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Aang goes first.
The news does not arrive as a surprise, but it still hits Zuko like a physical blow to the chest. He sets off for Air Temple Island immediately on Druk and thinks it fitting that this last journey to the Avatar will be through the skies he always loved.
Republic City is flooded with visitors when he arrives, hundreds upon hundreds of world leaders and dignitaries, commoners and nobles, come to pay their respects. The world goes into mourning for Avatar Aang, the hero who ended the Hundred Year War, the man who restored peace to the four nations.
There are only a few of them left to remember the boy in the iceberg.
He finds her later that night by the sea. When he folds Katara into his arms, her tears soak into his shirt and his drips onto dark hair now streaked with grey.
They stay there till the sun comes up.
o-0-o
There is, surprisingly, a lot of freedom in being old.
Zuko has worn the weight of the crown for so long now that sometimes he still feels it like a phantom burden on his shoulders. But the Fire Nation is no longer his responsibility – it’s Izumi’s, and his daughter wears it with more grace than he ever did.
Rid of the shackles of the throne, Zuko is free to go wherever he wants and do whatever he pleases. He visits every nation and the friends remaining in each – all the people he loves scattered to the four winds.
Sokka and Suki in Republic City, and the daughter who is now Chieftess of the Southern Water Tribe. Toph in Gaoling, still greeting him with punches to the arm and cackling laughter accompanying the nicknames of his youth. Azula in the Sun Warrior Temple, blue fire sparking at her fingertips and eyes free of malice. Ty Lee on Kyoshi Island, no longer unbound by the laws of gravity, but as cheerful as ever.
Mai accompanies him sometimes, though their journey together is usually cut short once he leaves Kyoshi Island. It’s a routine he’s used to though, one they agreed to all those years ago when both of them realized their hearts could never truly belong to each other again.
When he’s tired of wandering, and freedom begins to feel like loss, then – and only then – does he let the compass of his heart point home.
o-0-o
“You,” Zuko announces, with no small amount of indignation, “are cheating.”
Katara placidly takes a sip of tea. “Or maybe you’re just a sore loser.”
“That’s besides the point,” he argues. “You still cheat.”
“It’s pai sho,” she says, a little incredulously. “How could I possibly cheat?”
He shrugs and looks morosely at his lost pieces. His side of the board looks empty and forlorn, only two small tiles keeping defeat at bay.
“I’ve learned a long time ago not to put anything past you.”
She laughs, a light, lovely sound like trickling water, and his heart somersaults in his chest. No matter how old he gets, he thinks, some things will never change.
o-0-o
Her eyes are free of tears when he finds her.
The funeral hall is not as crowded as Aang’s was, but crowded still, for there is not a person in the world who doesn’t know Sokka of the Southern Water Tribe and Chief Suki of Kyoshi Island. In some ways, Zuko can still feel them – in the automobiles parked outside the building, the lightning-fuelled electricity that powers the lights, the razor-sharp fans gleaming at the sides of the police officers standing at attention around the room.
Katara smiles politely at every politician that accosts her, receiving them with the practiced ease she must have perfected after Aang’s death. But the diplomatic façade doesn’t conceal the lines in her face, the weariness that hangs over her – even if the grief that sent her crashing to her knees when she received the news, clinging to him to hold herself steady, is nowhere to be found.
Katara speaks first, and he follows her, feeling painfully lacking in the wake of her words. He remembers the speech Sokka gave at Aang’s funeral, touching and poetic and funny all at the same time, and feels a fierce pang of yearning for his friend.
Brilliant, loyal Sokka and fierce, brave Suki. Together till the end, fan and sword still swinging.
It’s how they would have wanted to go, giving their lives for the Avatar, but that doesn’t make it hurt any less. Prison, Zuko thinks with a burst of fury that almost takes him off-guard, was too little of a punishment for the Red Lotus.
When the last person leaves and the room is cold and empty, Sokka and Suki’s bodies already sent to the ice and earth, he takes her hand and they sit together for a long time.
o-0-o
“Do you think we’ll make it?”
He doesn’t really intend to ask the question, but it leaves his lips anyway. Katara turns to look at him, moonlight gilding the curve of her cheek. She looks beautiful in the night, surrounded by her element, like she was borne of the sea and would always belong to it.
“Will we survive, do you mean?”
He swallows and looks out at the ocean. Lets the waves sweep in along the sand and caress his fingers. “Yeah.”
