AtLA fanfic: Red and Blue: A Different Beginning Part Three
Title: Red and Blue: A Different Beginning
Author: SCWLC
Disclaimer: Nope. Don't own nuthin'.
Rating: PG for now, I suspect it will go up later but . . . well . . .
Summary: A slightly different start, a little bit of self-deception - they can go a long way together.
Notes: The self-deception continues into the utterly ridiculous. I warned you this was senseless.
After the Battle: The First Encounter
Katara was waiting eagerly for Lee, and almost missed him when he first stepped into her view. He looked terrible. Tired and gaunt, the ponytail she'd become used to seeing was chopped off and there was fuzz on his head, indicating he wasn't shaving most of his head any more. He was limping a little too, and Katara rushed to his side. "Lee! Are you okay? What happened?"
"Katara," he croaked. Then suddenly he was clinging to her as though she was a lifeline in a turbulent ocean. Maybe she was.
Stroking his head gently, Katara pulled him to a bench, making him sit down and ordering food and water. Finally he eased up, and she said, "Do you want to talk about it?"
He shook his head, paused, said, "I . . . yes . . . I don't know."
"Whatever you think you can tell me," she told him.
"Uncle and I, we've . . . we've been declared traitors," he said, in a broken whisper. "I can never go home."
"Oh, Lee," Katara wrapped her arms back around him, offering what comfort she could. "I'm so sorry." The food arrived, and she watched as Lee, who had previously always had enough gold to pay for everything and insist on it, hesitated.
"I . . . I can't pay," he told her. "I shouldn't-"
"You need to eat something," Katara told him briskly. He needed her help and she wasn't going to turn her back on him now. "I wasn't meeting with you at every stop because I wanted you to pay for my food. You look like you haven't eaten in days and I expect you to eat something. Then I'm going to look at your leg and see if I can heal it."
"You don't have to-"
"Yes I do," she interrupted sternly. Then she pointed at the plate. "Eat."
He ate, but Katara noticed him carefully wrapping portions of food and putting them aside. He noticed she'd caught him and flushed. "Uncle hasn't had anything much either," he admitted. "I'd hate to come back and not have brought him anything."
"I understand," Katara said. "But if you wanted, you and your uncle could join me and my friends while we travel."
Lee shook his head. "I couldn't," he told her. "Now that Uncle and I have been declared traitors the Fire Nation will be looking for us. I don't want to cause you trouble."
"We can handle ourselves. My friend is-"
"No."
"But-"
"No," he said firmly. "I don't care if you were travelling with the Avatar. I wouldn't want you to have that kind of trouble."
Katara couldn't stop herself from kissing his cheek. "Eat your dumplings," she told him. When he was finished they found a corner with some privacy and Katara fixed up the ankle he'd hurt since she last saw him. Before he left to return to his uncle, they kissed, expecting it might well be the last time. "If you change your mind," she told him, "We're going to Omashu."
"Goodbye," Lee said.
She watched him trudge off, worrying, but knowing there wasn't anything they could do. Maybe when the war was over she'd have a chance to find him.
After the Battle: The Second Encounter
Out of the corner of his bad eye, Zuko was aware that the Avatar and his two friends in blue were there, along with some earthbender. But it was his bad side, and while he had adapted well enough to catching motion, he couldn't really see clearly. Moreover, he had to focus on his sister. With the Avatar, he knew the boy and his friends wouldn't attack him while his back was turned like this.
Then Azula attacked, striking out at his uncle when the man was distracted by something. Zuko saw the man go down, striking at his sister in fury at the same time as the others. When the dust cleared, his uncle was lying on the ground, burned and barely breathing. He fell to his knees, suppressing the keening that was trying to escape his throat.
There was a roaring in his ears, and he clutched his uncle to him, only aware that the Avatar and his friends were the enemy, and the enemy was too close to his uncle. "Get away from us!" he shouted hoarsely. Exhausted and running on instinct, he desperately pushed them away, aware someone was saying something but not able to hear it for the blind need to hide and protect his family. "Leave!" he cried, an arc of fire leaving his hand and making them all jump back.
They left, and Zuko set to dragging his uncle to safety. A half an hour later, a flash of blue caught his attention and he snapped a fireball at it, sure it was one of the Avatar's friends. "Hey!" came a very familiar voice.
