Chapter Text
On the surface of things, Katara takes well to her new life in the Fire Nation. Of course, Zuko never expected anything less of her but still he marvels at how she finds her place so easily. Even he, with the role of Fire Lord and its rigid boundaries already set out for him to define himself against, did not find it so simple when he returned. But the element that her energy is bonded to is versatile. Water fits to wherever it flows. It can alter its forms to suit the environment, but fundamentally it does not change. She is the same. She always remains stubbornly Katara, and he finds symbols of her presence in the palace wherever he looks - drain covers pulled up in the courtyard for her to reach the water beneath, different utensils in the kitchens from where she likes to cook for herself on occasion, medical texts stacked high on the librarian’s desk ready for her to collect.
Before Zuko even knows it, she has become as integral to the place - to his world - as the floor tiles beneath his feet, the volcano walls around him or the sky above.
He and Katara rarely coincide with one another accidentally - they are both far too busy for chance encounters - but he comes to miss her when she’s not there, and she’s not there quite frequently. Katara works as hard as she excels at it. The political relationship between the Fire Nation and the Southern Water Tribe is revolutionised within a few short months, but she pursues projects not just of the traditional ambassadorial sort. She spends her down time healing at the hospitals and clinics, pushing for the building of new ones, tackling issues of citizen welfare, and championing the smaller causes of people she meets on her travels.
As he’d predicted she might, Katara makes some enemies within the palace. They are mostly among the other diplomats, disgruntled by the rewards her proximity to him reaps for the Southern Water Tribe. Some of his staff take a dislike to her, too, either reluctant to facilitate their nations’ ever-closer alliance, outraged by her boldness in involving herself in the Fire Nation’s affairs, or both. The people as a whole, however, whom she walks and works among as much as - if not more than - the political elites, are quick to warm to her.
The Southern Water Tribe’s new ambassador is, without doubt, flourishing. When Zuko sees her at their fortnightly formal appointment, she’s always on top form. And yet when he sees her for their dinner each week, in her capacity as just Katara and his as just Zuko, he finds her wilting.
The first few times he sees it, though she avoids giving an explanation when he probes for one, he puts it down to a trying day - if there’s any feeling he can relate to, it would be that - but it soon becomes every week without fail. Zuko thinks he finally sees what Ty Lee sees when she preaches about the dimming of auras. It’s an intangible feeling of wrongness he senses, but it does show itself in corporeal symptoms. Katara’s brow is fixed in a plunge towards the bridge of her nose. Her smiles come far less frequently. Even when they do, it is obvious to him that they're put on falsely and they seem to drain her energy faster than a sprint. The curious, endless questions she’d usually ask him in their get-togethers disappear and her answers to his are short.
Most unsettling for Zuko, though, is the dullness in her eyes. Katara’s soul resides in her eyes, but the spark that lights up the ocean in her irises has fled.
Zuko doesn’t like confrontation, least of all on matters of nebulous emotion. He tries to fix it indirectly. On the day marking six months in her position, he curates a dinner of all her favourites to lift her spirits, though it ends up more like a banquet by the time he’s done with it - skewers of scallion and whale-walrus meat, grilled rice balls, crunchy vegetable spring rolls, sweet and salted sea prunes, ginger-glazed pork belly, seaweed noodles and arctic hen egg soup, stir-fried cabbage and seared tuna chunks, custard pudding spiced with cinnamon, various fruit flavours of mochi, and a jug of lemon iced tea with a sprig of mint.
And yet she is still the same, if not worse, with her head leaning into her hand on a propped up elbow, picking at her food dejectedly, and suddenly Zuko can stand her unhappiness no longer.
“What’s wrong, Katara?”
Katara startles at the abrupt intensity of the question, dropping her chopstick as her eyes snapping up to meet his.
“Sorry, I-, I don’t mean to pry.” Zuko hurriedly explains under the weight of her blank stare. “It’s just... well, I’ve noticed you’ve been out of sorts these past few weeks. What’s happened? Is there anything I can do?” A frown creases his brow when the discomfort on her face and her continuing silence leads him to another possibility. “Has someone been bothering you? I can-”
“Whoa, put down the pitchforks there, Fire Lord. Everything’s been going fine.” Katara finally intervenes with a smile. It’s weaker than its usual glow, but at least it’s genuine in sentiment. “I’ve just been feeling a little homesick, that’s all.”
