Chapter Text
Katara
Throbbing— her head was throbbing consistently. The pounding didn’t seem to ease as the light poured in enough that she was forced to peel her eyes open.
For a moment, time stood still. Her body was sore, her head was spinning and for a short second, Katara had thought that she was dreaming. She had to be, she thinks, because the last she remembered, she had been on the back of Appa after narrowly escaping the clutches of both Zuko and Azula— again.
That’s right… she remembered, now. She had likely passed out from the effort it had taken to revive Aang after he had been shot with Azula’s lightning in the catacombs beneath Ba Sing Se.
Katara shakes her head at the memory, but it sends her falling right back into the bed, one of her hands moving to hold it still as the world tilted and spun on its axis around her. The dizziness alone was enough to confine her to one spot, the pulsing and pressure she’d felt on the left side of her temple being heavy enough to weigh her down. But, as the room comes more into focus, her breathing falters and gets stuck in her throat and she swears she had to be imagining things. She freezes, then, because the red tint to the walls surrounding her becoming bright enough to turn her stomach. It pitches violently and roughly and painfully deep and she thinks she was going to hurl.
Surely she wasn’t here— surely she was just… seeing things. She would close her eyes and reopen them and she would be back at camp. She would see Aang, Toph, even Sokka wandering around the campfire. He would show up any moment to bug her, to ask her when she was going to start dinner But… he doesn’t come; nobody does. She was alone in a large banister bed with a canopy; floor to wall windows that opened up to a balcony with the spans to view the violet tinted sunset.
Then, a realization hits her. There was more red— too, too much red all around her.
Katara swallows hard and tries not to panic. She tries to keep her grounding and reality within herself. She wasn’t in a prison— she wasn’t in a cell. She was in a bed. A large, grand, and seemingly… Fire Nation bed?
Confusion and fear alike grip her by the throat and for another moment, she doesn’t move. She doesn’t move until the sun dips a bit lower and she is able to gather her bearings, her breath, her sanity if she had any left.
When she looks around fully, taking everything in, she notices the sheets are far too slept in to have been a place of entrapment. In fact… nothing seemed to indicate that she was in any kind of trouble— but that thought alone causes her stomach to pitch and roil even more than it had before. She wonders, then, what she was doing here— what had happened to her. Surely she was remembering correctly. Surely she would know if they had come here on their own volition but she doesn’t. She doesn’t remember anything besides the sickening sight of lightning hitting Aang in the back and bringing him down into her arms as a panicked cry was ripped from her throat.
Not wanting to waste another moment in fear someone would come after her, Katara throws her legs over the edge of the bed and all but stumbles towards the windows. It takes her too long to reach them as her head was intensely throbbing, still, and the feeling made her sick to her stomach with worry, with doubt, with uncertainty alike. Not as badly, though, as when her fears had been confirmed; she wasn’t just in the Fire Nation— she was in the palace, from what she could gather from her surroundings— it made too much sense and yet… none at all.
Shit, she thinks, she had to think quick on her feet. Something had to have happened, had to have knocked her out in the battle and she wasn't remembering things correctly. She must have been captured, must have been taken from the rest of the group in hopes that she could be used and questioned. It begged her to ask herself why she wasn’t in a prison cell— why she wasn’t locked up like the fugitive she knew that she was, that she knew that she had to be.
Katara didn’t want to find out before it was too late. Instead, she quietly makes her way towards the large, ornate metal door where what lied beyond would be a mystery. She is prepared to face someone— anyone— head on. Guards would be stationed at her door; soldiers would be waiting for the moment she tried to make her escape. She had thought about leaving through the balcony in a moment of sheer and utter desperation, but the steepness of the drop was too far, and she wouldn’t survive it even she’d wanted to. Not when she was this weak; not when she could hardly stand on her own.
There’s a solid, seemingly endless stretch of time where she doesn’t know what to do. Her hand hovers atop the door handle for far too long because it hits her that she does not have her water skin. Of course they would take it from her, she thinks— she couldn’t be naive to think they would leave her with enough water to fight with.
Swallowing hard, Katara decides to take that chance anyway, and turns the handle; she would go out fighting with her hands, if she had to.
Silently, she slides the door open and she is met with—
— Nobody?