Zuko scrambled to his feet and found himself face to face with an exhausted-looking Katara, who shot him an angry look, shoved him out of the way, and plonked herself down to heal his uncle without paying any attention to Zuko. He just stared. He hadn't seen her since that day several weeks before when she'd told him they were going to Omashu. It hadn't been the longest stretch he'd ever gone without seeing her, but it felt like the longest. He hadn't expected to see her again, and here she was. Just when he needed her the most. "You're here," he said, blankly.
She shot him a sour look. "No thanks to you. I offer to help after that mess with the crazy girl and you try to fry me?"
"You were there?" Zuko asked. "I wasn't . . . I mean, I just . . ." He didn't even know what he meant. He was just grateful for the coincidence that put her at the same place as himself and the Avatar once again.
"You didn't notice?" she asked. "We had the crazy girl pinned and there was only one person between us."
This, at least, he could explain. "It's my bad side," he told her. "My peripheral vision on that side is awful. I can't really see anything."
Her face softened. "Oh. Well, I can't fix everything, and he'll be tender for a while, but he'll be okay."
"Thank you," Zuko found himself on the other side of the small room of the hovel he'd been hiding in, his arms tightly around her. "I'm sorry about what I did before. I just . . ."
She sighed. "It's okay. I've overreacted when my brother and friends were hurt, too." Then she yawned and sagged against him.
"Are you okay?" he asked, alarmed. She was leaning against him very heavily. "Did she hurt you? Do I need to get you help?"
"Mm-mm," she mumbled into his shoulder. "No sleep for days. Tired."
He shook her a little to keep her conscious enough to answer questions. "Do you need to get back soon?"
She yawned again. "No. Everyone's gonna be . . . sleeping."
With his uncle resting comfortably, Zuko picked her up and felt the moment she fell asleep by the way her whole body just became near-deadweight in his arms. He found a second cot and curled up with her on it, just lying there and watching her sleep the day away. Eventually he fell asleep, holding her against him just to feel the rise and fall of her chest.
When he woke, she was gone. But scratched into the floor was a note.
Sorry I had to leave. I'll see you again soon.
Love, Katara
After the Battle: The Third Meeting
Katara was craning her neck as she looked at the masses crowded into the cavern waiting to get onto the ferry to Ba Sing Se. While the others were chatting amicably with the refugees they'd chosen to accompany, Katara was anxiously looking around, hoping (and knowing it was completely irrational) that she'd spot Lee there.
Amazingly, as she craned her neck about, she spotted a familiar head of grey hair. "Uncle," she murmured.
"What did you say?" came Suki's voice from behind her at the same time the warrior poked Katara sharply.
Katara was pretty sure she jumped three feet in the air. "Suki! Don't sneak up on people like that."
"If you were paying any attention at all, you'd've noticed I was coming up behind you and asking you what you were doing, instead of needing me to poke you to get our attention," the other girl said reprovingly. "So what's going on?"
"I just . . . saw someone I recognised," Katara told her, now looking for Lee in the crowd.
"Family?" Suki asked.
Katara paused and frowned at her. "No. Why would you say that?"
"Because I could have sworn you said, 'Uncle'," the other replied.
The waterbender winced a little. "I said that out loud?"
Suki nodded. "So if it's not an uncle of yours, why did you say that?"
Katara suddenly spotted Lee coming up to his uncle and broke into a wide grin. "Because I saw Lee's uncle. Excuse me," she told Suki, and rushed off. "Lee!" she exclaimed as she came up to him. Then she flung herself into his arms, kissing him.
"Katara," he murmured into her ear when they finally pulled apart to breathe. "What are you doing here?"
She sighed, recalling all over again that Appa was missing. "My friend lost his-"
Lee's uncle made an odd noise - sort of a strangled choking sound. Lee instantly turned, forgetting about Katara. "Uncle? Are you alright?"
The man coughed, cleared his throat and said, "I am fine, nephew. I am most . . . interested . . . by your . . . acquaintance."
Lee frowned at him. "You made a lot of comments about the poems I wrote for her. You even helped me write them."
The uncle looked rather stunned. "This young lady is the one for whom you wrote those poems?" he asked. He seemed to be choosing his words with great care.
"You know," Suki said, from where she'd come up behind Katara, "You look awfully familiar," she told Lee. "Have you ever been to Kyoshi?"