“Oh. Oh, I’m sorry.” Blood rushes to his cheeks as shame takes hold, averting his eyes away from her. Now she’s said it, it seems so obvious. The people, the place, the ways of life mean everything to Katara and, after she and Aang had separated, she’d spent the last four years of her life helping to rebuild it from the ice up. Of course she misses it. “Do you want to take a leave of absence? It can be as long as you need. Or...” Zuko’s insides swirl as the other solution comes to mind. He wants her to stay, more than he thinks he’s ever wanted anything, but he refuses to be selfish. “Or I’ll release you from your post if you want to go home.”
“No, Zuko, you’re not getting ridding of me that easily. I’m not going anywhere.”
The relief he feels at that insistence almost distracts him from how she casually reaches across the table to rest her hand atop his - almost.
“I knew in my heart that I was ready to leave home. My dad and Sokka have everything in hand and with the Northern Tribe there to teach the new benders, it was time for me to find my own path. When Silla stepped down and you asked for me to replace him as Ambassador, it was the sign I’d been waiting for.” Katara sighs as Zuko tries and utterly fails to get his heart under control at the sensation of her skin against his. “And yet, I’m feeling like this. It doesn’t make sense.”
“They don’t, most of the time. Feelings, I mean. They’re weird. When I was banished, I hated being at sea more than anything, but when I became Fire Lord, I felt even more adrift. I dreamt a lot about being on that ship, and they weren’t nightmares like you’d expect. They were almost... peaceful. I never actually wanted to go back; I guess a part of me was just reaching out for what’s familiar.” Zuko finds his voice again rather suddenly, so fast he hears himself talking before his brain has decided what to say, but he’s hesitant in reciprocating the gesture she’d made. Rationality dictates that it’s not a big deal - Katara is touching his hand; what could be so wrong about him touching hers in the exact same way to illustrate his understanding? - but anxiety asserts that he’s crossing a line. When he finds the courage to lay his other palm over her hand covering his own and she smiles gratefully, he wonders with a shiver if his nerves scream because his emotions are growing stronger than just friendly empathy. “Are you sure there’s nothing I can do?”
She leans back in her chair as she appraises him for a moment. Katara has always had a way of looking at him like she’s scrutinising every single facet of him through the eyes. In the early days, it had scared him stiff, dreading what she might see in him. But as the years had gone by, as she’d taken her looks and remained in his life time and time again, he’s only curious to hear her verdict.
“Do you still dream about the ship?” she asks eventually, head tilted to the side.
“No, I don’t.” The motivation behind the sigh that Zuko releases is difficult to pin down, even for he himself. He finds solace in the fact that the end of his sleeping visits to those damp, dingy halls demonstrates how he has grown in his position, but being left with no escape can be an unsettling prospect.
Katara, on the other hand, seems solely comforted as she straightens up in her chair again and nods her head confidently. He can be thankful for that, at least.
“Then this will pass, too.” A burden seems to lift as the words escape her, the lightening of her worries visible in the serenity of her features. “Thank you, by the way. For doing all this.” She gestures over the spread of food between them. “It’s very sweet of you.” He blushes as red as the cabbage as she scans the selection on the table like a hungry predator, her relief apparently restoring her appetite. “I love seaweed noodles.”
Zuko smiles as he hands her the bowl. “I know.”
He asks her again when the meal is had and and they rise to go their separate ways, if there’s any way he might be able to help her settle. She says no - nothing more than his companionship, at least - but even when he crawls into his bed hours later, tries to switch off so he might get enough sleep for the day lying in wait at the dawn, he still can’t get it out of his head. He’s more than aware of what a horrible thing it is that she’s feeling. Time, and the patience to tough it out, had been the cure for him. The thought of Katara, however, spending so long waiting for contentment, after everything she has already endured in her life, pains him.
Zuko exhales, staring up into the canopy over his bed as his brain persists in keeping sleep at bay. It’s a nice sight, he thinks as he admires the embroidered dragons flying on the red silk, but not nearly as nice a sight as the stars above.
When his mind strays again to the waterbender in spite of his best efforts, maybe lying awake with her thoughts just like he is in a bed not so far away, the idea strikes almost immediately, so much so that his feet lag behind as he staggers over to his writing desk.
Ten days later, a hawk brings him a reply from the south.
