attackfish

Zuko opened his eyes to see Katara kneeling beside him, her face lighting up when she saw him move. He yelped, and rolled away from her, sitting up and dusting himself off. His armor was on, he noticed, and right then, it felt very important that even though he had taken all of it off in Avatar Lu's swamp, it was still safe and sound on his body, where it belonged.

He pushed himself up to his feet. "You weren't supposed to come here. I told you, I wanted to do this by myself."

"You keep saying that," she muttered. "You were gone a really long time. Your uncle got worried."

Behind them, Sokka rolled his eyes, but didn't comment.

"Where is he?" Zuko asked sharply. Katara shrugged.

"Ran back to the temple." Sokka stopped poking at the spikes on one of the hundred-year-old Fire Nation helmets to stand in front of the Fire Prince. "Said he had an idea."

"What kind of idea?" Zuko groaned, dreading the answer.

"Beats me." It was Sokka's turn to shrug. "But now that you're awake, we can go find out."

"Sokka!" Katara sprang to her feet to catch up with the boys who were heading towards the curtain. "He wasn't sleeping, he was in the Spirit World."

"Yeah yeah," her brother said without turning around.

"I can't believe you," Katara half yelled. "You're lucky enough to actually watch the Avatar commune with the spirits, and you just- I don't get it."

"Hey, he was just sitting there, and-"

"Would you two just please shut up?" Zuko snarled. It just didn't make sense to him at all. They yelled at each other as if they didn't know words could bruise or break the bonds between them, as if they weren't afraid of each other. Azula never talked to him that way. With Azula, it was all honey sweet and mockery, and when he started arguing with her, he had already lost. And when she was angry and arguing, was when she was almost safe.

They were both staring at him.

Zuko glowered at both of them. "What?"

Katara ducked under the curtain to the outside instead of replying.

"Seriously?" Sokka glanced back at him before following his sister. "You're a little high strung, you know that, right?"

Exhaling sharply, Zuko shoved his way through the curtain after them, sending a hundred years worth of dust into the air in a thick cloud.

Outside in the cool summer air, he didn't feel like he was choking so much. The weight pressing in on his chest was lighter. The Water Tribe siblings picked their way down the snow covered trail, and Zuko hung behind them, mind whirring, trying to get the memory of the heat and suffocating smoke of the abbey where Avatar Baoshi had died out of his mind. Had that been what it was like for the monks here at the temple?

The temple grounds were calm, the snow muffling their steps and the harshness of their breaths. It was easy to pretend that the temple had grown out of the mountain, and that it had always stood empty, that this wasn't a shadow of what it had been. As Katara led them up the steps into the temple courtyard, the stone fountain filled with ice, Zuko steeled himself for the echoing emptiness that waited for them inside.

"It's really..." Katara opened the temple doors. "Pretty."

Zuko wanted to close his eyes. "Yeah."

But as she stepped inside, she pressed on. "I mean, I wasn't expecting that, seeing as your uncle said it was just men here."

"Are you saying men can't make pretty things?" her brother squawked, and Zuko could already feel a headache starting, and he couldn't help thinking that maybe that constant bickering was somehow a twisted kind of fun for them.

"That wasn't what I meant." Then she turned on Zuko. "Help me out here."

He backed up into the temple wall, indignant. "No!"

Katara turned away with disgust. "That wasn't what I meant, Sokka, it wasn't."

"Yeah, sure, Katara, please." Sokka examined a piece of the nearest wall mural. "Not buying it."

Katara rolled her eyes. "Oh, just shut up."