ch: the distant glow of stars.
characters: katara, kya, iroh, zuko.
notes: a belated birthday present for bean.

…

i. in your eyes we see the tiny white snow caps of mountains
the death of living fire and the life full of death
…

One day, he just appears.

Katara is kneeling at the water's edge, sculpting snow with soggy mittens and a wobbly smile—she thought her father was coming back this season, coming home, but their hut is carved hollow with the scratching of her Gran's knitting needles and the congested snoring of her brother—but he is there, staring at her with muddled discontent.

The first thing she notices is how his eyes shine, like lights through the cerulean depths. "Gran!" she calls, voice wavering in distress, and Katara knows it won't carry far, "there's someone in the water!"

They stare at one another, because he is confused and Katara is horrified; his face is oddly misshapen and his eyes, ochre colored and rippling like waves, follow her with sharp cuts that make her feel like he is tearing something underneath her skin.

When he breaks the water's surface, he floats onto the ice, an apparition with such human gait that it startles her. He folds his arms across his chest and stares at her down the ridge of his nose, and Katara flinches.

She hasn't seen many men before, but she knows the delicate creases of his face are twisting into a crevasse of hurt and anger, and she knows how dangerous those things can be. (Gran always tells her that wise men let their emotions rule, but also let their emotions swallow them whole, and this boy is too young to be encapsulated.)

Katara studies him under fearful lashes. He's not too much taller than her with an enviously straight spine (perfect posture, that is what she envies, because it belies nothing) and aristocratic features (narrow eyes, narrow cheeks, bones stretched high and skin pulled taut). He wears Fire Nation armor, decked in sharp bends of gold and red, black plates covering his chest and shoulders. Waterlogged bandages wrap inside the crease of his armor, as if they have slipped from their hold, and she sees the wild, fire-bloom scar across his eye, red and raw.

"What are you doing here?" she asks nervously, blows on her mittens so they dry fast, because she's shivering and she does not want to look tiny and afraid near this boy-spectre, she is not scared.

He snorts and fire ribbons the air. Katara knows what fire looks like, what it is supposed to look like, but this boy breathes and it is pale and blue and spirals into wisps like gusts of wind.

(He is a ghost, he cannot bend living fire from his dry lungs.)

"I'm not really here," he drags his foot through the snow but it leaves no trench marks, and Katara now knows for certain that he isn't real, "this is just the last place I remember."

There must be a reason, of course, why that is. Katara doesn't know much about Spirits; unfortunately, she doesn't listen very well when her Gran tries to warn her about the otherworldly things that sometimes slip between the sheets of the Earth. And here is one, floating mere feet away from her, and fear is the last thing coiled up inside of her stomach.

"I'm Katara," she says, kicking snow with her boot. The snow shifts and falls over into the water, and maybe, this boy notices the blatant differences between them (he drags his feet through the snow, along the lines of the trenches that she does, but nothing changes).

His hands, pale alabaster lines, tug on the dark length of his hair, gathered in a ponytail to leave the rest of his scalp bare. "I'm Prince Zuko," he responds, and something twinges in her chest, "I think I died here."

…

She forgets to count the days her father will return; instead, Katara finds herself huddled at the gap between the ice and the water, with the boy who can keep his feet in the abysmal navy ocean and his hands at either side of her. Zuko, she learns, is not a day over thirteen. He is from the Fire Nation—a firebender of pale blue flames (but when she tells him this, he smiles before his face blanches considerably)—and even though he is rough and jagged around the edges, he is always snapping at her to get away from the edge! (You'll drown, Katara.)

Katara tells him how she's a waterbender, although not a very good one. He tells her about the element of power and the element of change, and somewhere in the middle they overlap into elements of influence, shifting and adapting and never relenting. Zuko also tells her that she's welcome to watch him bend, and that his Uncle was always learning strategies from other places. (Sometimes, if he wants, he tells her about his uncle, but she knows it is a sore subject—as sore as his homeland, as sore as his scar.)

Zuko keeps her company, or she keeps him company. She tells him about her father, a broad shouldered, strapping warrior gone to protect their tribe (and sometimes, when she cries, she tells him about how much she misses him). So in return, Zuko musters up all the voice he has and talks about a woman with rich, dark hair and soulful eyes who helped him to the shore, about how he'd swallowed stretched lungs full of water and sunk like an anchor, about the kind woman whose daughter she watches over.