Predictably, Sokka’s diagrams aren’t the greatest of guides to go on but, cobbled together with some old charts dug up from the library and the images scattered in his own memory, it’s enough to work with.
The design that Zuko and the head seamstress agree on is incredibly intricate. She warns him that it will be a long process and, even with all four of the palace’s expert wardrobe staff working on it, it takes many weeks for it to be completed. In a cruel twist of fate, when the finished piece is delivered to him, Katara is not in the palace to receive it. Gone to the villages beyond the volcano on a healing outreach, her aide tells him when he finds both her office and her quarters empty. Yumiko also said that the ambassador is not due to return until late that night; nonetheless, he’s unable to concentrate on anything else for the rest of the day. Half of the letters that he planned to spend his morning writing responses to go unanswered. In the string of meetings scheduled in the afternoon, he only barely manages to clamp down on the desire to fidget like a bored child. Zuko is so restless at dinner, looking out the window every two minutes even though he knows she won’t be back yet, that the attendant asks if he’s feeling unwell at the sight of his untouched food.
After hours of trying to force himself to work, interrupted by periodic pacing at the window, the guard stationed at his door knocks to inform him that Katara has returned.
It’s a struggle getting up onto the roof with his hands full but, after he launches the package as far as he can and uses the hook of a hanging basket to pull himself up before it slides down the tiles, he manages it without catastrophe. From there, it’s an easy jaunt to the suite belonging to the Southern Water Tribe ambassador. Sure enough when he drops down onto her balcony, Katara is there in her dimly-lit room, her back to him as she sits at her vanity table. Before his knuckles can even make contact with the glass pane of her balcony door, however, Katara spots him in her peripherals. She jumps up from the stool, the water from the skin at her hip forming a lethal ice dagger in each hand.
Anger is quick to replace her shock when he yanks down his hood to show his face, holding his free hand out defensively.
“Tui and La, Zuko!” she exclaims as loudly as she can without the guards detecting her voice as she hauls open the door to her not-intruder. “What’s so wrong about using the front door?”
“I can’t just openly come to your bedroom this late at night. Or any time, really. It’d be... improper. People would see me and get the wrong idea. That would spread like wildfire.” Zuko argues back as his lips lift into a smirk. “Far be it from me to corrupt you, Ambassador.”
She snorts incredulously. “And you think that sneaking onto my balcony in the dark is any better for my reputation?”
His smirk turns to a grin. “The difference is that no one will catch me doing that.”
Katara huffs, crossing her arms over her torso. She eyes him in a way not too dissimilar from a scolding parent but he can see the tinge of humour lurking beneath her exasperated veneer. Sure enough, she steps back to allow him to cross the threshold into her quarters. “What are you doing here?”
He closes the door behind him, turns back to face her and—
She looks beautiful.
Zuko blushes furiously - again, Agni help him, why can’t he control himself around her? - at the awareness he’s had that thought. He crosses his fingers in prayer that that she can’t see the scarlet colouring his face in the light of the lone gas lamp brightening the room. Though it’s never taken hold of him quite so emphatically before, it’s far from the first time he’s thought it. He’d thought she was pretty the very first time he’d seen her up close. Sixteen-year old Zuko was filled with rage and fixation, but not blind, and age had only flattered Katara. She is taller and elegant, more muscular from years of honing her bending. A more stable and varied diet, enabled by the opening of trade to the south after the war, has enhanced the flowing dips and curves of her figure. The last remnants of baby fat in her face have melted away, showing off her bold cheekbones and proud jaw. Her hair has grown out even longer, the loose brown waves tamed to a braid that swishes down to the small of her back.
It is still her eyes that steal the most attention, however. A blue so striking in its darkness, as deep and vibrant as the water she commands, as demonstrative of her kind soul as it is her power.
She is beautiful and by the spirits, he wants her badly.
But it’s not love, Zuko insists, just the uncontrollable chemical reactions of a single young man. It can’t be love, because even if it were, he has no right to it. Not with her. A relationship - or, at least, one with any future - would keep Katara trapped here with him, a water lily in a bed of fire. It would surely be like cutting a flower or caging an animal. The beauty of her, the spirit that lights her up and draws him in, would wither. He would sooner admire her from afar and always wonder what might have been than see her burn.
She is not meant for him.
But rationality fails to cure him of his attraction, nor the embarrassment burning his cheeks that comes with it.
