Chapter Text
While Katara stood in a council room, arguing with Chief Arnook on her right—or lack thereof—to check on the welfare of the camp’s prisoners,
While Jun tried composing letters in her head, because they hadn’t given her nearly enough paper to be making her mistakes in written form,
(While Hanako turned another scrap of metal into a shiv,)
Zuko stopped gulping his dinner down long enough to actually look around.
People were shivering. People who weren’t just him. They were huddled together, hoods up, conversations low under the eyes of their guards. Zuko was cold on the outside of his skin, not just the inside, despite his army-issued coat. Because Zhao had been the kind of idiot to attack the greatest waterbending stronghold on a full moon in winter, and he’d outfitted his troops with that same blithe faith in Fire Nation superiority over the elements (or in the firmer belief that the only one the scholars would write about would be him; what were a few soldiers with frostbite worth, in the eyes of history?)
Which was to say: these coats were made for Fire Nation soldiers based out of Fire Nation ships. Ships where crewmen could duck into the boiler room after their shifts and warm back up. They weren’t made for living and working and sleeping and eating on ice.
Zuko stood up. Scrubbed his bowl out with snow, and returned it to the clean stack. Walked up to a guard.
“I want to see the quartermaster,” he said.
“No.”
He sat back down.
(Most of his old crew were here, but none of them had shown any inclination to sit with him. Or talk to him. Which was fine, that was normal, that was what they’d done back on the Wanyi, too.)
(But did they really have to sit with the bounty hunter who’d kidnapped him?)
He waited. Dinner ended. Curfew came immediately afterwards. He waited to get in the back of the line as their guards escorted them to the men and women's igloos (...and a new special igloo for the bounty hunter?), then waited to slip away, into the quartermaster’s building.
“Our clothes are too thin,” Zuko said, “and the work too hard. We’re going to freeze in our own sweat. You salvaged enough from the wrecks. Give us a change of clothes, so we can hang the other pair to dry while we sleep.”
“How did you get in here?” the quartermaster said, which was not a constructive reply. Zuko crossed his arms.
He did not have to wait on the formal Water Tribe response. With how swift it was delivered, these men were probably fathers.
* * *
“What happened to you?” asked Helmsman Kyo, squinting at him in the darkness. The moon was a waxing crescent above, through the distortions in the ice.
“The usual,” said Zuko.
Waterbender fists weren’t as bad as a firebender’s. Zuko, also as usual, learned nothing.
* * *
“Firebenders eat more,” Zuko told the camp cook. “Especially when you have them bending all day. They need more food.”
The man snorted. “Where do you think food comes from, up here? A trade caravan? A market?”
“Then let us fish. Or take us hunting. Or—”
The man was squinting at him. “Oh, you’re the stupid kid. I can tell you don’t need another hit on the head, so why don’t you just take your bowl and sit down?”
Zuko didn’t see why people always thought recent head injuries could explain his actions. He hadn’t failed a concussion test since he was ten.
“If you can’t feed us,” he said, “you shouldn’t keep us.”
“...Take your bowl, kid,” the cook said, with the air of someone saying That was the plan. “It’s not like you’re even a bender.”
He might not be a bender anymore. But somewhere inside, he was starting to feel awfully warm.
He’d missed being angry.
* * *
They weren't allowed breaks. Or to work too slow. Zuko was young and new here and he’d liked being in the sunlight, so he’d hurried his loads out of the forge as soon as they were ready. He’d been making the older prisoners look bad.
“Oops,” Zuko said, as the steel beam slammed down just shy of the guard’s foot.
Miss. But it still worked, for getting them to leave his former crewman alone. The only one allowed to berate Lieutenant Jee was him.
* * *
“Could your little gang keep him from getting new bruises,” Jun hissed to her attendant, “for two consecutive days?”
This thoroughly confirmed her role as the prince’s undercover bodyguard. The crew of the Wanyi knew all about getting paid to care for that brat.
* * *
Bodyguard shmodyguard. The prince was Jun’s bargaining chip. If the Fire Nation had cared about any of the other schmucks stuck up here, they’d already be negotiating their release. Her first job was to make them care, so she could ride the prince’s coat tails out of here.
Now if she could figure out how to word this letter, so the governor of Shinchiheisen would know she had his prince up here, and that ransoming some low-ranking, totally inconsequential prisoners—along with Lady Jun, of course—would be in his best interests.
* * *
“...And they won’t even let me in to look,” Katara said, grinding her current ingredients to a finer paste than the recipe called for, “which is how I know it’s bad. Do they let you in?”
“No,” said Yagoda. “They haven’t called on the healers since the prisoners were moved to the camp.”
“What about the other women? Are any of them guards?”
Yagoda’s hand slowed on her pestle for just a moment. “Hand me the thornleaf? Thank you, dear. Katara, what do you mean, when you say ‘the other women’?”
“The ones training to fight,” she said.
“Mmm,” said her teacher, crumbling the dried leaves over her own bowl.
Katara stopped liquifying her paste. “Yagoda? Who else started training to fight?”
