AtlA crackfic: What Really Happened 5/6
Title: What Really Happened Part 5/6
Author: SCWLC
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Rating: PG? Ish?
Summary: Yet another entry in the backfiller of the first story in the series.
Notes: Tales of Ba Sing Se, Lake Laogai and the Earth King.
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“Are you ever gonna start another fight, Katara?” Toph demanded at dinner a few evenings after the most recent kerfuffle.
“What?” Katara asked.
Toph looked quite annoyed as she explained. “I already told you this. Every time you tell another story about you and Sparky before the brainwashing in Ba Sing Se, there’s a fight. I’m bored. Start another fight already.”
“What?” Zuko echoed.
Aang sighed. “As much as I don’t really want to hear this, I think we all deserve to know the rest of why you two decided to get married out of nowhere.” He put down his vegetable jook and looked a little nauseated as he spoke, but he also looked quite resigned.
Katara sighed. “Well, you know how Zuko and Iroh were working in a tea shop in Ba Sing Se. . .”
Katara had gone exploring and wound up overhearing one of the maids at a nearby house talking about the handsome boy with the scar on his face and his uncle. She caught the girl, questioning her briefly and discovered, from her descriptions that it had to be Zuko. Curious, and very interested, she snuck some of the expensive food from the house they were staying in and bribed the girl to set up a date with Zuko on her behalf. She also made sure that the girl, Jin, wouldn’t tell Zuko the date was with Katara specifically.
That evening, Katara met him at the prearranged restaurant. He was already waiting at their table when she sat down in the other seat. His eyes went wide. “You!”
She smiled. “Yes, me. What are you doing here?”
“Nothing,” he snapped. “You set this meeting up to do what? Taunt me about how low I’ve fallen?”
“No,” she snapped back. “I wanted to know if you were still chasing us since your sister seems determined to kill you under your father’s orders.”
His jaw clenched, manfully-
“You just can’t help yourself, can you?”
“Would you stop harping on my narrative technique?”
“You don’t have technique, you have overwrought, flowery, purple, prose.”
“Hrmph.”
In the end, it was only in the interests of avoiding a scene that he didn’t storm out of there.
“You mean, you made a scene, and I would have been lynched by the people there for making you cry.”
Every eye in the room turned to stare at Katara. She flushed under the scrutiny. “I didn’t want him to leave?” she offered.
“Excuse me sir, would you and your girlfriend care for dessert?” asked the waiter.
“She’s not my girlfriend!” Zuko practically shouted.
Instead of responding the way she had the last time the implication was made, she suddenly burst into tears, spouting the most humiliating nonsense. “If you wanted to break up with me, why did you bring me here, Lee?” She buried her face in her hands, shoulders shaking with feigned sobs. “And on our anniversary!”
“Katara!” Sokka said.
“I know,” she said, miserably. “I didn’t want him to go. I panicked.”
“Katara!” Aang said, looking horrified.
Zuko smirked. “I knew you wanted me.”
In a blind panic, not wanting any more attention to be drawn to himself, Zuko grasped at straws to silence her. “Honey, did you forget why we were celebrating? You’ve been acting like this all day. We’re engaged now, remember?”
Suki made a delighted high-pitched noise, then exclaimed, “That is so romantic!”
Katara looked wistful. “It really is.”
With no other reason to cry, she flung herself over the table, saying something about how she was an idiot and kissed him. They stayed that way to the applause in the restaurant. Zuko decided that he really didn’t mind for as long as the kiss went on.
Sokka and Aang were making choking noises while Toph had both hands clapped over her mouth to muffle the snorted laughter. Suki had a bright grin on her face as she looked at the couple who were staring deeply into each other’s eyes.
“This is quite better than my favourite romance scroll,” Iroh said, a little misty-eyed.
The moment broke as Katara shot him a look. “So I have you to thank for his reading taste?”
Eventually they broke off and finished their meal. They slowly made their way through the city in silence, holding hands. Neither wanted to shatter the perfection of the moment, letting the silence stretch between them, saying all that needed to be said about their connection with each other.
“I hear anything about the animal with two heads and I’m bailing out on this,” Toph said. “Romance is weird.”
Iroh sighed. “That is one of the most beautiful tales, Miss Toph.”
“I don’t want to hear about it either, Uncle,” Zuko said hastily.
They had to talk at some point, however. “I’m sorry,” Katara told him sincerely. “It was just . . . we’ve kissed and you sort of offered to be my boyfriend before, and it just felt a little like you’d decided I was repulsive.”
He stared. “So . . . that whole thing in front of Jun-“
“Who?”
“The bounty hunter.”