Katara smiles when Zuko says her name, Kya.

…

"Dad!" Katara slings her arms around his neck and cries into his shoulders, and Hakoda closes his arms around her sadly. Katara can feel it when he sets her down into the snow, feel it when he stops Sokka at an arms-length distance with a frown.

"I'm not here to stay, Katara," and her blood freezes cold. She tries to stop herself from feeling anything, but anger boils through her skin, fresh and virulent.

She wrests herself from his slackened grip and storms off, a drizzle falling from blackened lashes.

…

Katara almost never speaks to him.

(Gran says it isn't safe to converse with non-elemental Spirits, but she trusts Zuko, somehow.)

She's so sad that all she can do is stoop down and slice her thin fingers through the icy water, let the numbing chill distract her from the pressure of an avalanche of words in her mouth. Zuko doesn't do anything, either. Sometimes he sinks into the water so she pulls her hands through his image, sometimes he sits in front of her and creates blooms of wintry fire in the air (and maybe there is a deep irony behind why it makes her think, if there were airbenders, this is how they would stream the wind).

They are both brittle, angry, lost children, and for months, all they have is one another.

…

She stops counting the seasons it takes for her father to return and instead, tries to tamp down the constant anger fraying at the edges of her psyche. Katara isn't sure she can take it anymore, that she can take one more day of Sokka asking her where it is that she stalks off to and hides herself away.

(On this open, frigid tundra, where have you found a place to hide?)

And she doesn't dignify him with a response until one day, she comes back in a flurry of tear streaks and mumbled disappointment and sopping wet mittens, and he catches her shoulder and asks, "Katara, where have you been?"

Ice cracks along the blue edge of her eyes until they ripple with fresh tears, and Katara goes from leveling him with a glare to barely holding herself together, and, "happy," she mumbles loudly, lips whispering over one another with minimal effort, "I've been happy."

(She hasn't been happy, but she knows now—she no longer sees that flame spirit-boy in the water, and she is considerably miserable.)

"Let's go," Sokka says and grabs her hands, shoving his own dry mittens over them, and Katara just stares at him blankly. "I want to go fishing, and I'm not leaving you here." She stretches her fingers inside of the fur and maybe there is a shadow of a smile on her lips after all.

…

ii. i am sharper than a switchblade
no one is watching but heaven
…

She's not sure how long she can wait down here, but she presses her knees into the soft soil and shutters out everything else with thin arms circling around her own frame. Somehow, she attracts a deadly form of ethereal chaos, from one spirited boy to the next, and she still isn't sure which of them is more real—Zuko had felt so close, like a constant whisper, like the wind, but Aang is smiles and laughs and gentle, consoling hugs.

And yet, both of them can be so far away.

Katara blinks open her eyes against the luminescent green glow and sighs, settling heavy in the center of her chest. Her heart suddenly feels heavy, but there is no distinct reason. It's her own fault that she's here, under these catacombs.

She almost doesn't feel the breeze, though; she does notice the spirals of wind that brush her face, an odd chill that lingers even when the lines of spiritual fire dissipate. Katara doesn't know what to do even though her body starts to scoot back, her eyes start to draw wide circles.

"You never told me you were leaving."

She sounds stupid, but she knows that face anywhere; Zuko walks across the cavern with his lips pressed into a petulant pout, and something inside of Katara wants to slap him (and she imagines the warm prickle of skin in her hands and the way the ridge of his scar would drag in her palm). Something inside of her douses her in shame, too, because he is a Spirit.

He dresses different, long robes with bell-shaped sleeves and Earth Kingdom spirals embedded in the hems. Katara wonders what it would look like if he were alive, tries to siphon this image through all of the dusty, earthen designs she's seen in her trip around (because here, his entire being glows limelight green, although he is not completely transparent). He runs tapered fingers over his head, and she's shocked to see tufts of unruly hair spiking from where there had been none.

How do Spirits—"I couldn't," he sits opposite her, folding his legs underneath the draped parts of his robes and sighing a breath between their bodies. Katara rubs her hands across her cheeks and expects to be crying, because so many feelings wash over her at once. His presence makes her think of her mother and the way he spoke about her loveliness.

She never forgot what he had said once, she waits outside for you, right by the door, and she'd always lingered in the threshold of the igloo in the ignorant hope that she was near.