She’s quiet for a while. He knows she must be thinking of the same thing he is – the battle that draws ever closer, a twelve-year-old boy alone against the living embodiment of evil.
The world’s last hope.
The fight that awaits Zuko himself, against the sister he loves and will now have to destroy.
“We will,” she says at last, quiet and full of faith. “We’ll survive. All of us. I know it.”
o-0-o
When his wife dies, Ty Lee follows soon after.
It’s quick, both times. Fever, then illness, stealing them both like a ghost in the night, mercifully short and painless.
Katara and Toph stand by his side as he buries his childhood friends, together in death as they could not be in life. He accepts condolences from visiting dignitaries, comforts his daughter and grandson, and grieves in Katara’s arms for the woman who stood by his side for almost half a century.
Katara understands, he knows. There is something about companionship and marriage that grows love, even if not the kind one should feel for their spouse.
It’s only days later that he gets the letter from the new chief of the Sun Warriors.
(Attached at the hip. His mother laughs, a sound he no longer remembers. She can’t go anywhere without them.)
Death has softened his sister, the sharp lines of her face and the exacting precision of her lethal fingers. She looks peaceful in a way he’s rarely seen, like she’s finally found the rest she began seeking all those decades ago. As the dragons commit her to the flames she once commanded, he hopes that in whatever world she’s found – it’s one in which she’s not alone.
Zuko stops wandering after that.
o-0-o
The Southern Water Tribe is almost unrecognizable now, a far cry from the little village he once crashed into as an angry, lost boy trying to do the impossible.
The paltry wall and small collection of igloos has grown to a formidable city, one bustling with life and movement. Ice gleams wherever he looks, walls and canals and streets all shining in the summer sun like newly minted silver.
Katara’s home has changed too. He remembers when it was nothing but emptiness, but now it’s full and warm, transformed into something of a shrine to a life well and fully lived: ancient scrolls lining the shelves, tapestries hanging on the walls, photographs of her children and letters from all over the world, from the people she’s saved and the women she’s taught, markers of the legacy that stretches behind her like an ever-present shadow.
His house is right next to Katara’s, but with the amount of time he spends there, it might as well be empty. It’s in her kitchen that he grumbles about the eternal cold (Zuko, you’re a firebender), on her porch that they discuss their worries over Korra’s training and her growing isolation, at the table in her living room that they play their daily game of pai sho.
Slowly, it becomes a tradition.
He pours the tea and she sets up the board; he loses repeatedly and she gloats in victory; he demands one rematch, then two, and they play well into the night. Their games become as familiar and comfortable as their lives together, intertwining, curving around each other and slotting into the nooks and crannies like puzzle pieces, a perfect fit in every way.
It’s a difficult thing to find joy amidst so much loss, a nigh-near impossible task – but he and Katara have always excelled at the impossible.
o-0-o
Katara’s hair shines like moonglow in the light that streams through the window.
“Hey,” he says softly, so as not to startle her. He moves to her side, taking a seat in the alcove. “Couldn’t sleep?”
Her eyes are rimmed with red, silvery tears drying on her cheeks. Despite her grief, her voice doesn’t waver. “I keep expecting it to get easier,” she says. “Yet every time hurts as much as the first. Is that normal?”
Zuko looks out the window. Zaofu is iridescent beneath the full moon, imposing and unfaltering, just like the woman who built it. Both shrine and tomb, legacy and grave.
“I don’t know,” he admits. “I don’t think there is a normal. We just live with it as best we can, in whatever way we can.”
He thinks of everyone they’ve loved and lost, a thread of names woven into the very fabric of his existence. Each loss rips at him, taking another piece he will never get back. The debt of love come due.
“It’s just us now,” Katara whispers, like a sacred oath, like a secret. “We’re all that’s left.”
Her words settle upon his cracked and bleeding heart like falling snow.
All that remains of their shining Team Avatar.
Just Zuko and Katara.
o-0-o
“Don’t worry, Zuko. We can take Azula.”
Her smile is comforting, full of endless faith and even more infinite warmth. “You aren’t dying on me now. Not when we’ve finally become friends.”
Katara’s friendship is more than he could have ever wished for, a miracle from the spirits themselves. He would change it for nothing, even if there is something else tugging him towards her, something both built on friendship and entirely unlike it.