Not a single soul was in the hall, so when she steps out and through the door, she lowers her arms from her defensive stance and lets out a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding. Okay, now she was really confused. This had to be some kind of trap. There was no way that anybody would leave anyone unguarded in the Fire Lord’s palace— let alone an enemy to the state.
For a split second, she thinks about retreating, about going back inside and figuring out a safer plan of escape that wouldn't result in her running straight into the arms of her enemies. Maybe she could scale the walls beneath the balcony, somehow— perhaps she could find a water source below to carry her to the ground beneath.
No, she thinks, she couldn’t do that. She had studied and studied and studied the palace grounds beneath that balcony and she knew, deep down, there was no way she was going to get out that way.
She must have been thinking too hard, then, because her head spins at the uncertainty of it all and she has to grab the wall for support as she loses her footing. One hand goes to her head again and holds it in her palm until the pain somewhat wavers and subsides. Whatever had happened to her, it had to have been a nasty blow. It had to have been bad enough that they’d thought it would be okay to leave her unguarded and alone. That she was weak or naive or not strong enough to be a threat.
Shaking her head to rid the thoughts, she decides she has to push herself, and so she pushes off from the wall and begins stalking the hall slowly. It was long, narrow, and the ceilings were taller than she had seen in the entirety of their travels— even the Earth Kingdom palace hadn’t been this grandiose. It sickens her to think that half of this was built on the backs of slaves— some of her people, probably, throughout the war. At least, that was what she had heard… a long time ago.
Shaking those thoughts from her head, she knew she could not let herself get distracted. She had to stay focused. She was already weak enough— too weak to fight— and she hadn’t had any water even if she’d wanted to. She was going into this blind and unarmed, and she knew she was insane. But, she also knew that she couldn’t just sit around until the next round of guards was sent to check on her— to see if she was awake. Maybe that’s what they were waiting for, maybe that’s why she was left alone—
—‘Umph’.
Katara’s body slams into another, two hands catching her by the wrists as they tug her close before she had the chance to fall. Her knees had buckled under the pressure but she had still been ready to fight, anyhow, ready to pull away from—
“Zuko?”
Shoving against him, she uses her weight to push against his chest and without fighting back, his fingers loosen from her wrists and she is able to take a step back. When she looks at him, from the royal regalia tapered to his body to the crown atop his head, she swallows hard. Fear strikes her in the gut and all of her instincts scream that she needed to run, that she needed to get away from him as fast as she could but she knew that was unrealistic. He would greatly over power her, especially since she had no water.
“Katara? Are— are you okay?”
Zuko’s voice is light, solemn and all she can do is blink back, frozen in time as her breathing comes to a stuttering halt. He was far too gentle, far too cordial, and for a moment she thought she had to be dreaming.
“Kat, hey, what’s going on? You look… you look like you’ve just seen a ghost,” he says, and she still can’t speak, can’t move, can’t breathe at the easy use of her nickname that only her family had called her. He isn’t calling for guards, he isn’t calling for help or for backup. Instead, he was looking at her as if she was some kind of wounded animal.
For some reason, that was much scarier than the alternative.
“Katara?”
When he reaches forward with a hand to do what looks like feel the temperature of her forehead, she stumbles a step back and holds her arms up in defense. With enough space between them, she thinks better than to attack first. Zuko had been wearing a small smile before, one where one of the corners of his mouth had tilted up but it fell, now, and he looked down at her with his brows furrowed in what she thinks is an equal amount of confusion.
“You look pale,” he tells her, and the way in which he says it so softly turns her stomach. “Yuki told me that you hit your head while training. I was just coming to check up on you…” he veers off skeptically, though, as if he himself was riddled with doubt. “Are you— do you feel alright? Do I need to bring one of the physicians to look at your head?”
That phrasing alone was enough to stall her. It was enough to send her mind reeling into a fit of confusion that she simply did not understand. She has to grab her head and lean against the wall again because she feels faint, dizzy, like she could pass out at any given moment. It was enough, she guesses, to cause Zuko to lunge forward as if he were going to catch her, but she shoves him off with an unsteady hand.
