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Zuko is ten years old when his grandfather, Fire Lord Azulon, dies in his sleep.
He is ten years and ten days old when his father, Prince Ozai, leads a coup against the newly crowned Fire Lord Iroh. It is short and bloody and loud, and when it fails Ozai is executed in the courtyard while Iroh looks on with cold eyes.
Traitor’s spawn, people whisper when the newly orphaned disgraced prince passes them in the courtyard.
Zuko is ten years and two months old when he kneels before the Fire Lord’s throne and swears lifelong fealty to Iroh and his heirs. “I cannot swear to you on my family’s honor,” he tells Iroh. “But I will swear to you on anything else you choose.”
The throne room is eerily silent for a long, long moment. A solitary tear tracks its way down the crags of Iroh’s face.
Crown Prince Lu Ten pulls Zuko to his feet and embraces him. “From this day on, you are my brother,” Lu Ten swears, his voice ringing out passionately over the watching crowd. “Any man who questions your honor questions my own.”
Zuko hides his face in Lu Ten’s shirt, and weeps.
***
He goes from traitor’s spawn to prince’s shadow. Zuko attends Lu Ten’s lessons and sleeps in the room next to the prince’s; they train together in the morning mists and eat together at the high table. Zuko is not technically a prince anymore, since traitors lose their property and titles along with their lives, but people who see him bow and call him ‘your highness’ anyway. He ignores it, just as he ignores the people who hide smirks behind their hands.
When Lu Ten turns seventeen, Iroh arranges a marriage for him. The princess from the South Pole is not yet of marriageable age, but the alliance between the Southern Water Tribe and the Fire Nation must be sealed somehow, and Lu Ten will need a wife.
Lu Ten only grins and bows to his father. “As you command, Fire Lord,” he says, and it is done.
The name of the prince’s bride, Iroh tells them, is Katara.
***
Zuko becomes ‘Captain Zuko’ on his sixteenth birthday. Iroh places him in command of Lu Ten’s personal guard, and Zuko refuses to weep with gratitude.
“I won’t let you down,” Zuko swears to Lu Ten, quietly.
Lu Ten rolls his eyes, and clasps Zuko’s forearm. “You earned this,” he murmurs, and pins the captain’s bars onto Zuko’s uniform himself.
Nobody calls him ‘prince Zuko’ anymore.
He prefers ‘captain’ anyway.
***
“Your bride is likely to grow impatient,” Iroh tells Lu Ten sternly when the prince turns twenty-two.
“My bride is only fifteen,” Lu Ten responds. “Let her be.”
Zuko does not laugh, because his military training is, at this point, second nature. But the glint in his eye is enough to alert Lu Ten to his amusement, and the prince immediately tries to put his cousin in a headlock.
Iroh’s face loses some of its sternness as he watches them wrestle, both of them young and strong, and joyfully reveling in their youth and strength. Zuko, for the moment, is laughing.
It is rare, Iroh thinks, to see Captain Zuko laugh.
***
Zuko is nineteen years and four months old when Iroh’s heart beats wrongly, and then not at all for a long, long, long moment. When Iroh’s heart resumes its rhythm, it wobbles and stumbles on its axis so that the once-formidable Fire Lord turns wan and gray and leans heavily on a cane when he walks. He wears his red silk robes like a hair shirt, his gold mantle like a locked and weighted chain around his neck.
Lu Ten’s laugh lines harden into serious grooves the first time he has to offer his father his arm as Iroh struggles to his feet. The three-pronged headpiece of the crown prince suddenly seems to sit heavier on Lu Ten’s head, so that the prince holds his head more intentionally, balancing the gold crown with a will of iron.
“Make plans to sail south,” Lu Ten tells Zuko. Lu Ten watches his father from across the room, ready for the moment that the Fire Lord grows tired so that he can escort Iroh from the throne room and cajole him to rest.
“As soon as the weather clears,” Zuko swears, and he does not miss the way the lines between Lu Ten’s eyebrows ease.
Iroh will rest easier when Lu Ten is married.
***
“Fair winds and good sailing, Captain Zuko,” Iroh tells his nephew.
Zuko bows deeply over his fists, and prays that the grizzled, grim-faced Fire Lord will be here on the docks to welcome him home.
