Title: Fathom
Status: Oneshot, complete.
Pairing(s): Zutara and (mostly) onesided Jetara.
Rating: M
Notes: Gift fic for my wifie Elle. This one has been a long time coming and I'm still not satisfied with it. This is really vague and stupid and I guess I left a lot open to interpretation on purpose, so if you ask me where Sokka and Hakoda are, I won't tell you. Warnings for: themes of violence, themes of death, implied sexual content. Unbeta'd yolo.

"I am the sun, and she is the moon, she can't see me when he walks into the room."

Ten

She's dirty, but not in the same way that he is.

Dirt has embedded itself so deeply beneath his nails that no amount of scrubbing at the hands of a furious housewife (not that he'd ever be in a position to receive a scrubbing from a housewife, furious or otherwise) would have a hope of getting every last particle out. Earth cakes his boots, old mud has dried on his pants up to the knees, and his naturally dusky skin is filmed in a thin layer of brown dust. He's dirty, yeah, with twigs in his hair and grass clamped between his teeth, but it's a clean kind of filth—if there is such a thing.

The thing is, he revels in his filth, because it's a part of who he is, the life he has chosen, for better or for worse, stamped across skin. When he presses his nostrils to the bend of his wrist, he smells the richness of the earth, the crispness of the autumn leaves.

She's dirty, but it's apparent that the filth clinging to her crumpled little body is something she does not want. And because it is filth she has not chosen, it is corrupt.

Her hair hangs in ropes around her face, stringy and crusted with sea salt. Blood cakes her hands—hers, someone else's?—runs in dried rivulets up to the points of her elbows. That blood is embedded under her nails, in the way dirt has pushed beneath his. It's on her lips, too, speckled across her chubby cheeks. Her cheeks—that's the only part of her that retains the softness of her childhood—she's little, so little—while the rest of her has been whittled down by malnutrition.

The wildness in her blue, blue eyes (he's never seen eyes that color before) matches the blood that splatters over her dark skin, her ratty set of robes. When he straddles a tree root and reaches out to graze her face with her fingers, she recoils and falls against the trunk. She doesn't even wince from the pain of impact.

(Maybe she's used to pain.)

"Hey," he cajoles with a practiced smoothness. He knows how to deal with wild children, because he's collected them, because he was one. Still is one. "Hey, I'm not going to hurt you. 'Kay?"

She jolts her head from one side to the other.

But when he reaches out again, touches his fingertips to her knuckles, she stays very, very still. Her hands are scrunched up against her chest, her chest that thrums with a racing heart. He smooths his fingers over hers, and blood comes off in flakes. He doesn't see any wounds on her hands, her arms, or even her face. Just the sour yellow and purple of aging bruises.

"Is this your blood?" he asks.

Another jolt of motion, a clear negative. Her eyes aren't blank and wild anymore; no, they are defiant. Judge me, I dare you.

"I'm twelve," he offers, "and I've killed ten men." His chest puffs up, and he lets her go to gesture to the too-big-for-a-child swords strapped to his waist. "Bad men," he amends, though he would have killed them if they were good, anyway, if it meant making a difference. "Whoever you hurt—they were bad, too, weren't they?"

There's that coaxing note in his voice again, as if he's trying to convince this little girl that the blood she spilled was justified, regardless if that is in fact the truth or not.

"I bet they deserved it, yeah? Didn't they?"

She makes a tiny sound low in her throat, and nods, vigorously.

"So it's okay." He scrapes his hands over the frizz of her hair and smiles with his teeth. "Wanna come home with me? I'll clean you up and keep the bad people away from you. I can teach you to fight, too, if you want."

Her eyes drop back to the hooked swords he wears.

"I can teach you to fight with swords, yeah. Me and my friends steal weapons from the bad guys every day."

She doesn't say anything, just tips her head to one side and leans forward on her knees.

"Do you have a family?"

She shakes her head on the negative.

"Bad guys took my family from me, but I made a new one. You can be in it, if you want."

"They took mine, too." The words are spoken so quietly, just whispers of sound between her teeth that he just manages to catch them. Her voice is rusty from disuse. He gets that. After the fire that took his home, he didn't speak for weeks, and when he finally did, words dropping heavy into the still forest air, his throat had creaked and his tongue had fumbled, and he'd barely managed to push out a thread whisper.