Zuko looks out at the bloodied skies they fly through, and the bloodier destiny that awaits at the end of it. These could be his last moments, a clock ticking down to an inevitable end. How poetic it would be, a story come full circle, for the Fire Nation prince to go down in service of his nation.
He gazes at Katara, her hair curling in the wind. She looks ethereal, powerful, otherworldly. An avenging spirit, an executioner come to deliver justice.
I love you, he thinks of saying. I love you so much I think it might kill me.
Instead he takes her hand, and keeps his silence.
o-0-o
“Impossible.”
Zuko stares at the table in disbelief, the unmistakable proof of his victory plastered across the board as Katara surrenders the white lotus tile to him.
(If her hand trembles a little as she drops it on his side of the table, it slips his notice.)
“I suppose miracles do happen,” she chuckles.
Says the woman who brought the Avatar back to the world, he thinks, but does not say. Enough time has passed now that they can speak of Aang without the heavy ache of grief, but he still tries not to bring it up unless she does first. There are some wounds which not even the best healer in the world can do anything about.
“Maybe you’re just getting careless,” he jibes instead, and waits for that familiar fire to spark to life in her eyes – but it never comes.
When Katara looks at him, her eyes are affectionate and unexpectedly sorrowful, startlingly blue against the stark white of her hair. The last, dying rays of the sun slant across the pai sho board, and her gaze slides from his face to the tablecloth.
Later, Zuko will remember this as the moment he knew.
o-0-o
Someday, he promises himself. Someday when his country is better, when he is better, he will tell her the truth.
When Katara arrives in the Fire Nation with a yellow ribbon around her neck, someday feels like a promise that belongs to another lifetime.
o-0-o
They don’t play much after that.
Tenzin, Bumi and Kya come home immediately, all of them clamouring with questions and concerns, futile hopes of healing and treatment. He sits by her side through it all, through the explanations and the reassurances, the crying and the anger and the denial.
Of all Katara’s children, Tenzin takes it the hardest.
It takes a long time for him to come to terms with the news, and even longer before he gives up searching for some way to save her. When at last Katara’s youngest son breaks down in his mother’s arms, Zuko is there to hold them both together.
“How do you do it?” Tenzin asks him after, sounding devastatingly young, and he looks so much like Aang that Zuko must turn away. “How are you so calm about this?”
There was a time where he would have laughed to be called such. Grief and age have taken much from him, but maybe they have given something back in return.
“I’m calm because I have to be,” he offers, though honestly, he doesn’t know. There’s a strange detachment that’s settled on him ever since he learned of Katara’s illness, a shield between him and any emotion he should be feeling. Perhaps some part of him always knew it would come to this, had been waiting for it since Toph’s death.
He was the last one to join their group after all, the final and most long-delayed member of Team Avatar. Why would it be any different now?
“You just keep going,” he tells Tenzin. “There’s no other choice.”
o-0-o
“You win,” Zuko announces, with a forced cheer he doesn’t feel. “Again.”
Katara meets his eyes with a steady intensity, though there’s a touch of pity to it. “Zuko, I’m sick, not an idiot. I know you’re letting me win.”
Denial leaps to the tip of his tongue, but he doesn’t let it fall. He cannot bring himself to insult her intelligence, not when her hands shake too violently to bend the way she used to, and her ravaged body is too frail to walk from room to room without help. Illness has taken almost everything from her; he won’t take the rest.
“You’d beat me anyway,” he settles for saying. “You always did.”
She chuckles. “Someone had to keep you on your toes.”
He packs up the pai sho pieces and puts the board away. Their usual room has changed over the last six months. Extra rugs and blankets are piled up on the table, a stone basin sits by her bed and Kya has taken up permanent residence in the room next door.
Uncle’s teapot rests by the heart and he uses it now to make her favourite jasmine tea, careful to keep it at just the right temperature to get the flavour she likes.
It’s just about the only thing she can keep down these days, apart from soup. Zuko once thought he knew desperation, grief, helplessness; the last six months have disabused him of such foolish notions.
“You’ve come a long way,” Katara praises after taking a sip. “Remember the first pot you made us?”
He winces at the memory. “I prefer not to.”
“If you hadn’t been so obviously incompetent at the art of brewing tea, I would’ve thought it was an attempt to poison us.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t anyway,” Zuko tells her. “You hated me back then.”
“No.” Katara’s face turns pensive, lost in another place, another time. “I didn’t. Not really. I was just afraid.”