Lee looked a little pale, and Katara knew that he'd probably been there on some manoeuvre for the Fire Nation. But since he was a refugee now, banished from his homeland, letting that on to Suki would do no one any good. So she told the lie she'd believed from him before, embellished a little to explain his current state. "That's where we met," she said. "At the marketplace in Kyoshi. Lee's uncle was a merchant until his ship was destroyed in a battle with the Fire Nation."
Suki had turned to face her while she was speaking, so Lee mouthed, "Thank you," behind the other girl's back.
"Sugar Queen!" Toph's voice carried over the din.
"Oh," Katara said in disappointment. "I'll see you soon, Lee!"
She hurried off, hearing Lee's uncle sputtering, "What do you mean, what do I mean? Do you not know who she is friends with?"
Katara shook her head. She didn't want to know. It wasn't like Lee wouldn't have known she was with the Avatar. As she caught up to the others, she heard Suki muttering, "Where have I seen him before?"
After the Battle: The Fourth Meeting
If there was one thing Zuko had figured out since they'd begun the dreadful work of serving hot leaf juice to the unappreciative and stupid, it was that his uncle was clearly crazy.
"Zuko!" he'd exclaimed as he'd watched Katara get lost in the crowd. "Is it truly wise to become involved with the young lady?"
"What do you mean, Uncle?" Zuko had asked, little knowing that his uncle must have recently found some bush to turn into a hallucinogenic tea.
His uncle had sputtered. "What do you mean, what do I mean?" he demanded. "Do you not know who she is friends with?"
Zuko turned and frowned at his uncle. "Should I? How do you know her, anyhow?"
His uncle's jaw had sagged open. "I met her at the North Pole. She is one of the Avatar's friends, and was there in the Oasis with him when Zhao killed the Moon Spirit."
Sighing, Zuko told him, "So she was there. That doesn't mean she's the Avatar's friend. How could she be? Both the Avatar and his Water Tribe friend know what I look like. If she were friends with the Avatar, he would have told her who I am, and she would have nothing to do with me."
"Unless she is covering for you," his uncle said in reproof.
"So then I have an ally within the Avatar's party. Which I don't," Zuko added repressively. "Honestly Uncle. She's just a nice waterbender who's gotten sidetracked. She said one of her friends had lost something, so obviously they're on their way to Ba Sing Se to get a replacement for something too rare or expensive to find outside the city. It has nothing to do with the Avatar, and I don't want to hear anything more about it!"
It had taken a great deal of effort, and the Blue Spirit had made several appearances before Zuko finally tracked Katara down to the Upper Ring. He cautiously scouted the house they'd been graciously given by the city's authorities and wondered how they'd gotten it. Then he found Katara's window and slipped inside.
She nearly shrieked when she saw him, and Zuko lunged across the space, clapping a hand over her mouth, and ripping his mask off with the other. "Katara! It's me," he whispered harshly.
"Lee?" she gasped. He nodded. "What is wrong with you?" she hissed at him. "You nearly scared me to death!"
Zuko backed away. "Uncle and I are stuck in the Lower Ring," he explained. "Without the right papers we can't even get into the Middle Ring. But I wanted to see you, so I had to sneak up here." He deliberately sat on her bed as he spoke and looked up at her through his eyelashes. He hadn't done that since he was very small, but it had always worked on his mother, and he was willing to try anything to keep her from being mad at him.
He saw her waver for a moment, then her resolve to be mad at him crumbled. "I missed you," she admitted, and sat on the bed, then curled up onto his lap, fitting against him as perfectly as she always did. "I was worried. You're both okay?"
"Uncle's got us working in a tea shop," he said wryly. "I think he's been dreaming of doing that his whole life. It's a little disturbing how much he loves tea."
They were interrupted. "Well, well, well," said a voice from the door. "What do we have here?"
"Oh, no," Katara moaned. "Toph, please don't tell anyone."
"Tell anyone what?" the blind girl asked. "Is there something wrong with your boyfriend?"
Katara glared for a moment. "You know perfectly well that Sokka would start frothing at the mouth and would never stop if he found out I had a boyfriend."
"So no one knows except me?" the girl seemed to delight in this information in a frighteningly wicked way.
"What do I have to do to keep you from telling the others?" Katara asked with a sigh.