“Don’t— don’t touch me,” she grits, trying to swallow back the lump in her throat as the corridor tilts and sways once again. She tries to take a breath, tries to suck enough air into her lungs to keep her steady but she was losing against the stifling heat. When her vision begins to blur, she knows she has over done it, and she knows that she is in trouble. Whatever he wanted from her couldn’t be good, no matter how cautiously he had approached her, and dread pools in the pit of her stomach when she realizes that she never stood a chance.
“Katara, seriously, let me help you,” he pleads, and she hears the desperation in his voice as he holds his hands out towards her. His face moved back and forth, distorting between being one and two of him standing before her at the same time. She was slowly losing her grip on the wall before her knees buckle, and she swears under her breath when they hit the ground and both of her hands fly out to catch herself.
“Agni, Katara, you’re really hurt. Here—“
“— I said don’t touch me!” Katara’s voice lilts to a level she hadn’t yet heard and her throat burns as the words come up. Fear grips her in its trembling fist and she knows she is about to go down. She couldn’t— not this way— not with Zuko right in front of her. He was probably playing devil’s advocate again, just trying to trick her into trusting him like he had before Azula’s attack. He just wanted to get into her head so that she let her guard down and give up Aang’s location. He—
“Kat— what has gotten into you? I know you can take care of yourself but you must have really taken a hit— you have got to start watching yourself more and—“
“— What do you want… from me?” Katara breathes, interjecting quickly as her chest still heaves with her hands holding her up. She lifts her head just enough to peer up at him from her place on the ground and she sees the confusion arching his brow as he stops mid kneel.
“You’re not making any sense.” Again, his voice holds a gentleness that guts her. “Seriously, Katara, we need to get you to the physician. I can’t believe you didn’t go straight there before now— what were you thinking?”
Katara shakes her head against his words and her throat constricts uncomfortably. Why was he doing this? Why was he offering to help her? Couldn’t he tell that she was clearly not falling for whatever game he was playing? Why wouldn’t he just take her back into custody already and get this interrogation over with?
Suddenly, she hears him sigh and she feels hands lifting her from beneath her arms. She is too weak to fight them off this time, although she tries, and she gives it her all as she puts all of her weight into the lift so that it became more difficult and he drops her. She falls back as she pushes his hands away roughly and her own fly back to catch herself. Now, when she looks up at him, he looked hurt— frightened, perhaps. She didn’t really know for certain because everything was spinning. The hall, his face, even his feet as he takes another step to kneel before her.
“Woah, take it easy— hey— hey,” he urges, and she has to fight off the urge to vomit as he reaches forward again to grab her. She kicks at him and she thrashes from his grasp before he can even so much as touch her. He backs away, finally, with his hands up and his eyes full of distress, full of something akin to pain, if she was even seeing things straight.
“What’s… what’s going on? Why are you… being nice to me?” Katara finally gets out between breaths.
Zuko raises a brow, and from where she sits in front of him, looking up at the way he towers over her, she thinks she sees a flicker of unease cross his face. “What are you talking about?” He asks softly, painfully slow and his hands fall limply to his sides, his entire guard suddenly down.
“Why am I here? Why— why haven’t you locked me up again already?”
Finally, a bit of animation comes to his face when he looks down at her in surprise. “Lock you up—? What are you talking about? Why would you be locked up? What are you—“
“— How did I get here? Where’s… Where’s Aang?” She can hardly get the words out as she cuts him off again, her breathing growing more labored as her head pounded furiously. “Where’s my brother? T-Toph?” Katara grabs at her head again and squeezes her eyes shut as she focuses on just trying to breathe. The light was too much, the spinning was too much, Zuko’s stoic facade and the worry weighing on his brow was too much.
“Okay, you really must have hit your head too hard. You’re talking nonsense, now. Let’s get you to the physician before you hurt yourself even further,” he says, and that makes her eyes shoot back open, her face tilt up towards him.
She doesn’t want to allow it, she doesn’t want him to take her into his arms, but she can’t fight him off, not this time, and when his hands go underneath her arms again, she actually grabs on to his own for balance. If he was going to take her, he was going take her whether she fought back or not. And it wasn’t like she had anything to fight with right now, anyway. She had already been stripped of her water skin and her dignity.
As soon as she is on her feet, though, and she is able, she tries to shove him away so that she could tell him that she could walk herself, that she didn’t need his help to walk to the room or cell she was obviously being led to despite his falsified pleas to get her to see a doctor. But, before she could say another word, before she could so much as utter a protest, the entire world shifts under her feet and everything goes dark.