“Afraid?” Zuko echoes, genuinely surprised. “Why? For Aang?”
She shakes her head. “For me. I didn’t want to like you. There’s a lot of power in letting someone into your heart. It means accepting that they might destroy you.”
He thinks of the scar burned across his chest, and the burning flash of lightning ripping through his veins. The way it felt to look at her every day for eighty years, so close yet just out of reach, as though he was being torn apart and knit back together all at the same time.
The teacup shatters on the floor.
Zuko is by Katara’s side before he even processes what happened, hands fluttering helplessly over her as she’s wracked with violent, hacking coughs. Her suffering belongs to them both, and yet only she can bear the burden while he’s forced to watch, helpless and useless in every way that matters.
When she finally straightens, her hands are speckled with blood.
He wants to turn away, to forget, but he can’t. The image is emblazoned in his mind, branded across his memory like his father’s palm on his cheek. He would do anything, anything at all, to take this from her but all he can do is bear witness in silence.
This is love, he learns, in its strongest, most vicious iteration: the impossible, irresistible need to look back, against everything that wills otherwise.
o-0-o
“That,” Katara says as she watches him arrange borrowed pelts and rugs on the floor of her bedroom, “cannot be comfortable.”
Zuko shrugs. “I’ve had worse.”
Even from across the room, he can feel her roll his eyes. “Yeah, when you were sixteen. Now you have back problems and arthritis, old man.”
“I’ll manage,” he insists, because the alternative is unthinkable. The thought of leaving Katara alone even for a second makes him feel like he’s facing his father again, alone and petrified. He will be her most constant companion, her stalwart protector, until the moment she goes where he cannot follow.
Before he can begin the arduous process of laying down, he hears her sigh. “Zuko.”
When he turns, she has lifted herself weakly up onto her elbows. The furs that cover her have been pulled back as she scoots closer to the wall, leaving the left side of the bed empty. “Get in.”
He stares at her. “Be serious.”
There’s a stubborn tilt to her jaw that he’s well-acquainted with. “I am.”
Zuko drops his quilt. “There is no way both of us are fitting in there.”
“As you said,” Katara retorts, “we’ve had worse.”
Before he can continue arguing, her face softens. “Please, Zuko. It would give me a lot of comfort to know that you aren’t sleeping on the cold, hard floor because of me.”
When has he ever been capable of denying her anything?
He sighs as he walks over, gingerly sliding himself underneath the covers and pulling it up and over them. A quick twist of his fingers and the last remnants of the fire in the hearth go out, plunging them into complete darkness.
He feels Katara turn over, pulling a little closer to him.
“Isn’t that better?”
“It is,” he admits grudgingly. “But I still think I could’ve managed fine on the floor.”
“As stubborn as ever,” she says. “I – ”
Her words are cut off as she begins to cough again – violent, uncontrollable spasms that send panic palpitating along his spine, into his heart. He begins to move – for what, he doesn’t know, but something, someone – when her hand seizes around his wrist and holds firm.
“No,” she gasps. “I don’t – don’t need – ”
“Katara, let me get you some water at least,” he says urgently, but she shakes her head and clings to his hand. He knows he could pry her off if he really wanted to, that months of sickness have left her weak and thin, a shadow of her former self, but doing so feels unimaginably cruel.
Instead he stays where he is, rubbing a gentle hand up and down her back. When her coughing finally subsides, Zuko wraps both arms around her and pulls her to him.
She goes easily, shifting a shaking arm upwards so that she can put it around his waist. The top of her head tucks neatly just below his chin.
“You worry too much,” Katara murmurs faintly. “It’s not good for you.”
“Someone needs to,” he says gently. “You’ve done it for the rest of us all your life.”
“It doesn’t matter now.” The words end on a sigh, like a release, and they jolt through his body like an electric shock. “Not when I’m – ”
“Don’t,” he interrupts, and it’s childish and stupid and immature, but he can’t hear her say the words. Can’t hear the proclamation of her death in her own voice, not if he wants to hold himself together. There is something unthinkable about a world without Katara, like she’ll carve it out and take the best of it – of him – with her when she goes. “Don’t say it. Please.”
He has no right to ask it of her, but she humours him nonetheless. The hand on his back twists into his parka, gripping him with a strength that belies the frailty of her body. He thinks of how many times those hands have saved and remade him, the miracles they’ve woven out of ragged determination and indomitable will. It is the cruellest irony he can think of that the only person they’ve let down is her.
