(no subject)
Fandom: Avatar
Pairing(s)/Character(s): Zutara
Rating: K
Prompt: zutara100 #072--Forgiveness
Summary: It is just before dawn on the Day of Black Sun. The Avatar and his allies, the army that has risen to follow him, is within the Fire Nation and camped for the night. Katara is unable to sleep, so she rises and begins to prepare for the day ahead. She finds, however, that she is not the only restless one.
A/N: Funny how this one started. Words were stringing together in my head of Katara waking, Katara walking to the stream, and I just had this image in my head of Zuko standing in front of a sunrise. Once I got past that, I had absolutely no idea where this was going. In the end, I'm actually rather pleased with it. Also, it's a bit long.
3.1.07-Okay, I just reread it, and dear God, someone shoot me, I used some prose bordering on lavendar.
Katara wakes early; she had not really been asleep at all, though she had tried. It is yet before dawn, with faint early-morning light tinging the eastern horizon (where it all started), and a light chill in the air. There is a heavy wetness, though, and Katara knows from the past few days' experience that when the sun is in the sky, it will be oppressively, unrelentingly hot.
Until the moon crosses before it, that is.
Still, though the Water blood in her feels the moon's pull on such a momentous day (it is a triumph and an exceeding rarity, to be able to bend so powerfully at noontime), Katara sinks such thoughts to the bottom of her mind. She does not really believe she's going to sleep this night, but something must be said for trying, and dwelling on the things that will soon come to pass--for better or for worse--certainly won't help her. She closes her eyes and tries to fall into, at the very least, a state of semi-concious.
It is not long before she is awake and bustling silently, fluidly about the camp, gathering tinder from their stock and starting a fire in the firepit. They are in the center of camp, well-protected and with many swift paths out should they need to retreat. A river runs along the northeastern edge, providing them with fresh water and a swift path to the sea. She lifts two buckets and makes for the bank to gather water, passing through rickety green, brown, blue tents (Bumi's is an elaborate hut of compact earth with elabroate, intricate architecture that changes every time they make camp).
The walk is short, but not too short, and drawing water is a chore she has always enjoyed; even back when it was just Aang, Sokka and herself, the duty was delegated to her, the waterbender, by unspoken agreement. She reaches the riverbank and is unsurprised to find that she is not the only one who is restless. Zuko sits in the cross-legged meditating stance she has become accustomed to seeing. He takes no visible notice of her (although she knows that he knows she is there, and that he knows that she knows that he knows that she knows this), and she, content to put the day off for a while longer, stands where she is and does not move. It is not long before she finds out why he chose this particular spot to meditate, though she had an inkling.
The white edge of the disc that is the sun melts over the horizon, moving with the speed of time. Its brilliance is almost blinding, but Katara is used to the glaring reflection of white sunlight off white ice, and does not let herself look away. Before her, Zuko is a stark contrast of shadows against the paling sky.
It is the most dazzling sunrise she has ever seen.
As a firebender, she muses, he must be able to feel the sun's path across the sky, just as she can feel the moon's (with a shiver, she wonders how horrible it will feel for him later today--but the thought is, like the rest similar, quickly buried below currents of others in her mind).
Soon he will turn and acknowledge her (or maybe he won't), but regardless, the camp is beginning to stir first, and she knows preparations must soon begin. With some (small, little) effort, she turns away from the silk screen image before her.
Instead of bending the water into the bucket as she used to do (it is, as with everything else, a way to practice skills and reflexes, honed and deadly, through the daily hum-drum), she sets one on the ground at her feet, and with the other, kneels on the dry earth and leans forward over the water, dragging the bucket against the current. Within seconds it is full, straining against the strong muscles in her arm, and she hauls it, dripping, back in.
"Why are you doing it that way?" It is his voice, not the quiet morning sounds from camp, that draws her attention, and she looks up at his question, blinking--not in surprise, because it is not surprise that she feels, but neither of them is exactly sure what.
"I'm not sure," she replies with a shrug, repeating the action with the second bucket and setting that beside its kin. "Just--for some reason, this morning--I just don't want to bend."
"You don't want to bend?" He looks at her, gold eyes incredulous, and she flushes at her vagueness, her misuse of words.
"It's not that I don't really want to--that sounds so childish, doesn't it? But with today being, well, today, when I think of what's coming, what might be, what we need to do and what we will do and what we might do, I want to do things the--the simple way. Not the normal way or the easy way, just--just the simple way." Katara dips a hand into the cool river-water in the bucket and swirls it around, letting it follow her hand, not her mind, feeling the tiny currents and eddies, the language of the water, the push and pull of the bodies in the sky on this little, miniscule body of water. She feels tiny, diminished, within herself, and it is of a sort of comfort.