***
There is nothing but blue as far as he can see. The inky black-blue of the deepest waters fades to the gray-blue of the frothy waves, which blends into the blue-white of the sky — soft and hazy near the horizon, sharpening into the iridescent, nearly painfully bright blue-silver apex of the Southern sky.
Zuko stands at the prow of a ship welded in metallic shades of red and black and gray, and breathes in the dagger-sharp chill of the southern sea, and feels at peace for the first time in nine years.
***
It is made of ice. All of it; from the great walls to the clustered homes of the people to the palace with its soaring buttresses — it is ice, glimmering gently underneath the nebulous glow of the never-ending South Pole summer sun.
She is swathed in furs, her robes dyed a deep royal blue with ice-white trim. Her hood is drawn far forward so that Zuko cannot see her face, but the Southern princess moves with such unmistakable grace that he knows, without any doubt, that she must be beautiful, in the same glittering, ethereal way as the ice beneath the Southern lights is beautiful. She could not be anything less.
She extends two slim, dark hands from the fur cuffs to clasp her brother’s hands, then her father’s, and last she embraces her mother. Then she walks — floats, really, glides — towards Zuko, and inclines her head to him with such preternatural grace that it sends chills down his spine. “Captain,” she says in greeting, and her voice is smooth and husky and warm like raw honey.
“Princess,” Zuko says, and he bows. When he straightens, he sees her face for the first time, sharp angular bones and warm brown skin and the bluest, bluest, bluest eyes he has ever seen.
Zuko has lost his heart twice. The first time was when Lu Ten named him ‘brother.’ The second is the first time he meets Katara’s gaze, and he falls into her eyes as though they were the endless depths of the Southern sea.
He never has been able to differentiate between love and self-sacrifice.
***
“Tea, Princess?”
She sips at it, and her wince is nearly impossible to notice. “Thank you, Captain,” she says politely, but holds the delicate china at a respectable distance from her face.
Zuko makes a face. “My uncle will not let me serve his tea, either,” he confesses without thinking. “But courtesy demands that I bring you tea.”
“Not to put too fine a point on it,” the princess says dryly, “but why you?”
Zuko bites back a laugh. “You’re our honored guest, and the highest-ranking person on the ship,” he says. “It’s a mark of respect for the commanding officer to serve you.”
“I feel duly respected, Captain,” Katara says, and the laughter in her eyes is joyful sunshine through gentle waves. “There is no need for further tea service.”
“Noted, princess,” Zuko says, and chokes on a sip of his tea.
***
The only princess Zuko has ever met is his sister — although, technically, Azula is no longer a princess.
Katara is something different. She is welcoming warmth in place of reserve; she smiles easily and is never cruel. Her first instinct is kindness; her second is laughter. She is slow to anger, but when she stands her ground she is as implacable and ferocious as the winter hurricanes that lash the Caldera’s shores.
He cannot help but love her.
It feels like the tides, like the endless and unstoppable and utterly necessary sway of the sea beneath his ship. The way he loves her is the droop of heavy eyelids, the burning of a stifled yawn; it is an instinct, a reflex. He cannot stop it. He cannot want to.
***
“Tell me about the Fire Nation,” she tells him in that honeyed voice, and he is lost. He tells her of the summer heat, of the burst and bloom of color that comes with the flowers in spring.
She gasps and listens with wide eyes when he tells her of the pleasure gardens, of the koi ponds and the hot springs and the fountains running with cool, fresh water. In return, Katara brings a flute carved from bone out of her packs, and plays a melody that aches and wants with such a fierceness that it breaks Zuko’s heart.
When Katara stands at the prow of the ship during the full moon for hours, watching the waves, Zuko stands watch behind her and thinks about the three-pronged crown and his grandfather’s throne and all of the things that will never be his.
***
When winter winds hurl sheets of salt and ice over the deck, Katara plants herself in the center of the ship and closes her eyes while she bends the ocean’s wrath away from Zuko’s crew. He watches with awe as water arcs over his head, churning and twisting so thickly that he cannot see the sky beyond it.
The princess wears an expression of utter serenity as she moves several tons of water over the heads of the nervous sailors. There is not an ounce of tension in the line of her jaw; her eyes are closed and still; the ghost of a smile plays at the corner of her mouth.
