Uh...yeah. I don't really have anything to say up here. xD

I own nothing! Zuko, Katara, Aang, Toph, Sokka, Iroh, Azulon, Ozai, Ursa, Zuko, Azula, the Southern Raiders, and anything else recognizable belong to Mike/Bryan/Nickelodeon/Viacom.

Enjoy!

"Your room, Princess Katara," a servant murmured, gesturing vaguely to an almost painfully orate door. The servant's voice wavered as she said princess; clearly, Azula had led her to believe that all royal women were demanding and cruel.

With scrutinizing eyes, Katara looked over the skinny girl. "What is your name?"

A look of fear swept over the face of the questioned servant: whenever Azula had asked for the names of palace staff, she was either going to use them for target practice or have them banished for not accomplishing one of her outrageous, mundane tasks to perfection. "Kai La, p-princess," she managed to stammer.

"Then thank you, Kai La," offered Katara, giving her a hint of a bow to show her gratitude. Again, Kai La's features were consumed with surprise before a delicate smile crept over her thin lips. The princess of the Southern Water Tribe, bowing to a palace maid!

"Of course! I mean, uh, you are very welcome, princess." Red faced and dazed, she returned the bow and scurried off when Katara dismissed her with a slight nod.

Katara sighed wearily as she watched the servant girl's back retreat quickly down the hall; it was so incredibly hard to refrain from bashing her head against the nearest wall. Princess Katara this, Princess Katara that. She was learning that she missed the times when she only had one part to her name.

A bit of crafty maneuvering was required to open the ridiculous hardware of her door without putting her bags down. Once the click of the lock resounded in the empty hallway, she trudged in, kicked the door shut, dropped everything on the stone floors, and promptly collapsed on her bed.

Face full of pillows, she groaned: traveling lately had become a hassle, with all the fame she had accumulated being a war hero and the newly crowned princess of the Southern Water Tribe, and also for the short relationship that she had ended with Avatar Aang.

Katara squirmed within the jungle of tasseled pillows. She needed a nap. Or a bath. Or preferably both, with a nice cup of tea to top it off. A quite curse hissed through her teeth with her next breath when she remembered that she had an ambassador meeting with Zuko, Toph, Iroh, and Sanya, Iroh's new lady friend from the North Pole, within the next hour. Neither bath nor nap could be achieved peacefully in such a short amount of time, though a cup of tea she could probably manage.

After staring at the plush reds and golds of the overstuffed pillow she had landed on for a minute, she heaved herself up off the duvet and halfheartedly stooped to snag her belongings from the floor, intending to shove the bags into the recently polished armoire at the far end of the room.

"Monkey feathers," she muttered when she couldn't get those doors to open either. She played with the handles, jiggling the mechanisms that kept the armoire shut, then aggressively yanked on the door. They swung open violently and the sudden backward force sent Katara to the floor, accompanied by spare pillows, pressed linens, and a few empty, wooden coat hangers. She grunted and tugged a tendril of hair that stuck to her lip away from her face, glancing up in time to see a tablet of some sort teetering haphazardly on the edge of the top shelf before tumbling end over end until it landed on the floor with a dull thud.

The pages were burned along the edges, as though it had once been dropped in a fire and pulled out quickly before the flames could eat away at the dry material. Thin twine bound the pages together to form a little book. On the very front page, in the bottom right hand corner, the letter K was elegantly scribed in purple ink.

Azulon, Iroh, Ozai, Ursa, Zuko, Azula, Katara thought. She wasn't exactly too keen on Fire Nation history, but she was fairly certain that no one in the recent royal family had a name that started with K.

Gingerly, she flipped the first page over and was shocked to find a rough picture of herself, sketched with fine charcoal, staring up at her. The picture showed her tediously washing a heap of clothes-no event of importance. She leafed through the packet quickly by fanning the pages backward with her thumb to see that, alternated with pages of lazy calligraphy, were sketches of herself doing various activities. Awed and unnerved, she returned to the beginning of the book.

She plays the role of the mother for both the Avatar and that Water Tribe moron. Her element is water, though she cannot bend well yet. She's pretty, for a peasant.

Peasant, Water Tribe moron, Avatar…in her lap was an account of her time in the war, from Zuko's perspective. But…he called her pretty. He never went out of his way to pay anyone a compliment, let alone comment on appearances. Hurriedly, she flipped the page. On the charred paper was her mother's necklace. It was a rubbing of the stone, all the smooth indents captured in reverse on the page. That seemed like such a long time ago, those days when he had used her necklace to find Aang.

She touches that necklace she always wears whenever her emotions get the best of her.

To her surprise, Katara indeed found her fingers at her throat as she choked back astonishment. It wasn't necessarily just an account of their time in the war; it was Zuko's account on her, as a person.

The next several pages were mutilated so badly that she couldn't see the pictures, though she could decipher a few words here and there: honor, destruction, understand, water bender, crystals, Avatar, mother, sorry. A couple of blurred pages passed and the next sketch she could see clearly was a night that constantly plagued the back of her mind. Dressed head to toe in black with rivers of tears streaming from her eyes, he had drawn her bending the blood of the recent Southern Raiders captain, forcing his limbs into sickening and unnatural positions.