"If you learn to fight, you can get them back for that," he offers, voice cracking just like it did on that day.

She stretches her arms out to him, and he hoists her up. She's not much younger than him, but she's tiny, so tiny, that it takes no effort to lift her up, to band one arm under her behind and the other across her back, cradling her the way he would a much younger child.

"What's your name?" he asks conversationally, hopping off the tree root and strolling down a path he's beaten over the years. "You can make up a new one, if you want," he amends. "I did."

"Katara," she says, draping her bloodied arms over his shoulders, notching her face against his throat.

Jet doesn't ask if that's her real name, or one she made it up.

It doesn't matter, anyway.

Eleven

Katara. It's all she says, just her name, for a good year. When she isn't obligated to say it, to introduce herself, she says nothing at all.

But she smiles, and she laughs, and sometimes she cries (only at night, when she thinks no one is listening). She expresses her emotions more passionately and eloquently than the most verbose of individuals, and she has her own kind of language, regardless. The rounded O of her mouth, the way she shakes tumbles of curls out of her eyes, the shift of her knees on rain-softened ground.

She sprouts like a weed, too, an inherent sturdiness suffusing those rail-thin limbs of hers, her thighs and calves stretching onto forever beneath the skirts she insists on wearing for all their impracticality. She scarfs down food at the same rate she prepares it for the Freedom Fighters; perched at the head of their makeshift table, she is a miniature matriarch whose body struggles to grow as fast as her mind.

Jet teaches her how to fight, how to swirl daggers through her fingers and into the chests of evil men. When he sees her make the rain shake and the puddles rise up, he grins at this new form of weaponry. Bending is a foreign thing to him, but any element aside from fire is welcome in his soaring home.

Her greatest fault, he reflects, is not her muteness, or the clumsy, disastrous ways in which she wields her Waterbending, but her persistence in stopping short of killing the enemy, no matter how sorely they deserve it.

Her mercy will get the better of her one day.

Katara grows and carves out a niche for her silent little self, and whenever they bring back new recruits in pairs of siblings, the blue in her eyes softens and fades into a gray storm of longing.

Twelve

She doesn't speak until her birthday (it isn't really her birthday so much as the anniversary of her new life, the day Jet scooped her up and scaled a tree with her arms latched around his neck). With Jet's arm draped over shoulders that she's drawn up to her ears, Katara speaks around a bottle's neck.

"They killed my mother in front of me and took me away."

So she saw murder firsthand, too.

"I don't get it," he says, tipping the bottle from her mouth up to his, tongue lapping up droplets of pilfered whiskey that burns even as it soothes. "If you saw them kill her, what's keeping you from killing them right back?" He's seen the silent wrath of her temper. What keeps her toeing that line?

The hut sways in the violence of the night's wind. Katara churns around on the blankets spread beneath their legs, wraps her hand around his jaw to smear whiskey across his skin.

"I want to make my mother proud."

Jet drops the bottle to run his hands along the scrawny legs that tangle with his. He hears it roll, a hollow, glassy noise lost in the wind's roar. "So do I. That's why I kill them."

He's happy to know this Katara, this brilliant, motherly thing that serves as glue for the motely bunch he calls the Freedom Fighters, but he misses the feral potential of the mute child covered in some nameless soldier's blood.

He doesn't get her, not in her entirety, and that's the seed for their fated tragedy.

Thirteen

"Good," he says, mouth parting around the stalk of wheatgrass he keeps fastened between his teeth. One boot, then the other, lands on the spongy forest floor, and he plucks up two of his fallen comrades. They're soaked to their underwear, teeth chattering out the distress call of freezing men, and Jet couldn't be any more pleased. "I don't know how you do this without a master, but you've gotten good."

"I don't need a master." Katara's pliant little body twists in time with the water whips that sway above her open palms. "But those scrolls you snatched from those pirates might've helped me along."

Her boasting has pride soaring in his chest, and he's never been happier that she's learned to use her words. Because while he still misses the feral child with all that hate in her eyes, he's come to love the girl who soothes wounds as surely as she metes out punishment.

Young woman, he silently corrects himself when the collar of Katara's earthy robes swoops down to her navel. A young woman who rushed to him in the middle of the night three and a half months ago to complain of blood splattering the insides of her thighs, staining her sheets. He could have foisted her off on Smellerbee, but his need to protect those dear to him, even from cringe-worthy things like moon cycles, override his masculine sensibilities.