"I don't know . . ." the girl said in patently false contemplation. "Why, as a Bei Fong, I have everything I could possibly ever want, and all by waving this one little seal around," she said, waving said seal.
Well, that answered the question of how they got the house.
"I promise to only bug you about baths once a week," Katara haggled.
The other girl grinned. "I'll take that, and one favour to be specified at a future date," she said.
"I'm going to regret this," Katara told her, "But done."
"Pleasure doing business with you," the Bei Fong girl declared. "Don't do anything with him that I wouldn't do." She casually sauntered out the door.
"What wouldn't you do?" Katara muttered as she turned back to Zuko.
"If she's that bad," Zuko told her, "Maybe you should tell your friends about me."
Katara shook her head. "It's not that I'm embarrassed or anything," she insisted.
"It's okay-"
She spoke over the reassurance. "I really do lo - like you, and I want to tell them, but my brother's kind of . . . stupid overprotective, and he'd probably try to do something bad to you. It just . . . it wouldn't end well," she explained. "Once I'm not travelling with him any more, maybe, but right now . . ." she trailed off, looking at him hopefully. "You're not mad, are you?"
"No!" Zuko hastened to tell her. "It's fine. Look," he said, shaking everything off. "I came up here to see you, not argue or worry about anything. Can we just-"
"Yes!" she agreed, then he found himself with a wriggling armful of girl and decided this was far better than talking.
They made plans to meet regularly before he left, and Zuko just barely avoided the patrols as he slipped in and around the back to the apartment he now shared with his uncle. The man was awake when he returned, and gave him a resigned look. "I cannot convince you she is with the Avatar, can I?"
Defensively, Zuko said, "How do you even know I was-"
His uncle silently pointed at his nephew's neck, which was when Zuko discovered the hickey Katara had left on him.
After the Battle: Meetings
Katara knew she should feel guilty for running off to see Lee so much when she should have been helping Aang hunt for Appa, but this was the first time she'd been able to just go and see him every day without making special plans or having to worry about making excuses to the others. All she had to do was say she was going off to look more for Appa, and she was free to leave.
It took very little time to find the tea shop where Lee was working, and in no time she became a regular. In any event, the Lower Ring may have been a slum, but it was a lot less annoying to be down there than it was to be stuck in the Upper Ring with snooty girls who thought it was fun to make other people feel bad.
Toph joined her a few times, and it turned out that she and Lee's uncle had run into each other once before, so the two chatted comfortably about whatever it was Toph wanted to talk about with him. Katara didn't know because she was usually busy helping Lee with serving. Mostly because it allowed her to follow him around and into the back where they could spend time kissing until Toph or Uncle Mushi would remind them that there were paying customers waiting.
Still, she always made sure to look both before and after she left for any trace or rumour about Appa.
Oddly enough, during that time, her thoughts had turned to the elusive Prince Zuko. She still had never gotten a good look at the guy, and she'd heard Sokka and Aang wondering more than once where he was. She was a little curious herself, if only to find out what he looked like. She was chatting with Mushi, while waiting for Lee to finish up so they could go on a proper date, when the topic came up. "It's just that I heard so much from them both about Prince Zuko," she complained to the man. He coughed. "Are you okay?"
"Just . . ." he cleared his throat. "Just fine. Something went down the wrong way."
"Okay," she said, pouring him a glass of water nonetheless. "Anyhow, they kept saying that Zuko was ugly with a scar on his face, so I wondered if Lee might be Zuko, you know?" she giggled, sharing the joke with him. "But that's ridiculous. I mean, Lee's hardly ugly, and just because someone has a scar on his face, doesn't mean he's the prince, right? Anyhow, it's obvious that I'm travelling with the Avatar, and if he were Zuko, he'd've tried something by now, you know?" Lee came out of the kitchen then, looking irritably down at his chest, which had somehow gotten soaked, causing the material to cling to the muscles Katara knew were down there. She bit her lip and murmured, "Definitely not ugly."
Mushi coughed again, and Katara whipped around. "I'm fine," he told her waving off her concerns. "It's simply an old man not wishing to be too invasive in the romance of you youngsters."
"Oh," she said, and blushed. "Sorry."
