Thoughts punctured in. He pictured himself running to the health resort, begging his uncle for advice as his mother watched disappointed in his childishness, but that would be repeating the same mistake he'd made in asking his sister for help. His father had always made decisions for himself, and had never begged someone else to solve his problems for him. Katara was right to be ashamed of him. He'd chased after the throne since the startling realization that it was a privilege that could indeed be taken from him on the event of the Agni Kai, and he'd finally achieved it, but for what aim? It was only the beginning, and he'd reached the mark already fatigued, like a fire low on fuel. Fire could not give heat without consuming source material. After six years banished to a ship, he had missed the vital education from shadowing his father that would have allowed him competence. It might have been too much a deficit to compensate for.
He didn't have a candle, but he listened inside and felt his bodyheat as a continual source, burning from the pit of his stomach outward in a radiant heat. Usually that heat was overflowing with plenty, but the fire stood neglected. He reached a hand out towards it.
Leaves brushed against each other. The rain was a constant.
Gravel of the trail shifted. Motion stirred the bamboo. Zuko opened his eyes.
He grunted as a sharp pain overtook his body. It felt like his blood vessels would explode from pressure, and his joints bent unnaturally, straining to the point of breaking. He huffed for breath as his body was wrested up to kneeling, his arms twisted to either side and fingers strained taut. Moving outside his own control, his adrenaline shot up and he felt terror. With the burst of energy towards survival, he pushed his inner heat to his palms, trying to firebend his way out, and flame reflected in the clearing circle on every shaft of bamboo, making the darkness behind them a deeper black in contrast. Unable to control his limbs, he wasn't able to direct his firebending, but could only push it forth trying to hit the attacker blindly.
Zuko fought and tried to yell, but his throat constricted, feeling like he was being strangled. No one was visible, as they were sheltered behind the dense bamboo, but an object was tossed out of the forest and landed at his knees, skittering through the gravel. The bare knife glinted in the flames he continued to pour out.
As his hands were thrust in front of him, sending a jolt of pain down either shoulder and arm from the creaking pressure, he clamped the flames shut to not burn himself. "Stop," he choked out, disappointed in the softness of his voice. His hands were pulled towards the knife and he clumsily took it up in numb fingers, holding it in front of his own chest with the blade pointed inward. The pressure increased and he clenched the handle overtight, enough to ensure lethal force could be applied, and in the next motion the knife would slam into his ribcage with his own hands.
He wondered if Katara would think he had done it of his own volition.
Resigned to the pain, he poured fire from his palms as they gripped the hilt, screaming through a constricted throat as it burnt his own hands. Under normal circumstances, like pulling one's hand off a hot pan, that would be enough to release the object through a nerve impulse faster than thought. However, his hands stung from the intense close-application burn but had not released the handle, and mere fire wouldn't damage a forged knife so easily. It felt like the day his father had burned him.
The leather string holding the yak-horn bracelet split apart with the flame, scattering the beads across the ground by his knees.
Fast footsteps closed in and someone skid to a halt between him and the unknown attacker. Katara raised her arms—a double of the described motion in the illustration—and his body phased back to his control. The knife dropped to the gravel. He looked up to her back, feeling the full pulse of the burn damage to his hands he'd inflicted on himself. She'd blocked the control of the other waterbender and was countering.
Zuko pushed himself to standing and fired off the largest bolt he could overhead into the sky.
She and the unseen waterbender were locked in a struggle to win control over the other. Above, as the clouds broke to a mottled grey, the brightness of the moon lit them in silver. With the forceful motion he'd been subjected to, he was shaking all over, like muscle strain after an over-difficult workout, and had trouble coordinating himself.
Zuko stepped beside Katara and threw a wave of fire blindly into the grove. The foliage was too wet to take light easily, but whoever was hidden there had their control broken in that moment, and Katara took the upper hand in their struggle. She was doing to that person what they'd done to Zuko a moment before.
Others, having seen the beacon, began running in to assist them, and a voice in the bamboo groaned. Zuko honed in on it and punched a flame forward. A crackling wail of pain sounded out. Something broke, and Katara's posture lightened, like she had won the contest and faced no further challenge. Zuko, aching all over and sapped of strength, wavered dizzy trying to not pass out. Sokka ran in from the direction of the mansion and bounded into the forest with Aang following. They began dragging a body into the clearing.
They pressed Nuwa, burned and screaming, to the ground.
Sokka tied her wrists, and his sister was free to break her hold and stood up straight, panting from effort. She turned to Zuko, put a hand on his arm, and traced it down to his burned hands. Without hesitation she pressed her hands around his, flowing between them the rainwater, and the pain abated.
#
Katara held his hands in hers, taking solace in being with him again. Being angry with him didn't change the fact that she couldn't stand to be away from him, and a dam broke on her emotions. It was like he'd tried to burn his own fingers to the bone out of desperation, and she was grateful for it, because it gave her an excuse to touch him without needing to go through the steps of the mutual apology just yet, an ordeal she wasn't prepared for while her own feelings were still in turmoil.
Nuwa screamed and cursed as she writhed on the ground. Piandao had joined them with a dozen students, and he watched his long-time servant with an expression of disgust.