(You'd think that he'd be used to blood, but seeing it pour out of an opponent's wound is not at all the same as watching it trickle from the space between a woman's legs.)

The fall sunlight falls rich as butter, bright as coins, and it gilds the thick brown braid of Katara's hair umber. It slides along her cheekbones, weaves through the water she commands, trickles into her gaping top, and something under Jet's belt buckle flutters.

This child of the moon looks like a woman under the sun.

He thinks her hips have gotten wider since the time she started to bleed.

Fourteen

It's a whim that has Jet's hands settling on the swell of Katara's hips, pushing up and down her sides until she stretches and purrs and slides her damp lips onto his throat. He's straddling a tree branch, and she's straddling him, and if it weren't for the promise of a broken neck (even he can't concentrate when he's between a girl's legs), he'd slide her tights down her thighs and push his fingers into the heat that swirls right over his abdomen.

He's curious about this feral, compassionate, growing girl; curious about the force that renders water her puppet; curious if those men took all of her family or if there are some left; curious if she makes the same sounds as other girls do, or if sex with her will be just as singular as her eyes.

"You're the only person I trust enough to kiss," she tells him with her mouth poised over his and her thighs biting tighter and tighter into his ridged hips.

"I'm glad you trust me." He unravels her braid and spreads the ringlets of her hair across her arching back. "But do you trust me enough to keep us in place on this branch?"

Her laughter tastes much the same as her tears.

…

Katara has spent many, many nights in Jet's hut, but this is the first time she's slid naked into his bed.

…

When he holds her breasts in his palms and thumbs the undersides, she giggles hard enough to hurt her own ribs.

When he moves in her, he tastes her tears, but not her laughter.

If he could afford such things, he'd say, I love you.

It's his inability to use words like love that winds them closer to loss.

Fifteen

Jet is practiced in the art of denying Katara things, though Koh knows that he's spoiled her rotten for all the instances he's forced himself to say no.

"—And I healed him; he was just lying there and I healed him, Jet. I've never healed a wound that serious before!"

Katara, where are you going to keep a puma in a tree house?

"He wasn't breathing at first, but then—well; you can see him for yourself, can't you?"

Katara, what if it falls to its death? I know you don't like thinking about that kinda thing, but it's a legitimate possibility.

"He's not a danger, I promise."

This is a hideout, not a zoo. End of discussion.

"Look, he even told me that the war's been over for a year! They won't hurt us anymore, they can't. They aren't allowed to—hey, did you know about that?"

But this isn't a puma, or a fox, or some other scrawny woodland creature that Katara wants to heal and adopt and coddle to her chest at night. Katara's fingers are woven through a strange man's sleeve, and her hip is grazing the armor strapped over his thighs, and her eyes keep touching the angles of his ruined face. Ruined because there is a burn scar folded over his eye, and yet Katara doesn't flinch away from the deformity the way most pretty young girls would.

That eye, slit and devoid of lashes, is the color of old honey; and Jet knows what this stranger is even before he catches the stink of ash and brimstone.

"Get out," he says, spitting out the stalk of wheatgrass that he chewed down to a mashed pulp. He palms his hook swords, feels his eyes go flat and manic. "I don't care if the war is over for you—it won't ever, ever be for me."

The man—the boy who is no older than Jet—says in a voice as husky as a sick man's, "The war won't be over for long if you kill the Fire Lord."

…

"The Avatar fought my father, you see. He fought him and killed him."

"Is he a warrior? Like you? The Avatar, I mean."

A snorting laugh. "No. Not even remotely. He's a thirteen year old monk. I'm, uh, not what I would call a warrior, either."

Jet grimaces into his lychee juice.

Too bad the Freedom Fighters who'd ambushed the guy didn't get to finish the job.

Katara scoots over until her hips presses into the Fire Lord's. Her hands run up and down his bandaged chest, allegedly to check his wounds, but Jet sees the way her fingertips linger on the ridge of the guy's abdomen.

"It's weird," she hums, angling her face so Jet can't see the way her mouth and forehead pinch, "that we never heard about the war's end. Even in a secluded place like this."

"Yeah," Fire Lord Zuko mumbles, the look in his eyes gentle as they graze the top of Katara's head, so damn tender as to make Jet's stomach revolt, "weird."