Spirits, she was warm. Almost too warm to the point it causes her to stir restlessly. She doesn’t want to, she almost refuses to open her eyes because of the comfort it brought to her, but when she slowly begins to remember where she was, she shoots up anyway. Katara gasps for breath, grappling at the tunic that felt too tight against her chest with her fingers. They trembled, and shook, and she could have sworn she was waking up from a nightmare. She hadn’t even taken the chance to see what was around her or where she was before pressing the heels other hands to her eyes to will away the pain she felt she was succumbing to.
“My Lord, she’s awake.”
The voice that speaks is unfamiliar, and when Katara withdraws her hands away from her face, she sees a woman dressed in Fire Nation reds standing at the foot of her bed. She follows their line of sight to the seat beside her, where Zuko suddenly pushes to a stand.
“Agni, Katara, you had me worried sick.” His voice comes out in a rush of panic, his eyes searching her own almost desperately. He had just leaned forward to capture her face between his hands before she came to her senses soon enough to push them away in shock, in utter terror of what he'd planned to do next. It was then that she spots the pail of water at her beside, and uses it to her advantage.
Quickly, before anyone could stop her, she bends the water out and sends it flying towards Zuko until his back hits the wall. She blows towards it with all the breath that she had until his entire arm and down to his his wrist was frozen in place. She then takes that opportunity to try and jump from the bed before he could make any moves to capture her.
Even this weak, even in a heightened state of shock, so long as she had water, she could fight.
“Katara!” He shouts, but she pays the plea in his voice no mind. She couldn’t be stuck there again, she couldn’t let herself become vulnerable to where he would get the upper hand. If she acted fast, she could make it. She might really be able to make it out without—
Before she reaches the door, however, before she is able to make her escape, she passes a mirror and it stops her dead in her tracks. She would have tripped over her feet had she not reached out to catch herself.
She had to be seeing things. She had to have hit her head so hard that she was imagining the look in her eyes— the growth to her face. Katara holds her hands out in front of her, then, and studies them. She flips them around, stares down at her palms, and then looks back up into the mirror where she traces her cheeks with her fingers.
Katara’s heart pounded furiously against her chest, her ribcage aching for its release as it thuds rapidly within its confines. There was no way that she was looking at herself. She looked like herself, but… she didn’t. She looked… older, grown, more mature than she had remembered.
Almost like… almost like her mother.
Whipping her head to the side, Katara opens her mouth to speak, to ask what was going on, but she couldn’t get the words out. Instead, her eyes hyper fixate on the boy— no, man— before her. Even Zuko looked older, more mature, perhaps even grown in his own way with the way that he watched her. When she looks at him, now, she sees a man different than she had before. His hair was passed his shoulders and down his back, haphazardly strewn across his face as if he had been running his hands through it. Even the way he watched her now was careful, calculated, like he was afraid of what she was going to do next.
She is still frozen in place when he begins to melt the ice she had bent at him and frees his arm almost effortlessly. He brings his arm in towards his chest, then, so that he could rub at his wrist before giving what must be the physician at his side a worrisome kind of look. The physician looks back at him with just as much awe and hesitancy.
“I told you she might try to run,” Zuko says softly to the woman beside him— so softly that Katara almost doesn’t catch it.
But she does.
“What do you mean? Why wouldn’t I run?" She asks redundantly. "I’m not an idiot, I know you’re just using me to bait Aang,” she grits. “That’s why you’re being so nice to me, isn’t it? That’s why you’re taking care of me?”
From where she stands, she can see Zuko’s throat bob roughly, and his arms fall to his sides. He shakes his head and blinks back as if he were in a daze himself. “Katara…” He begins slowly, carefully. “Where do you think you are? Do you have any idea of what’s going on right now?”
She only stares at him dumbly. But, despite herself, she dips her chin a couple of times in answer. She did know, didn’t she? She’d been captured. That was why she was hurt, that was why she was being cared for in the way that she was. It was some kind of elaborate ruse to get to Aang, surely. That’s all that it ever was with him. That was all it ever would be.