Katara hid her face from the rest of the group by stepping close to his body with their hands pressed together. After the position the Dai Li had forced Zuko into, and the disappointment she'd felt in him, she'd followed after into the same disgrace no more than a moment later, reflecting back upon herself every dirty thought that had cropped up regarding him. As they had run, she'd burned in shame. Similarly, she'd felt moral outrage to the suggestion of bloodbending and had instantly taken the high ground that she would never do such a thing, and that assertion, too, had been thrown back in her face. It wouldn't be possible to be angry with him without being equally angry with herself, and she hadn't known how to face that. So she prayed that they could apologize wordlessly, physically, that maybe just grasping his hands was enough to wipe their mutual shame away, that he wouldn't demand an answer from her, and she wouldn't have to listen to him apologize again. Hidden away in the solace of night lied what she didn't want others to see about herself—the same sin he'd committed.
His steady breathing was a salve. She leaned against him. He shuddered. She could still feel the connection she'd opened to a new way of seeing and a sense of his privacy and agency was stripped. It was easy, fresh after using the technique on the woman, to have done the same to him, and she hated to know that.
"Are you afraid of me?"
"Of course not," he whispered. "How did you know I was out here?"
"You didn't even eat since we came back. I was worried about you. I was going to come apologize."
"I should be the one saying sorry, not you."
"You already did, but I didn't accept it. Don't keep secrets from me anymore."
"I won't."
Their soft words came surrounded by a string of vulgarities and hysteria from the arrested servant. Sokka had a hard time pinning her down as, despite being middle-aged, her body thrashed in frenetic opposition like a cornered animal. "He's a firebender!" she shouted at Katara. "He murdered your people. Let me end him."
Keeping his hands in hers, she turned to speak over her shoulder with resolution. "Zuko hasn't killed anyone."
They took a moment to meet, away from her screaming, as everyone had questions for him. He recounted the interaction, and Sokka and Piandao felt committed to holding the interrogation armed with that much. They returned and stood before the woman. "It's useless, Nuwa. You're best off cooperating with us. Tell us everything and we won't hurt you, but if you refuse to answer, we'll turn you over to the military." She begged him not to, in a sudden fervent terror. "Why did you try to kill him?"
"Revenge. I've lived for this."
"You entered my service long before he arrived here."
"The Fire brat used to train here. Do you remember? I finally got accepted to work for you the very same year he was banished."
"You were planning to kill him when he was a child?"
"Yes. I waited, thinking he might come back some day. I was going to poison him, but he never ate a meal alone, that girl was always by his side, ruining herself with him, and with his herbal knowledge I had to think of a new plan, or he might recognize a poison in his meal and stop eating before ingesting a lethal dose. Then she finally left him."
"Why did you want to kill him?"
"He's the blood of the enemy. My people were genocided."
"The Fire Nation never reached the North Pole," said Sokka. Katara, realizing, felt sick.
"My mother was from the South, just like you."
"That letter, did that come from you?" She affirmed it. "That happened before your time."
"It happened to my mother. You can't tell by looking at me, can you, boy? Yes, my mother was the prisoner in that story. She broke free from the prison but had no way to return home, so she took up here, fomenting a plan. Alone, stranded in a foreign nation, she had to adopt a camouflage to evade suspicion, and she wedded a nonbender. My mother's eyes were beautiful, the purest blue of the ocean, and she mixed her lineage with the mud of this country, giving me these dirt colored eyes. When she finally had a waterbending child, she left him and took me away. We lived in bliss, training. My mother knew she wouldn't live long enough to see the end of your line herself, so she created me, and passed on what she learned. The prison term destroyed her body, but I could be her reincarnation. She was beautiful, once, before your prison sapped her youth. When I look in a mirror I can't even see her eyes anymore, all I have are these, the coloration of the enemy. If not for the stress of her internment, she would still be alive. It took decades off her lifespan. You took my mother from me!"
Zuko shouted, "I didn't do anything to you! I ended the war."
"Bring my mother back and I'll forgive you."
He looked disturbed, and Katara shushed him, making him refocus on his hands in the healing water. His breathing calmed back down. Piandao continued, "Why did you give that letter to Katara? Are you working with the Dai Li?"
"Feh, do I look Earth Kingdom to you? We wanted the same thing. If I prompted the girl into killing him, it would be even better than doing it myself. I could save her from wasting herself on a Fire bastard, and she could join me. But after I gave her that knowledge, everything my mother taught me, she hid it away and never killed him, so I had to continue alone. I was waiting for the full moon. Otherwise I would have killed him sooner."
They tried other questions, but she truly didn't know anything, and couldn't have been the one who attacked Yue. The plan had been set up around her, leaning on her without needing to inform her, rendering her useless as a prisoner and expendable. Piandao had her dismissed to the cellar, where they had a room that could be used as a cell for the time being. The students dragged her off.
Zuko could flex his fingers again by that time, and she paused for a break while Piandao spoke with him. The master knelt on the ground and apologized for his oversight. Zuko replied that it was okay, but he didn't relent. "It's your right as Firelord to remove me from my position. As a member of the White Lotus it was indefensible to make such a mistake for so long. Punish me any way you see fit."
Zuko replied, "Stand up. You forget, I might not be Firelord for much longer."
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