Zuko loses track of how much time has passed before Katara speaks again. “Can I ask you something?"
"Anything,” he promises.
“The Agni Kai.” Her voice is hushed, as though she’s revealing a secret. “When you – when Azula shot that lightning at me. We never talked about it, afterward. Not once in eighty years.”
“You never asked.”
“No,” Katara says slowly, like she’s thinking about it. “I didn’t. But I’m asking now.”
The question seems to grow, filling the space between them, the air around them. It holds eight decades of things left unsaid and secrets kept hidden, tangling in his throat, weighing on his lungs and choking the breath from him.
Tell her, logic screams. Tell her now, before you can’t.
“I couldn’t let you die,” he says, an answer that’s not really an answer. “I just – couldn’t. That was all I knew when I jumped.”
He can’t see the expression on her face, but he can feel her considering his words. In the dark, he is more cognizant than ever of how present she is; her slim frame ensconced in his arms, the brush of her hair against his throat, the rise and fall of her chest as she breathes.
“My turn,” he continues, before she can speak. “Why did you run out into that courtyard?”
Why did you come out after me when I did it all to keep you safe?
Katara is silent, and he suddenly wishes that he hadn’t extinguished the fire. He wants to study every flicker of expression, every tell-tale sign of explanation in her face, but he stifles the temptation to light a flame. It’s easier to speak into the night.
“For the same reason, I think,” she answers at last, something strange in her voice, “that you took that lightning for me.”
The world changes.
Not physically, of course – the wind is still howling outside and Katara is still warm in his embrace and he can see nothing but blackness all around him – but there’s a shift between them, within him, like gravity has re-aligned itself and something long delayed has finally, finally, clicked into place.
“Why didn’t you ever…” he trails off, unsure how to phrase the question. He’s been a diplomat and a statesman, a ruler and a politician, for more than half his life – but now he feels like the fumbling child asking to join the Avatar’s group, tripping on unsteady ground as he tries to ask the girl he loves if she loved him too.
“Why didn’t you?” she parrots his own question back at him.
Back and forth, the way it’s always been. Neither one willing to cede ground, pushing and pulling, giving and taking, until they find a balance of their own making, a harmony that belongs to them alone.
“I don’t know,” he tells her truthfully. “I was scared, I think. I didn’t know what you would say, or if it would ever work. It seemed so impossible. Not after a hundred years of war.”
He waits, then. Waits for her to complete the symphony, a piece for a piece, singing her own truth back at him in the melody they’ve perfected all their lives.
“I was scared too,” she says, and she sounds very young then, as young as the day he first met her. There’s a lingering melancholy to her words that twists him into knots. “Confused. Stupid, the way you are at that age. And then Aang was there, and it was too late.”
Too late. Zuko wonders if sadder words have ever been invented in any language.
It’s all too much, then. Too much to think of the life that might-have-been, the revelations unfurling before them like condemnations. Too much to think that this was how it ended for this woman who deserved everything every universe had to offer. Too much to accept too late.
“No,” he says abruptly, more determined than he’s ever felt in his life. “No, it’s not too late.”
He can feel Katara shift against him, her hold loosening slightly on his shirt. “What – ”
“Maybe not then,” Zuko accedes. “Not there. But what about tonight?”
She goes very still in his arms. There’s a long, weighted silence and he almost wonders if he’s read the entire situation wrong and is now going to receive his long-awaited rejection at the ripe age of ninety-six, when she responds. “Zuko, are you asking me on a date?”
It’s some sort of magic, the way this woman can reduce him to an awkward teenager again.
“Are you saying yes?”
Her voice is tinged with amusement. “Not if I don’t know what I’m saying yes to.”
“Then – yes.” He clears his throat, feeling more nervous than he can remember being in years. “Master Katara of the Southern Water Tribe, I’m asking you on a date. If you’d do me the honour.”
“Always honour with you,” she teases, and if he closes his eyes, he can feel the years between them crumble into dust and scatter into the wind. Her face presses into the crook of his neck, her laughter whispering across his skin – and if he wills it hard enough, right now, right here, he thinks he could rewrite it all.
“Yes,” she says, bright and airy, and he feels as though he’s been lit up with a blaze brighter than ten thousand suns. “Of course, yes. Where are we going?”
She is already as close to him as she can get, but he tightens his arms around her anyway. “Wherever we want.”