I often wonder how the same hands that can heal treacherous lesions and battle wounds-the same hands that had once offered to rid me of my scar-can also slowly wring the life out of a person. She can steal a person's soul by pinching a few select veins closed. She terrified me tonight with the way she manipulated that man as if she held a rag doll. For just a few seconds, I forgot that she isn't Fire Nation.

Those words hit hard. She knew it had to be possible to confuse her with a Fire Nation warrior, for on that night, she felt as ruthless and merciless as the previous Lord himself, but her ways belong to the people of the water, not fire. Katara turned the page and banished the memory. Just a rough sketch of her eyes stared up at her on the next page, as if they were something to showcase. Katara thought her eyes to be too wide, too blue, too revealing.

When she's angry, it's not necessarily her words that sting. It's her eyes. Her oceanic eyes blur to a wild shade of navy, no longer that pretty cerulean I'm now used to. Instead of smooth sailing, a furious storm of rippling lightning and rough waves conquers her irises.

How fitting, with his little play-on words. I'm an ocean.

Her fingers moved nearly on their own accord as they reached to reveal the next matched set of pictures and captions. This time around, she had to blink a few times to make sure that her mind wasn't playing tricks on her. In charcoal, she was lying on her back, wearing only her necklace and his shirt. The silk-red and gold, she knew, despite the crisp tones of gray-fell nearly to her knees and the sleeves pooled around her elbows as she lifted her hands to touch the necklace at her throat.

Several lines of fancy wording had been scribbled out, like he couldn't decide what he wanted to write. Finally, he had decided on something that he apparently deemed acceptable.

Today, for the first time, I got so mad at her that all I wanted to do was kiss her.

Katara stared at those words for what seemed like endless hours. During those lazy days just before the Comet, she had let the heat and the boredom get the best of her. She wondered what his lips would taste like-smoke and honey, her imagination eventually decided-and then she found herself wanting to know the power behind those lips. Those few, dreadful kisses with Aang had been so careful, so unsatisfactory. Zuko, she believed, would lace bruising power behind his kisses. Of course, no one but herself ever knew of these musings.

She turned the last crinkled page, handling the charred edges carefully, to show a picture of her in a simple bending stance. Her hair was down, a cascade of dark stokes rippling down the page. Large, passionate eyes sat above high cheekbones and full lips that were set in a playful smirk. Her bending clothes-the white bindings that had gotten progressively smaller and tighter as she grew and the war raged one-hugged her darkened form almost provocatively as she curled her arms and fingers around the open air. Below the picture, five words were scrawled not in the calligraphy used in the rest of the book, but in deliberate freehand.

Our children will be beautiful.

Oh dear. The blur of tears haunted her vision then. How often had she stayed awake until the sun nearly rose, sitting in the lush grass with her legs crossed, mindlessly talking to him about everything from her home and family to fireflies (which were a brand new discovery for her) and Iroh's tea, all the while surrendering her life to his listening ears and getting his in return? How many nights had she woken up from her slumber because of a dream featuring him that perhaps wasn't exactly innocent? How many times had she begged him to spar with her, telling him that they both needed the practice when in reality, she just wanted an excuse to be close to him? For how long did he harbor those secret feelings? She had no answer to any of those questions, but she knew that they would sound pathetic, desperate.

She sat on the floor silently, clutching the book in her hands, until heavy footfalls in the corridor outside her room shattered her reverie. Hastily, she slid the book beneath the bed and rose from the floor, her legs tingling with the pins and needles of blocked circulation. She dusted her skirts off, dragged her sleeve across her moist cheeks, and hurried off into the palace for the meeting she was supposed to be at.

Her attention skipped off to the point of no return during one of Iroh's long speeches, staring up at nothing from her place just to the left of the Fire Lord; a picture of a little girl with long, raven black hair in two thick twin braids with icy, narrow eyes and pale skin a shade or two darker than Zuko's embedded itself in the front of her mind, thinking on the last scribbled words in the book.

...

With strict orders to Kai La telling her to escort Fire Lord Zuko to the guest chambers, Katara bid her goodbyes to the Fire Nation palace. As much as she wanted to stay, she had to help rebuild her homeland, not to mention plan her grandmother's wedding. Despite having to complete her duties as the Southern Water Tribe Princess, she knew that she would very soon be back in those luxurious halls, though for reasons other than boring meetings and formals gatherings. She couldn't have stayed then, she knew, despite every nerve in her body telling her the opposite.

On the bed she had been offered for her stay, she laid the book she had unearthed from the stubborn armoire and opened it to the very last page. If he wanted her, Zuko would have to find her and tell her himself. Which, Katara figured, wouldn't be so hard: he'd already followed her across the globe once. What difference would one more time make? So, with her necklace on the bedspread and a scrap of paper underneath, Katara continued on her way.

Yes, they will.

~Fin~

So I like this one, more or less. It started as a picture in my mind of Katara in Zuko's shirt, done in only pencil. And now here we are. :)

*I am working on a sequel to this, even though I said it was a one-shot, because so many people requested a second part. Hopefully I'll have that up sometime in the next century.

Review, please?
Tchao, Zutarians.
Erika
xoxo