Zuko's mind stretches just a little towards the day ahead, and he can concede to what she says. For her, though, he thinks it must be a strange thing to do. He cannot simply firebend whenever he wishes--he must take into account his surroundings and who may or may not be hurt, whether the slightest miscalculation in control could lead to disaster; she may waterbend as she breathes--or perhaps walking is a better analogy. This, he reflects, is the difference between a discipline which can cause only harm, and one with the capacity to heal and nurture.
He looks up to see her watching him, and he knows she is remembering all the things that have passed between them in the past year. Her hand rests on the bucket's edge, fingers lying still in the water that yet continues to swirl gently around them, slower and slower, slower and slower. He knows he has her attention now, that she is stalling the return to camp, and this gladdens him. Over the past weeks, he has come to gradualy realize that he enjoys her company. Even when she watched him with shaded, distrustful eyes, he preferred her presence above the others.
She was the first person after Uncle to whom he'd ever opened up.
Suddenly he senses what he must do, now, before the sun rises any higher above his nation's destiny. It is daunting, humbling, but he is himself humbled.
He takes in a deep breath, and she looks up at him, attentive. "I must--I want to apologize."
"Back in Ba Sing Se, when we were imprisoned," he says, "you told me that you had always pictured my face as the face of the enemy."
After the battle in the Catacombs, her mind adds, it was still like that. Only her face was there, too. She does not say this out loud because she has told him this before, and besides, the group has gone beyond shooting such barbs at him.
"You knew me when I chased the Avatar with single-minded obsession. I terrorized your people, and others; I lashed out against everyone. Yet when we spoke down there in the Catacombs, you saw me as a human. It's--it was a level of trust I hadn't realized existed. And I disregarded that trust, threw it away. So I apologize."
Katara cannot fathom this. Here sits Zuko, banished Prince, traitor countless times-over, broken boy and loyal companion, his head bowed, hands clenched in the dark red fabric of his pants. He has apologized more times, in more ways, to all of them--to Aang, to Toph, to herself, Spirits, even to Sokka--in the past weeks than anyone she has ever known, and he is doing it again; yet his voice, the look in his eyes when he raises is head, the way healthy skin and scar skin stretch over his bones (his face is thinner than she has ever seen it, except in that ghost town when they cornered his sister), they all tell her that there is something different about this apology. He is not apologizing for only his actions. So instead of exasperatedly shushing him as they have been wont to do lately (except Sokka, of course, whose ego will probably never get enough of their old enemy humbled before them), she smiles and reaches out to take his hand into hers. He flinches as he does at any contact, but doesn't pull away; for her part, the action is almost unconcious and she hardly realizes she is doing it.
"Thank you," she says, and: "You don't need to feel sorry anymore."
Pairing(s)/Character(s): Zutara
Rating: K
Prompt: zutara100 #072--Forgiveness
Summary: It is just before dawn on the Day of Black Sun. The Avatar and his allies, the army that has risen to follow him, is within the Fire Nation and camped for the night. Katara is unable to sleep, so she rises and begins to prepare for the day ahead. She finds, however, that she is not the only restless one.
A/N: Funny how this one started. Words were stringing together in my head of Katara waking, Katara walking to the stream, and I just had this image in my head of Zuko standing in front of a sunrise. Once I got past that, I had absolutely no idea where this was going. In the end, I'm actually rather pleased with it. Also, it's a bit long.
3.1.07-Okay, I just reread it, and dear God, someone shoot me, I used some prose bordering on lavendar.
Katara wakes early; she had not really been asleep at all, though she had tried. It is yet before dawn, with faint early-morning light tinging the eastern horizon (where it all started), and a light chill in the air. There is a heavy wetness, though, and Katara knows from the past few days' experience that when the sun is in the sky, it will be oppressively, unrelentingly hot.
Until the moon crosses before it, that is.
Still, though the Water blood in her feels the moon's pull on such a momentous day (it is a triumph and an exceeding rarity, to be able to bend so powerfully at noontime), Katara sinks such thoughts to the bottom of her mind. She does not really believe she's going to sleep this night, but something must be said for trying, and dwelling on the things that will soon come to pass--for better or for worse--certainly won't help her. She closes her eyes and tries to fall into, at the very least, a state of semi-concious.
It is not long before she is awake and bustling silently, fluidly about the camp, gathering tinder from their stock and starting a fire in the firepit. They are in the center of camp, well-protected and with many swift paths out should they need to retreat. A river runs along the northeastern edge, providing them with fresh water and a swift path to the sea. She lifts two buckets and makes for the bank to gather water, passing through rickety green, brown, blue tents (Bumi's is an elaborate hut of compact earth with elabroate, intricate architecture that changes every time they make camp).
The walk is short, but not too short, and drawing water is a chore she has always enjoyed; even back when it was just Aang, Sokka and herself, the duty was delegated to her, the waterbender, by unspoken agreement. She reaches the riverbank and is unsurprised to find that she is not the only one who is restless. Zuko sits in the cross-legged meditating stance she has become accustomed to seeing. He takes no visible notice of her (although she knows that he knows she is there, and that he knows that she knows that he knows that she knows this), and she, content to put the day off for a while longer, stands where she is and does not move. It is not long before she finds out why he chose this particular spot to meditate, though she had an inkling.