She hurried over to Lee, kissed him hello, and they left. Katara looked back briefly, to see Mushi's leaning on the table, tears of laughter streaming down his face. Lee rolled his eyes and pulled her off. "Ignore Uncle," he told her. "Sometimes I think he lives somewhere in his head the rest of us can't go."
"Your uncle's a very nice man," Katara objected. "I like him a lot."
"I'm glad you do, and he likes you too," Lee told her. "He said something about you being a good influence." Then he stopped and pulled her into a kiss in the middle of the street. Practice had made him better at silly, romance-scroll-inspired gestures, and it was really wonderfully nice. "Now can we stop talking about Uncle?" he asked plaintively.
"Of course," she said with a smile. It was fair. She wouldn't want to talk about her father on a date, either.
They found a nice little noodle shop and sat and talked for hours. Katara had found a whole pile of scrolls of the Tales of Ming Tsu, and had split them between her and Lee. They'd both just finished the last of them and settled in for a nice long chat about their favourite series. It was a wonderful evening and Katara left, promising Lee she'd meet him again the next evening.
When they found themselves fleeing the city on Appa after having to leave poor Jet dying in those caverns under Lake Laogai, the one thing Katara most regretted was that she'd had to stand Lee up for their date. She just hoped she could get him to forgive her.
After the Battle: Meeting Again
Zuko was, to put it frankly, in a terrible mood. Katara hadn't shown up for their date, and when he'd gone by the house, she and everyone else had been gone. He was angry with her for not telling him she was leaving, he was worried that something had happened to make her leave and he was very concerned she had decided she didn't want him any more.
She showed up, days later, looking penitent, and tried to kiss him before even saying hello. He was so angry that she'd stood him up and then had the gall to not be hurt in the slightest, that Zuko just backed away. "Hello, Katara."
"I'm so, so, so, so, sorry," she said. "There was this thing, and the Dai Li tried to capture me and my friends and we had to run, and I'm so sorry-"
He'd seen the Dai Li in action since he arrived in Ba Sing Se. He'd seen the formidably trained earthbenders taking away those they deemed criminals, and their methods weren't gentle. He interrupted her, dragging her into the back and starting to check her over. "Did they hurt you? Are you okay?"
"I'm fine," she told him. "I'm sorry I had to skip out without telling you. If I could have, I'd've been here. I promise."
"After you came to see me when you should have been in bed, resting," Zuko said, "I'll be the judge of whether you're hurt or not." He carefully ran his hands up and down her limbs, listening and watching for telltale movements or noises that would indicate pain. He just didn't trust her not to lie to keep him from worrying.
Katara sighed, and just let him do it. "Oh!" said his uncle, "I am most sorry for interrupting, but I would remind you, Lee, that we have customers waiting."
They both froze, and Zuko realised how intimately his hands were placed, and how close his face was to Katara's. "You have customers," she said softly to him.
"Sorry," he said, backing away. He stopped when she grabbed his wrist.
Katara's eyes looked a very deep blue as she said, "I didn't want you to stop. It's just that . . . there are . . . people. Waiting."
"Right," he heard himself say. But her mouth looked so very tempting, and he was so relieved she was okay, and she hadn't wanted to miss their date . . .
He wasn't quite clear on how they started kissing that time, only that the adrenaline rush of all the anxiety he'd gone through meant that there was a sense that something had been . . . scaled up since the last time they'd done this, and they both wanted more. It was an act of will to pull away. "I have to . . . I have to work," he reminded both of them.
"I'll see you at closing," she told him.
That whole day, he felt like he was floating, and his uncle spent a lot of time poking him to keep him from daydreaming. Katara showed up on time for their date, and they went out. After dinner, they wound up in a small park, hidden amongst a clump of trees that gave them privacy, and Zuko found himself in territory he'd only ever fantasised about. Only the fear of getting caught in a public space kept them from passing the point of no return.
The next day a letter arrived from Katara, brought by a dragon hawk, telling him that she'd had to leave due to circumstances beyond her control, and she'd keep writing as long as he wanted her to.
One week after that, Azula found them, and Zuko gave in to the temptation his sister offered. He helped her finish her invasion of Ba Sing Se, he let her take his uncle away and he got on a ship to finally go home.
He told himself he'd make Katara understand when he was able to dress her in blue silks, build her a bending arena all for her personal use and give her all the perks of nobility she deserved.
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