“Oh. That was because Sokka was there. Really, his head would explode if I didn’t freak out about you in front of him.”
“What?” Sokka shrieked. “You were just . . . faking? The whole time?”
Suki leaned back and looked at Zuko as though assessing him objectively. “He is quite handsome if you’re just sticking to appearances.”
Sokka choked on his meat, then made some random gurgling noises, then made random vowel noises after working the meat down. Suki, to the disgust of everyone else at the table looked at Sokka with a face that said, “Isn’t he just adorable?”
Zuko finally admitted to her that he was there as a refugee, hiding from the Fire Nation like most of the others in the Lower Circle. Not knowing whether he just wanted to see her again or whether he wanted to pump her for information on the Avatar, Zuko agreed to meet again.
“I can’t believe you put us all at risk like that!” Sokka said, waving his arms in the air like a maniac.
Aang was just wide-eyed and shocked.
Toph was muttering under her breath. If one were to listen closely, they would have heard, “Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!”
It was right after they got Appa back that Zuko missed a date. And they had become dates in the meanwhile. There hadn’t been many of them, but they’d chatted, sharing interests and every one had ended with deeply sensual kisses that left them both breathless and wanting-
“Katara is right, nephew. You do narrate much like The Golden Flower of Pao-Tse,” Iroh commented.
Zuko blushed. Suki perked up. “The Golden Flower of Pao-Tse?” she said eagerly. “Oh, that’s my favourite!”
Toph made a face. “It’s okay. Dragonmaster’s Daughter is way better.” The whole table now turned to stare at her. Aware of the stares in her own way, Toph glared around impartially. “I had a nurse who used to read them aloud instead of the books on proper ladylike behaviour.”
“Oh . . .” Everyone around the table silently tried not to express that they had, perhaps, discovered the origins of Toph’s complete lack of decorum.
Katara was feeling rather unhappy about it, especially since they’d had to flee the city with Appa, then fight their way back in to see the Earth King. She went looking, and discovered Iroh’s new location in the Upper Ring.
“And you didn’t drop by?” Iroh sent her a sad look.
“I didn’t know whether I could trust you,” she told him.
Sokka’s jaw hit the floor with that. “So you trusted Zuko, the guy who tied you to a tree and force-kissed you-“
“There wasn’t that much force,” Katara told him.
He ignored her. “And tried to capture Aang-“
“He could have right after the thing with Azula chasing us and Iroh getting hurt and he didn’t,” Katara protested.
“But you didn’t trust the guy who helped us fight Zhao at the North Pole?” Sokka finished incredulously.
“Pretty much,” Katara said blithely.
Zuko stared at her. “That doesn’t even make sense to me, Katara.”
She followed him home, and waiting until he left to go back to work, crept in and found Zuko lying on his bed, sweaty with fever and twisting about, muttering about his mother, dragons and fire. Something in her twinged, and she chose to sit with him every moment she could get away. Sometimes he woke and recognised her, sometimes he seemed to see someone else where she sat.
Katara stopped talking, losing herself in the memories. Finally, running out of patience with her, Toph picked up a chopstick and poked Katara hard in the ribs with it. “Ow!”
“More story!” Toph demanded. “No one’s started fighting yet.”
“You are a disturbing person,” Sokka informed the earthbender.
When Zuko was finally awake and coherent while Katara was there, they talked and he agreed that he no longer wanted to hunt Aang down. He’d had an epiphany and all he wanted was to find himself and his own path. He agreed to talk to his uncle about teaching Aang firebending.
Katara sighed. “And that was when I did something dumb.” She looked at Suki. “I thought it was you. Azula was dressed in your armour with the Kyoshi makeup on, and she caught me. So I told you . . . her . . . what I thought was you but was her, about me and Zuko.”
“What?” Suki said, eyes wide.
Katara winced. “I know, I know.”
“How could you think it was me from up close? I look nothing like her!” Suki demanded waving her hands.
“Now sweetheart,” Sokka said, trying to placate his girlfriend, “We were all fooled, and you have to admit all that thick paint makes a person almost unrecognisable.”
Suki was having none of it. “You got close enough to talk and you thought I looked like that skinny, freakish, mutant-faced-“
“Hey!” Zuko snapped. “She looks just like my mother, and if you’re calling Azula ugly, you’re calling my mother ugly.”
“Well maybe you need to get your memory checked, ‘cause your sister’s a mutant with weird eyes,” snapped Suki.
So the fight started and Toph cheered the two on while Sokka and Katara tried to get their respective significant others to stop. Aang and Iroh shared looks of resignation and took their food elsewhere to talk philosophy. There was no point in brokering peace there. Hostilities would just have to cease on their own.
Go to Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6
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