“I don’t think you do,” he responds, and for some reason, there was a pain in his voice that she wasn’t so certain she knew how to face. Even the way he held his hands out, as if in a defensive yet easily broken position, held some kind of meaning that she didn’t quite understand.
“Do you remember hitting your head?” He asks her, then, and before she could even respond, he asks, “Do you remember anything from today?”
Shaking her head, Katara grips it as the pain reminds her that it is still very much there. She must have just been caught up in the adrenaline of the moment that she’d been able to push it aside. Now, it was almost impossible to ignore.
“I…” She starts, not understanding why nothing was making any sense. His questions, the gentleness to his tone, the attentiveness from the physician and the way that she kept glancing her over cautiously. “I remember… being in the caves— with you. I remember your sister shooting down Aang and having to save his life but I— I don’t know how I got here… it doesn’t make any sense,” she finally says, and she says it so slowly, so painfully uncertain that she does not know what to do next. “What am I doing here? What do you want from me?” At this point, she was desperate. She was alone, afraid, and separated from her family and anyone that she had trusted. In a bout of confusion, she felt the pang of fear run through her at the thought of how much time has passed. At how much older they truly looked.
“What happened to me?”
Before saying anything, Zuko looks to the physician and gives her a solemn kind of look. “You may be dismissed.”
The physician seems to wince, almost, as if she had been confused herself before she says, “But, my Lord, she—“
“I know what she needs. Please, leave us.” It wasn’t a request, but a demand that cuts clean through the air, and from the moment the physician passes her by in order to get through the door, Katara wonders why he was so adamant to be alone with her.
Once the door creaks shut, Zuko doesn’t waste a moment. “You should sit down.”
Immediately on the defense, Katara crosses her arms against her chest and stares back at him. “Why should I listen to you? You won’t answer any of my questions,” she says.
“Just sit, please. I’ll answer any of your questions if you just… sit down.” Zuko’s voice is shaky, now, warbled and shaken and she doesn’t know why it worries her so much. He holds his hand out to the seat across from his own and for a second, all she can do is stare down at it blankly.
“Katara,” he urges again, and she doesn’t like the way her name sounds coming out of his mouth. But, she sits. She scoots her chair further away from his own and twists her fingers into her lap.
“Where do you want me to start?” He asks her, prompting her for a response.
Immediately, she asks, "Where’s my brother? Where’s Aang?”
Zuko sighs before her, deep and heavy and weighted in his chest as he looks at her. His eyes were sad as he runs his hands over his thighs carefully, slowly, and there was an emotion she didn’t quite understand that fills the amber of his eyes.
“You really don’t remember, then?” He tests the words as if they were sour on his tongue and for a second, she thinks she sees another flicker of something like sorrow.
“Does it look like I remember?” She doesn’t mean for the words to come out so harsh, so starkly defensive and she sees the way he winces before closing his eyes and shoving his gaze away. He licks his lips and swallows before looking back at her.
“Sokka is at the South Pole. He’s with your father and Suki,” he starts to explain. Her stomach flips uncomfortably at the way that he says this and she isn’t sure why, but she doesn’t get a chance to think about it before he continues. “And Aang… he’s helping Toph in Republic City, the last I heard from him a couple of weeks ago,” he says, looking at her as if he hoped it would jog some kind of memory. But, when she shakes her head, still clearly lost in the rough of it, he pushes on. “I don’t know what you know— what you remember— and I don’t know how to tell you that… the war is over. It’s been over for about…” He hesitates, and her eyes go directly to his knee as it bounces restlessly. “We ended the war over ten years ago.”
Katara’s breathing stalls as the world stops spinning, and all she can do is stare at him, almost blankly, dumbfoundedly shaken as she tries to think of something— anything. But her mind was blank, and even after letting her head fall into her hands and squeezing her eyes shut in order to focus, all she can see is black. Empty, solid blackness. There’s nothing— there was nothing there. She couldn’t remember a single thing after their fall out in the Ba Sing Se.
Ten years, she thinks. Katara lost ten years of her life.
“You’re joking, right?” She asks, then, almost panicked as she lifts her head to look back at him. She could feel desperation rise to her chest and tears sting at her lash line but she did not want to falter. She did not want to believe it was true as the desperation for him to be lying to her rips from her throat and into the way that she asks him, “You’re— this isn’t just some kind of sick joke?”
