes up all of his problems come hurtling back. Sometimes she will crawl on top of him and undress him and they will have sex (sometimes Sex) with lips pressed together but sometimes she just stretches out next to him, her cold feet pressed against him, and words don’t hold enough meaning for what they are anymore. It is etched on their bones, written across their skin. Sometimes Zuko thinks about those days when he fought against them, when he hated them, all of them, especially that damn waterbender. (He still calls Katara that damn waterbender sometimes, but only when she can’t hear him). It feels like that was a completely different person, a completely different life, and he supposes it kind of was.
Katara has stopped complaining that he perpetually tastes like spice and he has stopped complaining that her body temperature is always cold. They don’t say I love you because it’s an unspoken message in every single word they say, even the angry ones. ‘Goodnight’ means I love you, ‘shut the fuck up I can’t believe I’ve put up with you for fifteen years’ means I love you, ‘what do you mean Izumi burned down her curtains again’ means I love you.
“It’s too hot in this country,” Katara whispers half-heartedly beside him. He smiles and kisses her forehead.
“I love you,” he says, just because.
“I know,” she replies. “Now shut up and go to sleep.”