“I-, I...” He stumbles as he tries to find the words the sight of her had stolen away. When he fails to recover his voice, he replaces it with a gesture instead, thrusting the gift into her hands roughly. Idiot, he berates himself with a wince as Katara becomes even more baffled. A few beats later, he regathers enough composure to explain belatedly: “I brought you something.”
Once the initial surprise at his presence subsides, Katara is seemingly unfazed by his awkwardness. Probably used it to by now, he thinks. She tilts her head with an intrigued smile as she examines the object curiously. “What is it?”
“I don’t know it. Guess you’ll have to open it.”
She doesn’t hesitate in following his suggestion, hurrying to sit on her travel chest. It’s not the first time they’ve exchanged tokens - he’d gifted her a selection of ribbons and headpieces for her hair when she’d first moved, and Katara had furnished his office with plants when she’d declared it too dull - but nothing quite so large as this. By the time Zuko has joined her perching on the edge of the case, she’s already eagerly pulled the string holding it all together loose. Even with the brown wax paper off, though, clarity is not so forthcoming.
“Is it a dress?” Katara answers her own question when the material keeps on coming as she lifts it higher, surely too much to be any type of garment. “No. A blanket?”
Before she can investigate further, Zuko kicks off his boots, takes the fabric into his hands and stands on her mattress. Katara rises, too, expecting that he’s holding it up for her to look at, but before she can catch a glimpse, he tosses it up over the bare wooden beams above her bed. A canopy, she realises as she watches him go about pulling it down towards the headboard; made of deep blue silk with embroidered silver waves trimming the edges and matching tassels on each corner, which he ties around the bedposts to secure it once it’s straightened out properly.
“Oh, Zuko, thank you.” Katara says as she wanders around the frame, admiring the waves. “It’s-”
Zuko cuts her off with a sharp shake of the head as he hops off of the bed. Setting down the lamp he retrieves on her nightstand, he gestures for her to go beneath the canopy.
“Close your eyes.”
His face is unreadable in its turmoil - somewhere between excitement and anxiety - but after a few failed attempts at figuring him out, she acquiesces to the request, wriggling to the middle of the mattress with her eyes firmly shut. She has not an inkling of what to expect but thankfully, he doesn’t leave her hanging for long.
“Open.”
Katara gasps.
There, high up above, is her night sky.
The stars are marked out with glittering rhinestones and the images of the constellations they make, described in stories told by her elders and left for her imagination to animate, are brought to life in white, silver and grey thread. The three tribesmen chasing their hounds as they surround the polar bear spirit Nanurjuk, the fourth man wandering down from the pursuit to retrieve his lost mitt. The red fox of Kaguyagat scampering in the sky above the hunt in search of mischief. The caribou of Tukturjuit, a vision of magnificence with his thick ruffled coat and towering antlers, the symbol of life itself for the tribe watching over. The lamp and oil skin of Pituaq and Uqsuutaattiaq, lighting up the dark for ancestral shooting stars to find the paths to their loved ones. More than just a pretty sight or handy markers to navigate the land by, these are the spirits of her people watching over. These are her - her history, her people, her home.
Katara does not notice the tears spilling from the corners of her eyes until she hears the panic in Zuko’s voice.
“Katara? Katara, hey. Don’t cry.” His eyes are wide with alarm when she looks to the side, fingers fumbling as he tries to undo the knot tying the canopy in place. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think this through. I can take it down-”
He halts in an instant when she reaches to grab his hand, falling short of her mark.
“No, Zuko, just...” Katara doesn’t know what to say. There are no words that could cover what she feels. “Come lie with me?”
She’s utterly oblivious. Zuko almost bursts out in despairing laughter when he realises it as he looks into her wonderfully inimitable eyes - the epitome of unassuming, just appealing for his company. She has no idea of the effect she’s having on him, of his heart thumping like a war drum as she holds onto his sleeve. If he’d worried that touching her hand was too close to the line, then lying on her bed beside her - no matter how pure the intentions - is definitely crossing it. But he can’t deny her anything and he blatantly ignores his last chance to back out as he reclines beside her.
“You like it?” he asks tentatively, hyperaware of her proximity - hip to hip - as his jangling nerves interrogate him as to what in Agni’s name he thinks he’s doing.