…

"Do you trust the Firebender enough to kiss him?" is Jet's only commentary in regards to the growing closeness between his Waterbender and the Fire Lord. Ostensibly, she's just being an attentive healer, but healers don't flush when their hands graze a patient's; healers don't look dazed when their patients flex and churn under the summer sunlight's touch.

Jet can't remember the last time she chose to spend more than ten minutes in his company rather than that of the interloper's.

Katara's fingers pause, the needle she'd been taking to a torn pair of long underwear sliding into her slack palm. She draws her back into a defiant line and swivels so her feet are no longer touching his.

"Yes," she says, pulling her chin up, stabbing the retrieved needle in and out of frayed cloth, "I do."

…

"You understand."

"Well, I can't—I mean, I'm not you. I can't speak for you, or question your judgment. It's your life, Master Katara."

"Katara. Just Katara."

"It's your life, Katara. No one has a right to question it."

"Jet says I should want to kill again, since I've already killed once. Or something like that, anyway. That's what he means, anyway."

"He's not you, Katara. You get to decide what kind of person you want to be. Not him, not anyone else."

"Fire Lord Zuko?"

"Zuko. Just Zuko, to you."

"Zuko."

"Yes?"

"I trust you enough to kiss you."

…

"I'll miss you."

"Your friend won't. He'll thank the Spirits to see me gone."

"I said I'll miss you. What the rest think doesn't matter."

"They're your family."

"So are you. I-I mean—you haven't been here long, and you won't ever come back, but you're still—"

"Katara."

"Yes?"

"Do you trust me enough to sleep in my bed?"

She doesn't answer, not with words.

Sixteen

"It's not the life you were meant for, Katara."

She says nothing, just continues to shimmy down the rope ladder until her feet spring off the damp ground.

"When I found you by that tree, covered in blood, I saw a warrior, not a noble's trophy wife."

She hitches her pack higher up along her shoulders and shakes out her spray of hair. She's been wearing her hair loose for the past year, and to Koh's Lair with the impracticalities of it.

"I am a warrior," she says, mouth moving so subtly that he can barely trace the bend and shift of it, can hardly make out the words she speaks, even with his acute hearing. Twigs snap in the distance, so rapidly as to call to mind muffled canon fire, and he knows he doesn't have much more than five minutes left with her. "I'm a warrior, but I can be more than that. I can choose what kind of warrior I want to be, too. You never got that."

"And, what?" His fingers shake along the hilts of his swords, dive into his belt so he doesn't grab her by the shoulders and haul her back home. "He does?"

Katara's fingers crumple the sheet of parchment folded to her chest. "Yes, he does."

His pain, his panic, both meld and narrow down into a weapon, a spear aimed straight between her eyes. "What, he'll settle for being someone's second love?" He doesn't mean it, it feels and tastes like acid on his tongue, but what else is there to do? He's already lost her.

"Before she died, my mother told me to choose my second love, because if I was meant to be with the first, I wouldn't have met the second." Katara's mouth curves, but it's not a real smile. "I didn't understand it back then, but now I do."

Hooves bounce off the path beaten between the trees.

"But I would've chosen the first, anyway," Katara says, not looking at him, not touching him, for fear of the warmth and familiarity of him, the jagged edges that form a boy she could have made her life with, "if he understood me."

And then she steps

…

out of his life.

…

When Zuko falls between her thighs and winds his fingers through her hair, when he kisses her straining mouth, he doesn't taste just tears or laughter, but both.

They're both made of equal parts compassion and cruelty, and Katara will take the rawness of what they have over the smooth ease that characterized her relationship with Jet.

More than passion, more than ease, more than the spike of adrenaline that sculpts a lover's embrace, she needs understanding.

…

Jet rolls onto his side; his eyes trace through the dim and land on a dust-fuzzed bottle that might've held whiskey, once.

His outstretched hand flexes. He can't sleep, not with the realization that hurled him out of the tight confines of his dreams still lingering on his tongue, in his stomach, tracing down to the core of him.

He understands.

("I want to make my mother proud.")

Maybe he'll get used to her being gone, maybe he'll resign himself to the images of dark arms lacing through pale ones, of Katara's thighs spread out on silk sheets rather than the rough blankets she used to nest in.

Maybe he'll get used to being so close, but not close enough, never close enough, to keeping her.