The white edge of the disc that is the sun melts over the horizon, moving with the speed of time. Its brilliance is almost blinding, but Katara is used to the glaring reflection of white sunlight off white ice, and does not let herself look away. Before her, Zuko is a stark contrast of shadows against the paling sky.
It is the most dazzling sunrise she has ever seen.
As a firebender, she muses, he must be able to feel the sun's path across the sky, just as she can feel the moon's (with a shiver, she wonders how horrible it will feel for him later today--but the thought is, like the rest similar, quickly buried below currents of others in her mind).
Soon he will turn and acknowledge her (or maybe he won't), but regardless, the camp is beginning to stir first, and she knows preparations must soon begin. With some (small, little) effort, she turns away from the silk screen image before her.
Instead of bending the water into the bucket as she used to do (it is, as with everything else, a way to practice skills and reflexes, honed and deadly, through the daily hum-drum), she sets one on the ground at her feet, and with the other, kneels on the dry earth and leans forward over the water, dragging the bucket against the current. Within seconds it is full, straining against the strong muscles in her arm, and she hauls it, dripping, back in.
"Why are you doing it that way?" It is his voice, not the quiet morning sounds from camp, that draws her attention, and she looks up at his question, blinking--not in surprise, because it is not surprise that she feels, but neither of them is exactly sure what.
"I'm not sure," she replies with a shrug, repeating the action with the second bucket and setting that beside its kin. "Just--for some reason, this morning--I just don't want to bend."
"You don't want to bend?" He looks at her, gold eyes incredulous, and she flushes at her vagueness, her misuse of words.
"It's not that I don't really want to--that sounds so childish, doesn't it? But with today being, well, today, when I think of what's coming, what might be, what we need to do and what we will do and what we might do, I want to do things the--the simple way. Not the normal way or the easy way, just--just the simple way." Katara dips a hand into the cool river-water in the bucket and swirls it around, letting it follow her hand, not her mind, feeling the tiny currents and eddies, the language of the water, the push and pull of the bodies in the sky on this little, miniscule body of water. She feels tiny, diminished, within herself, and it is of a sort of comfort.
Zuko's mind stretches just a little towards the day ahead, and he can concede to what she says. For her, though, he thinks it must be a strange thing to do. He cannot simply firebend whenever he wishes--he must take into account his surroundings and who may or may not be hurt, whether the slightest miscalculation in control could lead to disaster; she may waterbend as she breathes--or perhaps walking is a better analogy. This, he reflects, is the difference between a discipline which can cause only harm, and one with the capacity to heal and nurture.
He looks up to see her watching him, and he knows she is remembering all the things that have passed between them in the past year. Her hand rests on the bucket's edge, fingers lying still in the water that yet continues to swirl gently around them, slower and slower, slower and slower. He knows he has her attention now, that she is stalling the return to camp, and this gladdens him. Over the past weeks, he has come to gradualy realize that he enjoys her company. Even when she watched him with shaded, distrustful eyes, he preferred her presence above the others.
She was the first person after Uncle to whom he'd ever opened up.
Suddenly he senses what he must do, now, before the sun rises any higher above his nation's destiny. It is daunting, humbling, but he is himself humbled.
He takes in a deep breath, and she looks up at him, attentive. "I must--I want to apologize."
"Back in Ba Sing Se, when we were imprisoned," he says, "you told me that you had always pictured my face as the face of the enemy."
After the battle in the Catacombs, her mind adds, it was still like that. Only her face was there, too. She does not say this out loud because she has told him this before, and besides, the group has gone beyond shooting such barbs at him.
"You knew me when I chased the Avatar with single-minded obsession. I terrorized your people, and others; I lashed out against everyone. Yet when we spoke down there in the Catacombs, you saw me as a human. It's--it was a level of trust I hadn't realized existed. And I disregarded that trust, threw it away. So I apologize."
Katara cannot fathom this. Here sits Zuko, banished Prince, traitor countless times-over, broken boy and loyal companion, his head bowed, hands clenched in the dark red fabric of his pants. He has apologized more times, in more ways, to all of them--to Aang, to Toph, to herself, Spirits, even to Sokka--in the past weeks than anyone she has ever known, and he is doing it again; yet his voice, the look in his eyes when he raises is head, the way healthy skin and scar skin stretch over his bones (his face is thinner than she has ever seen it, except in that ghost town when they cornered his sister), they all tell her that there is something different about this apology. He is not apologizing for only his actions. So instead of exasperatedly shushing him as they have been wont to do lately (except Sokka, of course, whose ego will probably never get enough of their old enemy humbled before them), she smiles and reaches out to take his hand into hers. He flinches as he does at any contact, but doesn't pull away; for her part, the action is almost unconcious and she hardly realizes she is doing it.
"Thank you," she says, and: "You don't need to feel sorry anymore."