“Anywhere in the entire world?” she muses. “I’m being spoiled.”
“It’s what you deserve,” he says honestly, the words tumbling out of him before he can even form them in his mind. “I would have laid the world at your feet if you asked for it. I would have done anything at all.”
Katara’s hand drifts over his chest, seeking. He knows what she’s looking for, and his hand slides over her thin fingers where they rest against his lightning scar. “I don’t want the world,” she says quietly, the way only a force of nature who already mastered it can. “Just you.”
You’ve always had me, he almost says – but she hasn’t, not really. All they’ve ever had to give each other were their hearts, so long-ago surrendered, so small in the face of everything they should have had. He can’t give her back everything that was taken from them, but he can give her this, this one last glimpse into their future past, this sliver of time even the universe cannot deny them.
Zuko twines his fingers through hers, their hands still resting against his solar plexus. “How about we settle for Ember Island, then?”
Katara hums contentedly. “A walk on the beach.”
“So you can dunk me in the water, I’m sure.”
She snickers. “It’s not my fault you look so adorable when you’re all wet and annoyed.”
He rolls his eyes. “Just for that, I’m not buying you a paper dragon in town.”
He would buy her a thousand paper dragons every day for the rest of his life, if she wished it.
“Two paper dragons,” Katara insists. “You always steal mine.”
“Slander,” he accuses, and when she devolves into giggles, it doesn’t take him long to follow suit.
They chart their way across the white sands and corals of Ember Island within the cocoon of the South Pole night, one step at a time. He tucks a fire lily into her hair; she makes him a necklace of sea-glass, and he pronounces it more valuable than any heirloom of gold and diamond in his family’s vaults. She drags him dancing in the town square and doesn’t complain when he steps on her feet. They duck into the Ember Island theatre for a quick look at the remastered, improved Boy in the Iceberg, though Zuko highly doubts the validity of the claim improved.
You’re a complete theatre snob, do you know that? She chides, and the argument that follows takes them all the way back to the beach.
It’s sunset now, and the first stars begin to wink into existence as they stand at the water’s edge. He lets her go then into the embrace of her element, content to watch as she sends waves rippling in spiral patterns and fills the air above them with sparkling mist. It’s not every day that a man is lucky enough to witness a living wonder.
When they’ve talked long enough that his voice is hoarse, they sit together on the pearly-white sand and she leans her head on his shoulder. They don’t speak, for there’s no need to. It’s enough, he thinks, to be here with her forever.
“That was nice,” Katara says wistfully, and with the faintness of her voice comes the crack in the façade. It all fades away then, the sand and sea and dusky-pink light, tearing apart at the seams, returning them to the here and now. “The best date I’ve ever had.”
She fumbles in the dark and then he feels the press of her lips upon the ridge of his scar. If there’s something wet in the brush of her face against his, neither of them knows who it belongs to.
“Me too,” he says, through the lump in his throat. “Me too.”
This – this moment, this night – is theirs in a way little else has ever been allowed to be, and he grasps it with both hands. Holds on long after after their voices fade into the quiet, long after Katara’s breathing evens out and her body folds into his.
When she shudders in his arms, her breath rattling in her chest, and her eyes blink open – blue as the winter sky, blue as the lightning that reforged him for her – Zuko knows.
“Take me to the sea, Zuko,” Katara whispers, and she feels ash-light in his arms, as though the wind will take her and carry her away any moment now. “Take me home.”
o-0-o
The sky is still inky-black when they emerge into the open air.
He loops her arm around his shoulders and keeps his around her waist to hold her up, bearing most of her weight – or what little there is left of it. She’s so fragile that he’s almost afraid she’ll vanish from right beneath his hands before they make it to the water.
“Hold on,” he whispers to her as they stagger across the snow and thinks of that long-ago day when they’d stumbled together across a burning courtyard, the unfaltering, steady anchor of her body holding him up. “Hold on, Katara.”
He grips her tighter and prays to every spirit he knows with a kind of desperation he hasn’t felt since the day the air exploded with lightning and all he could think was not her.
The sky has lightened by the time they reach the edge of the tundra, the place where the frigid water laps against the ice. He sits first and gently pulls her onto his lap, cocooning her with the warmth of his body. She rearranges herself a little, looping her arms around his neck so that she can lean against his chest.
“Thank you, Zuko,” Katara says softly.
He chokes on a laugh and thinks this is it; this is the moment his long-beaten and battered heart finally bursts open within his chest. This moment will do what his sister could not, all those years ago.