She knew it wasn’t. The way that he looked, the way that she looked and the time that has passed on both of their faces— she knew he was not lying to her.
“Why am I here, then? Why am I here and not at home?”
At that, Zuko diverts his gaze again and leans forward in his seat, his elbows going to rest on his knees. His hands scrub against his face as he sighs and she watches him have an internal battle within himself. “Just— you’re not going to bend at me again, are you?” His voice was weak, low, and she would have thought he was trying to be funny had his eyes not shone back that same kind of emotion that she was feeling: fear.
Katara furrows her brows but doesn’t respond. All she can do is look back at him as he looked as if he were going to be the one to faint.
“Katara— you’re my wife."
No, she thinks, and she shakes her head when all she can do is let out a painful, fearfully driven laugh through her nose. It wasn’t one of humor, or because she thought anything was funny— it was one of disbelief, of utter and complete surprise.
But, the longer she looks at him, the longer she stares into his eyes, the more that she knows that he is not joking.
No. No, no, no, no, no, no.
Katara stands quickly, suddenly, and she doesn’t give him a second glance before turning to walk back towards the door with a panic driven step. She couldn’t do this, she couldn’t face him. She couldn’t listen to anything else he had to say. She couldn’t be here, right now— she couldn’t do this.
“Katara, wait—“
When Katara whips around this time, when she sees the look in his eyes, she freezes. He, too, was standing now with an arm outstretched towards her. His eyes had matching tears that they seemed to share and that emotion again that she couldn’t quite place flickers inside of her. She swallows hard and tries to breathe through the weight she could feel atop her chest that would not stop pushing her down, and down and down until she could no longer breathe at all.
“This isn’t funny, Zuko,” she bites, white hot anger coursing through her blood. One at a time she feels tears push through each blink as they roll down her cheeks, hot and wet and insistently bruising. “It’s not. I don’t know what kind of sick game you’re playing but I’m not falling for it.”
“Katara.” But his voice breaks, it cracks on her name and she shakes her head even harder. He had to be lying.
“I don’t believe you.” Another onslaught of tears breaks that barrier along with a feeling she couldn’t quite place. Heartache, maybe. For what, though, she couldn’t be sure. Perhaps the years she has lost, the memories that were gone, and she mourns what she did not even know: her past.
“I’m not lying to you,” he says desperately, pleading, and when she looks at him now, his own tears have fully broken through his stony visage. He looks at her with desperation, longing, begging her with his own eyes as he says, “Please, Katara, I wouldn’t lie to you— I wouldn’t—“
“You did! You did lie to me!” Katara couldn’t hold it back any longer, and she yells for what she has had ripped from her. “The last thing I remember is you lying to me! Back in Ba Sing Se, with Aang and your sister,” she cries, then pointing a finger at him, shaken and angrily. “How am I supposed to trust you when that’s all that I know? That’s— that’s all that I know,” she chokes, and the damn breaks, and she clutches at her chest as if ripping off her clothes was going to free her from this prison of shame, of humiliation, of true and utter terror. Whatever she had been holding back before out of fear finally spills out and into the space between them.
“Are you really telling me that… I lost ten years of my life?” She asks him. “How— how old am I?”
Zuko only hesitates for a moment before he answers. “You just turned twenty-five.”
Katara balls her hands into fists atop her head and wraps her fingers into her hair. “And Sokka? You said he’s okay? He’s alive? And Suki, too— you said Suki was there? At the South Pole?”
He nods. “He and Suki go between there and Kyoshi Island… with their kids.”
Katara freezes. His kids— Sokka had kids— he had a family.
“He… he has kids?” Another tear rolls thick and punishing down her face. She missed it— she missed it all— she missed everything.
Katara collapses back into her seat, her face falling into her hands as she chokes out sob after sob after sob. She would be humiliated if she’d cared at all. She couldn’t quite care about embarrassment when she couldn’t even give a reason to. If this was true… if he was telling her the truth… her entire life was about to change.
“Katara, there’s… there’s something else.”
Lifting her head, then, red faced and puffy eyed, she looks at him. With the way that he looks back at her, she isn’t entirely sure that she wants to know.
Zuko opens his mouth to speak but before he can utter a word, the door behind them flies open and smacks against the wall.