"I'm a Spirit," he says with exasperation, and nothing has changed except that the angry boy she had left had been three years her friend, and this boy across from her is a teatime stranger. "I can't just leave you a note: hey, Katara, sorry I gotta scram—I don't know what's up, but my soul is being dragged halfway across the entire world. Believe me, I…"

It drips so fast like a blur.

"Why are you cr—Katara, how the hell did you get here?"

She's crying before she realizes it, collapsing into a full kneel with her hands against the ground (and in his lap, if it were solid and warm and substance, instead it feels like sheets of cool raindrops over the backs of her fingers). Her words are shaky at best as she recounts that splinter of ice and the boy that slid from its depths, the journeys they have already completed and the ones ahead of them, and the nuances in between.

Zuko doesn't even flinch when she mentions the Avatar's gentle spirit and unshakeable talent, his wide eyes and goofy smile.

Katara is in the middle of telling him between gasps of air about Toph, Aang's earthbending master, when she hears his voice echo low. "My uncle," he says and his voice sounds like a smile (although she knows him to have never been one for smiles, even tiny ones like secrets or ones that rip across his jaw), "my sister is here and my uncle is here, and if you r-rescue him, he would gladly teach the Avatar to firebend."

Maybe it is her happiness for Aang that bubbles up like chemicals in her chest, but she tips her head back and there is something about that intricate moment that freezes as his hand passes through the hollows of her cheek, fingers lingering between her skin and bone, and Katara closes her eyes.

They must have touched like this before, because the ghosts of his fingers feel like home on her skin.

…

iii. let us count every kiss as a victory
take time, not lives, not anything more than enough
…

"Why do you age?"

She asks him questions throughout the day, hopes he is lingering close by to answer them. Maybe, because now, Zuko is painted in reds and golds and hues of skintone; his face flushes and his hair bends with the wind around them, but he is still as translucent as he was in the crystal chasm where she had spilled her feelings, and his fire bursts into orange glows and scarlet threads in the air.

"Why do you age? Here's a question," he says, folding his feet underneath him as she leans over the pot to toss things inside, "why do you talk to me like I'm real, but then treat me like I'm not?"

And Katara laughs, because she remembers curling up at ten with a Spirit who had been nothing more than a slip of her imagination, no more real than frost and dewdrops over the snow. She cuts up the carrots in her hand and focuses on the water boiling inside of the pot and the sound of his voice in more than a harsh whisper in her ear.

"Like what?"

"Like undressing yourself," is first, and she watches red slap itself against the high rise of his cheekbones (like a beautiful sunset, on the horizon and out of her reach, she laments) and Katara curls back onto her feet, bouncing the tips of her toes against the ground.

She laughs quietly and shrugs her shoulders. "I just forget that you're around sometimes. But your uncle talks about you all the time, Zuko," and even though she knows he had been but a shell of a boy upon death, his uncle fills him with so much potential and life and passionate pride, talks about all the things his nephew could have done, all of the greatness he would have amounted to. "Maybe it'd be nice, too, if he could see you."

Zuko sighs and scoots closer to her, and she's never really thought to question why she does see this boy.

(It could be because her mother was his reaper, pulling him down the river into the afterlife with a disarming smile, it could be because she had looked down into the depths of the outline of his soul, it could be because there is an entire lifetime they could have had written into the pathway of her life.)

"Do you think about that? Being alive?" Katara draws her hands over the pot in the fire with a wry smile, "I'd like to see you try and teach Aang firebending," she tosses an elbow harmlessly at his side and he flinches when it overlaps his skeleton, "your uncle says you are not renowned for your patience."

Suddenly he is so close that Katara is a mixture of things at once, wreathed by the kind of chill that leaves one's palms cold but the tips of their fingers burning with heat, and she turns to look at this half of a boy achingly close to her side.

I neverreallyforget that you're around, she thinks to herself and remembers the way he'd touched her cheek in the catacombs, and wonders how his skin would feel under her hands in return, and when she closes her eyes to kiss him, for a startling moment, her lips brush smooth and chapped and soft pink pale skin, and then it passes, she passes, into the outline of his body.

(And maybe the courage he threads her with is the reason why only she can see him.)

I never really forget that you're around, she thinks as hard as she can and hopes he understands, because you have always been here.

…

notes: don't ask me to make sense of this, i hate everything. i just wanted to write a spiritual guardian!zuko (with a one time fluke) but my first attempt was very wordy and confusing. also parallels, because parallels. updated, 11/23.