“I think I’m the one who should be thanking you,” he replies and remembers a crimson sky, soft fingers brushing his skin and tears dripping onto his face.
Now it is she who lies in his arms, prone and helpless, and he who hovers desperately above her, feeling her life slip through his fingers like sand. This time, there is no enemy to fight, no lightning to outrun – only the icy presence of death, drawing ever closer.
This time, there is nothing he can do to save her.
Zuko ducks his head and looks down at the woman he loves.
Her face bears the marks of time, and her hair is as white as the snow around them, but every time he looks at her, she is still the Katara of his youth; dark-haired and bright-eyed, riding a wave with joyful abandon and laughing into the wind.
“Were you happy?” she asks suddenly.
He thinks for a minute.
I’m never happy, he’s tempted to say, a flicker of Sokka’s memory to ease her into the light.
But…he was, wasn’t he? He’d found love – maybe not the sort he once wanted, but love nonetheless, in Mai’s steady companionship, Izumi’s warmth, his friends’ loyalty. Found it in Katara’s friendship, the blue of her eyes, the softness of her embrace.
“Yes,” he answers at last, quietly. It is not quite dawn and in this sacred last hour of the night it feels wrong to disturb the silence.
“I’m glad,” Katara says lightly. Her fingers curve over his cheek, gently stroking the edges of his scar, and he surrenders himself to her touch as he has since that very first moment in the catacombs far beneath Ba Sing Se.
“And you?” he asks in return.
She looks out over the water. She has always been cool to his burning skin but now she feels colder than ever, as though ice has chilled the blood running through her veins.
“Yes,” she says simply. “Perhaps not as happy as I could have been but – I was. And I’m happy now, knowing I’ll see them again soon.”
There is no fear on her face. There never has been, even from the moment he first laid eyes on her as a foreign invader on a Fire Nation ship.
But he is not her, could never be, and if he ever thought he knew terror in his life, it pales now in the face of the dying woman in his arms. Zuko is not made for acceptance, not if it comes at this price.
“No,” he says fiercely, gathering her closer as though his hands alone can keep her here, tether her to this world. “No, no Katara. You’ll see them again but not now, not today. You haven’t – you can’t – ”
“Prince Zuko,” she says gently, and he startles. He has been Fire Lord for so long now, he barely remembers the title of his youth. “Always so stubborn. Will you fight death itself to save me?”
“I did before,” he says stubbornly. “I won, then.”
“There are some things even you cannot battle, Zuko.” Her hand rests on his wrist, butterfly-light and so, so delicate. “Let me go.”
He breaks, a thousand shattering pieces of a prism built upon the people he loves – the people who’ve left him behind. He doesn’t know, anymore, how to be alone. He doesn’t know how to fall without trusting her to catch him.
“Don’t leave me,” he breathes, and in the frigid air his tears freeze upon his cheeks. “Katara, don’t leave me here without you.”
She looks at him with those lovely eyes that have never lost their colour, full of the same unshakeable belief that has kept him afloat most of his life.
“You can bear it, Zuko,” she says, with the same conviction that crumbled empires and led revolutions, and even now, he cannot help but believe her. “I’m sorry you must, more than you’ll ever know. But if any of us were made to bear it, it’s you.”
She leans forward to rest her forehead against his. He closes his eyes, their breaths mingling, hers slipping away like the tide, and clutches her to him like he can soak the imprint of her into his skin.
“It would’ve been nice,” she says, the words slipping into the space between them. Despite her waning strength, her voice is as clear as ever.
“It would’ve been everything,” he tells her, and sees it all like a flash of memory.
Katara spinning in robes of sea-green and garnet at their wedding. Katara chasing after two dark-haired, blue-eyed children in the royal gardens, laughing as she swings them into the air. Katara pinning a crescent crown into her curls, turning her face up to kiss him.
All his dreams, come true for a single shining moment at the end of her life.
Katara’s hand finds his and holds on tight.
Dawn bursts across the sky in a thousand stunning shades of gold. Katara smiles at him and he’s sixteen again, looking at the girl he loves and knowing that there is nothing he would not give for her. He wants to stop this moment, right here, wants to unravel the threads of time and weave them into a shining, glorious eternity where he will never lose her.
“I’m glad,” she sighs, lovely and joyful. “I’m glad it’s you at the end.”