“Daddy!”
All Katara can make out is a mess of blue and white that flies past her.
“Daddy— daddy guess what?”
Almost instantly, Zuko’s persona changes and an animated smile plays at his lips as he catches the child with an ‘oof’. She slams into him without hesitation and climbs into his lap, spinning around until she was bouncing on his knee with excitement.
“I’m sorry, Lord Zuko, but Kya was insisting she needed see you now.” The woman who stands in the doorway wears a worrisome kind of look. Her brows had furrowed almost as soon as her eyes fell upon Katara’s as her own widen in a shock that left her with a gaping mouth. They only hold each others gazes for a moment before the woman tears her gaze away and folds her arms against her chest in a bow of respect.
“No need for any apologies, Rua. You’ve gone above and beyond for me today. You can be dismissed.”
The woman, who must be Rua, gives another bow to the both of them before letting herself out the door. The click of the lock settling in place rattles her to the bone, and before Katara can so much as think, her head is snapped back to the child in Zuko’s lap when she calls for out her.
“Mommy! I learned a new trick!”
Katara blinks back slowly, numbly, almost too still when she realizes she isn’t breathing. Had— had she heard that correctly? Was… was her name… Kya?
Was she… her mother?
Katara’s eyes snap to Zuko’s, and she knows that this was what he was trying to tell her before they had been interrupted.
“Daddy— why does mommy look sad?”
It isn’t until then that Katara realizes that she is still crying.
“Oh baby, she isn’t sad. Mommy just feels a little sick right now. She hit her head and just needs to get some rest.” Zuko holds the child by the shoulder and uses his other hand to smooth down the fluff of hair that was long and messy and sticking to her cheeks. And, for a moment, Katara thought she was looking into the past because this little girl was a spitting image of her.
Only… her eyes reflected that same color of the man in front of her.
“Oh, is she okay? Am I gonna be able to show her my new trick? Oh— it’s so, so cool! Please— please can I show her?”
Zuko gives the child a sympathetic kind of look, but one where only Katara would be able to see the sadness that truly lied within it. “Maybe later, okay? She really doesn’t feel well. If you go practice your trick by the pond for a while then I promise we will come and watch you a little bit later, alright?” He smiles soon enough before pulling her into his chest and sloppily kissing the top of her head.
“Fine,” she blanches, and hops up from his lap. She gives him one last tight hug around the neck before skipping over to her— to Katara— and giving her a little pout, a soft and burningly gentle pat on the leg. “Hope your head feels better mommy. Want me to kiss it and make it feel better?”
Katara doesn’t get the chance to respond before the girl… her daughter… stretches on her toes to quickly kiss her forehead. On instinct, Katara flinches, and forgets for a moment that the world was still spinning.
Just as quickly as she had appeared, the child was gone, and Katara could stretch her neck just enough to see her grab Rua’s hand, who had been waiting outside the door, and scamper down the hall.
For a moment… she doesn’t move. She doesn’t breathe. Her muscles feel taught and tense, her entire body seemingly seizing under the pressure. It isn’t until she hears Zuko clear his throat that she is pulled from whatever trance she had been stuck in.
Slowly, Katara turns around in the chair to face him, and her eyes waver in his wake. “I…I…” But, she is completely riddled speechless. There was no way… there was no way that this was…
“Hey… Kat— Katara.” She notices he corrects himself when her name catches in his throat. “Hey— I know you’re lost, and probably really confused, and scared. I know… you weren’t expecting this. I wanted to ease you into it. I didn’t—“
The rest of the words die in his throat when she pushes to a stand. She didn’t stay long enough to see the look on his face when she all but runs from the room. He doesn't stop her, either. Nobody did. She didn’t even stop herself as she bound through the halls, left here, right here, passed God’s knew how many people before she found a door that she hopes lead to the outside.
Katara’s hands push at the steel as hard as she can until the sun peeks in through the cracks, blinding her eyes but inevitably not stopping her. She didn’t stop until she was far enough away from the red lined walls that she could breathe.
Trees and vineyards full of roses and lilies dot the landscape and she realizes she is in a garden. It isn’t until then that she feels safe enough, alone enough, to collapse onto her hands and knees and let out an agonizing scream.