“I love it. It’s-” A hand covers her mouth as she gazes up, noticing new details with every inch she wanders. Language fails her; even the words she picks feel woefully inadequate. “It’s incredible. Unbelievable. How did you do it?”
“Sokka, mostly.” Zuko meshes his hands together atop his stomach to stifle the urge to hold hers. “He did some sketches of the constellations and summarised the stories for me. I matched them up with some astronomical charts in the library and the seamstress took it from there.”
Katara’s eyes find Tukturjuit once more. Caribou have pelts of mingling brown and dun. Naturally, that’s how most people would picture the constellation, since that’s all constellations truly are; just stars drawn together by humans applying their own realities in search of meaning. And yet, the bull sewn above her is as accurate as if it had manifested from her own memory, including the snow white coat - a quirk that her own imagination had always insisted on. Sokka would not have envisaged the caribou like this; he’d heard the story from their mom, from their dad, from Gran Gran, who never mentioned the colour of the pelt. The only person that would visualise Tukturjuit this way is someone who’d had her as their storyteller.
He remembered her story.
The question slips out before Katara has time to consider the effect it might have. “Why did you do this?”
Like always, she sends him reeling.
Because...
Because, because, because....
“Because I want you to be happy.” In outrageous defiance of his better judgement, Zuko turns to look at her. “Because you deserve to be happy.”
He’s never been so close to her before. He finds it like he imagines admiring a star, only for it to one day fall to the earth at his feet. It’s blinding, and yet he discovers things about her hidden by the distance they usually keep. The stubborn curls of wispy baby hair tucked behind her ear. The natural flick at the ends of her eyelashes. The faint scent of cocoa butter to smooth her hair and aloe vera to soften her working hands. The freckles scattered on her forehead, down the silhouette of her nose and along her cheekbones, brought to life by the Fire Nation sun.
It’s the truth. But not all of it.
He wants her to be happy because her happiness sustains him. It sets the world to rights somehow. Nothing is ever enough if it isn’t enough for Katara, too.
And suddenly the cosmic joke reaches its punchline. Zuko had spent his youth chasing after things he could not have - the Avatar, his honour, his father’s favour. Now he would spend his adulthood chasing after yet something else he couldn’t have - a woman far too good for him.
He’s in love with her.
He has been for a while, but he’s been adamantly dishonest. Honesty has been thrust upon him now. There’s no going back.
Oh.
Oh no.
The Fire Lord, in love with the chief’s daughter.
The firebender, in love with the waterbender.
Spirits, it sounds just like something out of his mother’s cringe-worthy romance novels and plays. Love essentially never goes right in those damned things.
Katara makes it so much worse - better, the large part of him that longs for her still in spite of the impossibility insists - when faces him, too. She is so near their noses almost brush, though a bare inch spares them from that predicament. Whether she heard the fervour behind his words or not, he only expects her to sweetly return the sentiment. Maybe she’d make the same not-so-subtle suggestion he gets from his advisers so frequently, from even his mother and uncle at times; that perhaps, at the grand old age of twenty-one, he should begin the search for a consort in earnest, that he should look towards siring the child that would give him security in the professional sense and domestic, too, if he’s lucky.
But he doesn’t want to hear that. Not from her. Not when he’s looked at the heir’s twin flames stowed away in the vault and imagined a different design for the old metal, melted down and twined with silver. Not when he’s been so bold as to wonder what that might look like on a child with dark curls and their mother’s eyes.
Thankfully, she doesn’t unwittingly inflict that injury on him.
“When I was a little girl, every new moon, we’d go out and stargaze. Dad would take all of our furs and blankets and make us our own fort up on the village wall, looking over the ocean. Mom would make us akutaq as a treat, if she had enough berries and dry meat left over from dinner.” Katara smiles wistfully as she stares up into the canopy. “Sokka would get bored, so Dad would tell him all these crazy stories to keep him entertained. Mom and I would watch those, though.”
Zuko follows her line of sight to the smaller crystals scattered amongst the larger stars with thread trailblazers. “Shooting stars?”
“We call them inik, though when I was that age they were called ulluriat anangit; that means star droppings, so that’s the name kids use.” she chuckles lightly. “In our culture, inik are caused by the souls of our forebears wanting to come down and visit us, so when we saw them, Mom would point them out and say it was her mom, her dad, her grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, old friends. Then she’d tell me about them till the next one fell. Over and over. We’d sit up there on the wall for hours, until I fell asleep, and she never ran out of people to talk about. There were just so many losses.”