Her smile will always be the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.
The last, indigo remnants of the sky drip away with the swell of the waves, and the sun breaks over the horizon to a world without her.
o-0-o
After the funeral, Zuko flees.
He makes his home in the curl of Druk’s tail, in a forest glen on the southern edge of the Earth Kingdom, under the stars of the Si Wong Desert. Sometimes he returns to the Fire Nation – when his advice is needed, when Izumi’s concern bleeds through the words of her letters – but he never stays for long.
He never returns to the South Pole.
Occasionally, he meets the Avatar and her friends, but he cannot linger too long with them, either, before the piercing sting of loss makes a permanent home in his ribs. In the flashes of their conversation, he remembers campfires on Ember Island, laughter ringing against a glittering night sky, the warmth of Aang’s embrace or Katara’s hand on his shoulder.
Zuko knows this is nothing like his years of banishment, that he has a place to return to and people who love him waiting with open arms whenever he wants it, but he cannot help but feel as though he’s been set adrift regardless. He is no longer hungry or exiled or set on a fool’s errand, and yet home feels just as elusive, just as unreachable. How can he find a place that no longer exists?
The world changes faster than he can keep up, and he comes to realize that there is no longer a place for him within it. He is a living memory, a relic of a bygone era. He belongs to the past, not the future.
Zuko has been many things in his life to many people – an exile, a traitor, a ruler, a friend, a husband and father – but beneath it all have always been those who’ve seen him in his entirety. But now, there is no one left who knows Zuko.
No one at all.
o-0-o
“Zuko?”
“Mm?”
“What do you think is gonna happen after the war?”
He opens his eyes.
Katara’s turned over, propped up on her elbow so she can study him. He pulls his gaze from the constellations to her face, watching the sea breeze tug at her hair.
“Uncle will be Fire Lord,” he answers, because that’s what he’s most sure of. “I don’t know what I’ll do. Go back to being Crown Prince. See the world, maybe. What will you do?”
“I don’t know,” she muses thoughtfully. “I want to go home. But I don’t know if I can stay there. Not after everything I’ve seen and done.”
He thinks of the places he’s been and the people he’s met, how every road and river and valley had led him to this moment, to his destiny. Thinks of everywhere he has still to go, the wrongs he has yet to right, the amends that remain to be made.
“It’s weird,” Katara continues. “To think of a world without war. We could do anything we wanted. Be anything we wanted.”
She is incandescent in the starlight, radiant with the joy of possibility.
“Come with me?” she asks. “We’ll figure it out together.”
The word settles on him like a blanket, warm and comforting. The future is less daunting with Katara by his side.
“Anywhere.”
He thinks he would follow her to the ends of the earth.
o-0-o
The spirits, for the first and final time, decide to be kind.
Katara is there when he opens his eyes, feeling stronger and younger than he has in years. He recognizes Ember Island immediately, the horizon glowing with a golden sunset as she swings her legs in the water.
“Finally,” she announces playfully, turning to face him. “I’ve been waiting forever, Zuko.”
He drinks her in like a dying man in the desert, the only woman who ever truly held his heart, as bright and brilliant and beautiful as she was at fourteen. She looks as if no time has passed at all, as if his life had been all a dream, and this was the only real thing he would ever know.
In death, there are no chains; no duty or propriety to care about, no politics or fear to hold him back. In death, he is free to speak the words he has wanted to say every minute of every day since he threw his life in front of hers:
“I love you, Katara.”
She looks at him for a long moment. There is neither surprise nor revelation in her expression, but he expected neither. His love for Katara colours every moment they have ever shared, every day they spent together and every night they spent apart. It simply is: eternal, constant, a beating heart at the core of everything they have ever been to one another.
“I know,” Katara says, and there’s something a little sad in her smile. “I’ve always known.”
When she leans in to kiss him, it tastes like both joy and grief, a lamentation for a life never lived and a celebration for a new one. There is something inevitable about it, the press of her lips and the silk of her hair against his cheek and the curve of her spine beneath his hands, like they were always meant to end up here.
“Come on,” she whispers against his lips. “They’re all waiting for you.”
Then she takes his hand and, laughing, leads him home.
“Tell me where the good men go, before I wash away.
Walk me down the old brick road, so I can die where I met you.
Hold me like we’re going home, turn your tears to rain.
Bury me beautiful,
Heaven knows how I loved you.”
- Heaven Knows, Five for Fighting