“You weren’t from the North,” Yagoda said, her liver-spotted hands steady. “You came in fighting, and you didn’t stop. Clearly you were an exception, as a Southern woman. Men like their exceptions. Makes it easy, to show that the rest of us really don’t have the spirit for fighting, after all.”
“But. You do.” She’d met so many other healers, gossiped with so many other girls in her classes, answered their questions on what training with the boys was like—they’d been so excited to start for themselves, once the masters weren’t focused on preparing their men for battle. They'd still been excited, when she’d left.
She'd left. And so had Pakku, headed to the south; the only master who’d actually accepted a female student.
“They won’t even let them try?”
“Oh, they let them try,” Yagoda said.
And let them fail, went unspoken.
“Here. A little less finely, this time. It stores longer when the pieces aren’t quite so… tenderized.”
Katara flushed. “Yes, Healer Yagoda.”
Healer. Not master.
…Master Pakku had gone south, after the battle up here. With medicines and supplies and man power enough to help the Southern Tribes start rebuilding.
Her hand stilled on the pestle.
What, exactly, would northern men rebuild in the South?
“...Are you feeling all right, Katara?”
“No,” she said. “No, I’m not.”
What could they rebuild? Even with the best of intentions, the Northerners only knew the North.
When they thought of rebuilding homes, were they picturing their ice houses, instead of her people’s winter igloos and the herding tribes’ yurts? Did they think the South would give up their seasonal camps, give up following the salmon-seals and tending the berry groves, if they built one big city for everyone?
When they found new benders among the children, would they even think to ask the elders what southern bending had been like?
Katara knew her father was on his way home. Him, and his men, from all their different tribes.
But Pakku and his men had been there for nearly a year.
She didn’t want to find a Northern colony where she thought she’d left her home.
Yagoda set Katara’s hands to creating more salves, more ointments, to boiling and bending dry and rolling up bandages for their next use. She talked of births and broken arms and a fish hook stuck in a thumb, which had nothing on Sokka’s two fish hooks, and they were both still laughing as she left. Just like she’d still been able to laugh with a hundred years of war, and no mother, and then no father.
The night sky was clear of clouds, and the world colder for it. Yue hung half full and untouchable overhead. Katara’s breath puffed white into the air, in clouds she could feel turning to glittering ice. Down the street, across the city, stood the white wall that had only stopped the Fire Nation for a day. Beyond it was the wall of the prison camp, which was doing a much better job.
…What could she do?
* * *
They were feeding him. (And he actually felt hungry again.) He got to see the sun all day, and even the moon at night (even if it was through ice blocks set with the same breathless seamlessness as earthbent stone).
It wasn’t the worst prison Zuko had ever been in. But he wasn’t expected to survive here, either.
And he wasn’t alone, this time.
But what could he do?
* * *
Jun was practicing her characters on one of her attendent’s shivs. She had to get this courtly handwriting thing down, and the ink wiped off the rust real nice.
“Please go to sleep,” groaned Hanako.
“Nu-uh,” said Jun. “I want to get this right. And I like wasting their lamp oil.”
“Ugh,” the other woman said, because she couldn’t argue with that.
* * *
Katara stared at Fire Navy smoke stacks, just barely topping the walls.
* * *
Zuko looked at the dark outlines of nearly repaired steamers, and the moon beyond, all of them wobbly through the ice.
* * *
Now there…
* * *
…was an idea.
* * *
She made her way back to her own little Fire Nation ship, thinking less of Sokka’s two fish hooks, and more of the time he’d gotten two clam-doves with one stone.
* * *
If he didn’t act, they might all die.
* * *
If she didn’t, she’d be abandoning them all.
* * *
…He could just leave them. He wasn’t their Fire Lord anymore; he’d barely even been their prince. They weren’t actually…
* * *
…her responsibility.
* * *
He could probably get out alone. Azula might kill him, if he didn’t.
The sun was coming up again, somewhere over the camp’s wall. They were still in shadow, but they wouldn’t be for long.
…He’d better get back to Azula, before he could see the flames from here.
* * *
She could wait it out. It wasn’t likely they’d hurt her.
(Just everyone she’d come with, and everyone in the camps, and all the women they’d never allow to be anything but what they were keeping them as, and…)
She—
* * *
—couldn’t. He just couldn’t.
* * *
“Perfect,” Jun declared, holding aloft the best calligraphy of her life. She hadn’t even smudged up the paper, either.
“I’m going to murder you in your sleep,” Hanako said.
“Mama always said that’s the best way to die.”
“Ugh.”
* * *
“I want to help you,” Katara said.
“With what?” asked Yagoda, looking far more rested.
“With getting out everyone who wants to leave.”
Because she’d been allowed to fight; because women from the Southern Tribe had been classed as different; because they’d made her an exception. Well. The Southern Tribe was recruiting.
Yagoda's smile was old and wrinkled and beautiful.
Operation Kanna was a go.
* * *
And besides. Someone finally needed Zuko’s help to escape.
“I need your help,” he whispered, to the people who’d once been his crew, “to fake my death.”
Some rescue plans were better than others.
* * *
“Did you hear? That kid with the scar is dead.”
“That figures,” said someone else.
“Fuck,” said Jun.
She had her perfect letter sent anyway. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d collected off a dead mark.