Zuko’s anticipation of her grief makes him audacious enough to slide his arm around her shoulders but, though she accepts it gratefully, she doesn’t need it; the tranquillity on her face catches him completely off guard.
“But she never made it sad. She’d always say that they were just... somewhere else. Somewhere better. And I could tell she really believed that.” The explanation eventually comes as she leans her head onto his chest. “It’s a comfort now to think that she’s there with her ancestors in that nice place she imagined, that she touched their lives and they were remembered because of her. And Sokka and I can see her in a star fall whenever we need her. Those nights are still a good memory.”
Zuko is somehow in even more awe of her than he was before, of her ability to shine such light into the heaviest of darkness, but, hearing that story, there can be no doubt that it is an imparted gift. Katara is certainly her mother’s daughter.
“I wish I could have met her.”
“You will.” She looks up at him, her chin resting on his bicep. “The next inik you see. That’s my Mom.”
He quirks an eyebrow. It’s inconceivable to him - why would Kya waste a visit on him when it could be used on her children, on her husband? - but it’s not his place to outright disbelieve her. “How do you know?”
“Because you’re important to me.” Katara is completely assured in her simple answer. “She would have wanted to meet you, too.”
Zuko studies the falling stars stitched into the silk, added merely as a touch for the sake of accuracy without a clue that they would symbolise so much to her. There’s no ancestor of his that he especially wants to see signalling him from the sky - the majority of them are perfectly good reduced to ashes in the crypt, and he made his peace with being the Avatar’s descendant some time ago now - but he could love them for her, at least.
“I’d like to have that with my family one day.” He hears himself say, breaking the stretch of peaceful quiet. “Not that, specifically. That belongs to you, to your people, but I’d like to have just... real moments.” He sighs at the awareness of the empty spaces in his head, of the spaces for nostalgia filled instead with trauma. “Good memories.”
“You will.” she says without hesitation. “I’d like that, too. One day.”
But Katara finds that she’s not thinking about her own one day.
She’s thinking about his.
His one day is a pretty, respectable, powerful-but-not-too-powerful and, most importantly, fertile Fire Nation noblewoman, she assumes. That’s the kind of lady in the picture his advisers paint when they publicly badger him to settle down at every opportunity. The content of her character will likely depend on how much influence Zuko gets over the choice of his bride, though she can’t imagine a circumstance under which he’ll tolerate anyone truly abhorrent. Before she knows it, she’s thinking about another woman walking the halls on his arm, sitting in his trusted right hand in council meetings, dancing with him at parties, taking dinners with him, laying like she is now with her ear over his strong heart. She’s thinking of another woman holding his hand, wearing the counterpart to his crown in her hair, hearing his whispered dreams and fears and secrets, sharing the expanse of his bed but choosing to stay close, touching his scars, stealing kisses from his lips that are always so smooth despite how he gnaws at them, being the mother of the children he will adore so deeply and dearly.
It’s only when Zuko winces at the sound of her grinding teeth that she realises the depth of her anger at these imaginations.
She says another woman, as if there is a first woman in his life already. A first woman, her reaction suggests, that’s her.
She’s jealous of this perfect phantom Fire Lady that she is not.
You’re being ridiculous, the rational part of her berates incredulously, he’s not yours and you’re not his. With that, Katara endeavours to logic her way out of it - this emotional tangle. She has many acquaintances and allies in the Fire Nation, maybe even some friends, but Zuko remains her best companion here; attachment to him makes sense and even without that in mind, he’s her friend, perhaps her closest one no matter where she is. Of course, the thought of him in such a stiff and loveless arrangement, with an equally stiff and loveless woman, riles her. He deserves so much better than that.
And yet, a fragment of her insists, and yet...
Katara quashes it like a stray ember under her boot heel. She has to. She cannot allow it to catch the dry kindling of her heart, still searching for its home.
He is not meant for her.
Barely after moment after she considers the maybe this closeness she seeks from him is enabling this troublesome, uncontrollable, dangerous part of her, Zuko shifts his weight in a manner that indicates he wants to move away. Even as Katara reminds herself that it was almost her idea, the pang of disappointment as he rolls off the mattress and onto his feet is palpable.
