Scars and Ashes (Avatar: The Last Airbender Fanfic)

Katara dislikes being confined to the home of her father, the head chieftain of the Southern Water Tribe, after her mother's death and eventually sneaks out in disguise and meets and befriends the nephew of the local tea merchant while remaining unaware of the ramifications of her actions.

Disclaimer - I don't own Avatar: The Last Airbender. This is one of my ONC projects for 2024 and a giftfic for my friend Kelsey Alicia. For this story I am using prompt fifty-five, "you're a young royal in disquise who befriends a villager with a scarred face. One day they are arrested for stealing something you gave to them."

Note - While I choose to ignore anything from LoK or the comics that retcons AtLA content I'm not against using content that doesn't, hence the use of existing Southern Water Tribe characters from the comics in addition to creating new ones, but certainly none of this strange idea of a tribe being a colony of another tribe or a tribe voting their chieftain(s) in instead of the tradition of heredity and/or earning the position through ones own merit.

As such, the Southern Water Tribe is reverted to an actual sister tribe to the Northern Water Tribe, aka an actual tribe rather than a colony and Hakoda is back to being the head chieftain as implied by what Sokka says about being the equivalent to a prince in his tribe to Princess Yue which, on top of the fact there's no way Hakoda would have gotten that many boats from a single village, indicates Hakoda was always head-chieftain.