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The war ended when the moon was killed.
Well, Zuko assumes it did.
Everyone he talks to assumes it did too. Everyone he talks to has bigger problems.
They talk to a lot of people, as he and Uncle try to eke out a living in the Earth Kingdom. That’s where they live now, and the threads of Zuko’s dream to return to the Fire Nation are nearly completely severed.
Ships don’t make it across the sea anymore. Not enough that Zuko is willing to risk it. He used to be willing, until the ship he had paid the last of their gold to was destroyed in port. Until it became clear that the only thing that could keep a ship safe on the seas was luck.
Zuko’s never had good luck.
He’s only come to understand after the fact just how lucky they were to make it out of the North Pole.
So, he doesn’t know what’s happening in his homeland. All he knows is that most of the colonies are either so battered by the sea that they’re barely worth living in, or retaken by the Earth Kingdom once they realised no reinforcements would arrive.
And so the war is over, and people draw further into the centre of the Earth Kingdom to be away from the sea’s anger. No more ships arrive from the Fire Nation. Zuko hasn’t heard of a ship arriving from the Water Tribes in years. Whether they still even exist changes depending on who you ask.
The Fire Nation, of course, deserve it for killing the moon.
The Water Tribes, naturally, should have defended the moon.
The Earth Kingdom is the chosen survivor, the only people that haven’t failed their duty. The only ones with the strength to last this out.
Zuko nods along, long past arguing. He ignores Uncle’s face when talk comes of outlasting anything. He looks so lost. He never speaks of destiny anymore. He doesn’t say what he thinks of the future, and Zuko doesn’t ask.
The Avatar was lost to the Ocean for a long time, so the stories go. Some say he’s still out there, others say he came back on land. Zuko doesn’t know which it is, and honestly, he’s glad. He was there when the Ocean’s wrath first came for them, he remembers men held beneath the waves until they sucked the water into their lungs. He remembers Zhao dragged deeper by a monumental hand.
He’s happy to have never seen that thing again.
And it’s not like he needs to find the Avatar anymore.
One day, he hears from a fisherman about some people by the coast, a girl who tries to talk to the sea. Madness, that fisherman said it was. Most people called fishing madness now, too. Then complain about the price of fish.
Zuko had gone to find them, if it was who he thought it was. Under the watchful eyes of his uncle, he decided he should seek them out. He wanted to… apologise. He’s had a lot of time to think and reflect, and Uncle seems to approve.
It’s not difficult to find them, they’re not trying to hide.
It’s the Water Tribe siblings. No Avatar in sight, and even Zuko has the sense not to immediately ask where he is. It probably wouldn’t go well with their history.
They’re still wary of him, once they get over him turning up after so many years.
They’re tired. Zuko has become a connoisseur of tired and worn out faces in the last few years, but these two look more worn than most.
The girl— woman— Katara spits anger at him. He’s sure he deserves it, but he’s still surprised by how immediate and strong it is. Time has not healed those wounds.
It becomes clearer when she marches to the shore, to the sea, with a rope that her brother insists she ties around her waist. And she tries to bend. She pleads with the ocean to bend to her will. She demands it. She begs it.
The Ocean does not reply.
Zuko can barely imagine Agni’s light leaving him. The pain in Uncle’s eyes as he watches her mirrors Zuko’s own. Her brother, Sokka, watches them all, on edge waiting for something, whether for Zuko and Uncle to turn on them, or for Katara to finally snap, it’s not clear.
Zuko apologises to both of them. Katara takes it as an insult. Sokka accepts it with a shrug.
They stay with the siblings for a while. It seems like the right thing to do for the two of them, who seem so lost.
Every day the Ocean gives Katara no reply, and every day she lays into Zuko instead. It feels good to have the hatred come from someone else. Sokka still waits.
One afternoon, it becomes clear what Sokka is waiting for when Katara is suddenly sucked beneath the waves. The rope is pulled taught like she’s bait on the end of a fishing line, the other end anchored on a tree.
Sokka heaves on the rope, and soon Zuko and Uncle help. The force pulling Katara is no tide or sudden current. Zuko half expects blood to stain the waves and the rope to come back empty.
It doesn’t, in the end. Katara is still there, they haul her to shore. Sokka lays her on her side, smacks her back and she coughs up more seawater than seems reasonable for so short a time beneath the waves. Sokka forbids her from going back in, and she listens to him.
They stay with the siblings. They’re not invited to, but they’re also not chased away. They sleep far enough from the shore that the Ocean probably won’t come for them in their sleep. They sleep close enough that they can still hear the waves cresting and lapping. Nights are quiet now, and always dark. People like to say the Earth is in mourning for the Moon. Zuko thinks it’s a held breath, tense and waiting.
The next day Katara goes back to the Ocean. The only difference is that Sokka now trusts them to watch over Katara, and so heads off on his own. To hunt, he says. He is gone an entire, uneventful day, and returns with no food, but reddened eyes and bruises on his knuckles.
Uncle drains his tea stores for them all. But he has no wisdom for the girl who tries to recreate her bending in this newly unbalanced world. He offers Zuko’s help with hunting, which is not exactly his to offer. Zuko will, though.
Katara is loud and angry like the sea, Sokka is quiet and tense like the night. Zuko can’t say he knew them before, but he knows they weren’t like this. Somehow it shocks him, even after all the changes in the world, it’s a surprise how different they have grown. He supposes that he’s changed too.
They aren’t as lost as Uncle, though, too tenacious in their goals even though they’re harder and callused, and angry in a way that Zuko knows so well.
Like everything, it feels wrong.
It takes weeks of staying with them, of learning the ebb and flow of these two lives so close to their element and so cut off. Drivers of change, stalled and stuck in the mud, in world where nothing is as it should be. The world has been tilted off its axis for a long time now, pushed further out of balance with nothing to pull it back.
It takes weeks. But eventually Zuko asks, “Where is the Avatar?”
The silence that follows is long and heavy, until Katara looks out over the deceptively gentle waves. “As far from the sea as he can be.”
Zuko looks to Sokka.
Sokka shrugs. “There’s a desert in the middle of the Earth Kingdom. He went there when he left us. Years ago.”
Zuko frowns and nods. He’ll laugh later, when the absurdity of the circles his life has turned grabs him, but the next words out of his mouth are, “I’m going to find him. I’m going to find the Avatar.”