“It’s getting late.” He glances out of the balcony doors as he pulls his boots back on, then over to her dirtied travel cloak abandoned on the armchair. “I’m sorry, you must be exhausted. I should go.”
The opposing voices in her head shout loudly but the conflict produces only silence from her. Taking it as agreement, he dips his chin in polite excusal and walks to the door.
“Wait!”
No sooner has Zuko turned his head over his shoulder to look back, there’s a small hand between his shoulder blades and a kiss pressed to his cheek - his good side where his nerves allow him to feel, thank the spirits. While Zuko’s mind immediately empties at the touch of her cool lips against his skin, in Katara’s, she lingers just a second too long for the pretence of friendly gratitude to be convincingly pulled off.
“Thank you.” she murmurs to him when she finally forces herself to back off.
“You’re welcome.” he murmurs in answer, the startle at her action clear in his eyes but not hindering the half smile that lifts the furthest corner of his mouth.
When her palm reluctantly slides off of his back, he goes out of the balcony door and hops up onto the parapet, as quick and sure-footed as an eel hound. Katara is no stranger to Zuko’s unnerving agility; nonetheless, she finds herself so transfixed by his grace on the narrow balustrade, walking with such perfect but effortless balance, that she almost misses the flickering light above.
“Zuko.” she calls before he can make his launch for the guttering. “Zuko, look.”
He follows the indication of her pointed finger out to the horizon. In spite of the glow of the city and the full moon polluting the dark, his eyes happen upon it immediately. The glimmering white star that seems to linger just long enough for him to spot it, before it soars across the sky and blinks away into nothingness.
Zuko lowers his crouch towards his heels more than slightly, unmistakably like he’s bending the knee. It’s a mark of respect she knows the Fire Lord is never meant to pay to anyone; Katara remembers the mortified gasps that had accompanied the first bow he’d ever made to her, deep enough that the crown was beneath her, his neck exposed and he was left blind to anything she chose to do subsequently. Trust and esteem interplaying in equal measures, displayed for everyone to see and understand its implications. It had set the tone for her time here in one fell swoop. If it had been a help, a hindrance, or a bit of both, Katara wasn’t sure. Either way, she’s sure he doesn’t regret it and neither does she.
Even with his back turned, even with only a sliver of the side of his face awash in moonlight visible, she catches the lift of a half smile.
“Hey, Kya.”
Katara’s heart shatters like a chisel driven straight into thin ice. Or it comes together like never before. The feeling in her chest is so powerful, so chaotic, that it makes every fibre of her being tingle and no matter how hard her brain scrabbles for purchase, she can’t really make sense of anything anymore.
After a moment, he stands up so simply and calmly, as if nothing had happened at all, and with his smile still in place, he bids her quietly:
“Goodnight, Katara.”
Her fingers curl tight around her mother’s pendant to keep them from shaking too visibly. “Goodnight.”
And with the slightest squeak of leather soles against metal pipe, the breeze ruffling his cloak as he climbs, he’s gone, and Katara almost finds herself resenting him for it - how dare he leave her feeling this way so nonchalantly? After he’d been granted a sign from her mother, the most precious figure in her life, and received it so much better than she could ever have dreamed of anyone?
It’s hardly his fault, her conscience speaks up in his defence in a small voice.
Zuko is not afflicted with this feeling like she is, she agrees with a bitterness in her mouth that tastes like disappointment. He is safe and content in the agreed boundaries of their connection, a realm that seems to be fast becoming not enough for her.
But you can’t have more.
Katara reminds herself of that sternly as she retreats back into her room, and when she looks at the priceless canopy draped over her bed, it’s hard to feel anything less than blessed with what she already has of him. And yet, the dissatisfaction still gnaws at her like a parasite. Katara wants to laugh at her uncharacteristically dire attitude; maybe she is more like that spoiled, stuffy Fire Nation noblewoman with a hand destined for Zuko than she gives herself credit for.
It’s been a long day; she needs a bath to wash away the dirt of her travels and try to calm her battered emotions. But she doesn’t find the willpower to bother. She doesn’t bother to change into her pyjamas either. Katara leaves her dress in an unceremonious heap on the floor and slides beneath the sheets in just her wraps.
Even when her the flame in her lamp gutters and the rhinestones no longer shine, the stars comfort her as she drifts away from her aching heart and into the hazy darkness.
It’s a feeling she owes not just to the crystal stars above but to the one that had hung them there for her.