He cannot stop watching her; the fluidity and the strength and the ease of her obsesses him. He thinks of the lines around Iroh’s mouth that have deepened with every year that he sits on the throne, of the way that Lu Ten’s eyes have grown more serious under the weight of the heir’s three-pronged crown.
Katara will be an excellent queen. He refuses to feel resentful over it.
***
They are halfway back to the Fire Nation when a sickness slinks its way through the crew. The glow of Katara’s healing waters lights the sailors’-cabin-turned-sick-bay with a weak, steady shimmer. She will not let Zuko past the door — we cannot have you getting sick, Captain — but he keeps vigil nearby, making sure she has plenty of clean water and fresh food. When he determines the glow has been lit for too long, he leaves a pillow and blanket on the floor next to the cabin door. When the pillow disappears, he risks taking a peek into the sick bay.
The Southern princess has tucked the pillow under the head of the sickest sailor, and she has fallen asleep leaning against the wall of the ship with the blanket wrapped around her shoulders. Her dark hair tumbles out of its braid and across her cheek in delicate strands. One curl falls across her full lips, fluttering in time with her breathing. She is curled in a tight ball, small and fragile in the faint light of the moon that seeps in through the porthole windows.
Zuko reaches out and tucks the blanket more firmly around her shoulders. He is careful not to touch her skin. He settles to the floor beside her and slowly stokes his inner fire until he radiates heat. Katara relaxes a bit, and Zuko likes to think that she sleeps easier in the warmth he gives off.
He keeps watch over her until the sun rises, and then she wakes and scolds him for coming too close to her patients. But there is a smile on her face when she ushers him out of the sick bay.
***
She sits with him as he pores over maps late into the evening. “So serious, Captain,” she teases him, but she takes notes for him in her neat hand while he takes measurements and mutters under his breath.
“Navigation requires concentration, princess,” he tells her seriously. When she nods with exaggerated solemnity and mirth behind her eyes, he cannot concentrate on anything but her.
When she moves in closer so he can show her how to use the astrolabe, he thinks it will be a miracle if he can concentrate long enough to keep them from getting lost.
***
“Tell me about the gardens,” she says.
Zuko smiles down at her. They are getting closer to the Fire Nation, and she has shed her heavy fur-trimmed robes for lighter traveling dresses of ice-blue. “I have told you about the gardens.”
“Tell me again,” she says.
“We’re making good time,” he says instead. “We should be able to see the Fire Nation by the end of next week. And we’ll be docking in the Caldera a few days after that.”
Katara is quiet for a long, long, long, long moment, and then she murmurs, “Tell me about the prince.”
He has already told her about Lu Ten, too.
“He is very strong, and kind,” Zuko says carefully.
She brushes a stray bit of hair behind her ear. “Is he handsome?”
“I suppose.”
“Does he laugh?”
“Yes,” Zuko says. “As much as any prince laughs, I suppose. He is more serious than he used to be.”
“More serious?”
“He smiles less,” Zuko says. “He has a great deal of responsibility.”
“He must be very grave,” she says. She does not meet his eyes.
“Lu Ten will be a very great Fire Lord,” Zuko says quickly. He wants desperately to see what is lurking behind the ocean of her eyes. “If he is grave, it is only because he feels the weight of his duties.”
“Of course,” she says with equal haste. “I’m sure I’ll admire that about him. I just hoped that I…well.”
“Tell me,” he prompts.
“I hoped that I would be able to laugh with my husband,” she says, and looks up at him, and Zuko’s heart breaks and breaks and breaks over the look in her blue eyes. Never again in his life will he call that color ‘ocean blue’ — it is ‘Katara blue’ for him now, it always will be, and it is joy and melancholy and hope and heartbreak all at once.
“I am sure he will laugh easier with you,” Zuko assures her, and avoids thinking about the way her joy lights her up like sunrise on sea foam.
“I hope so,” she murmurs, and she looks at him as though she is searching for something. “I want a happy marriage. I want a happy partner in my life.”
“Yes,” Zuko says, and he means, I want that for you. He means, I want that with you. He means, I want. I want. I want.
***
The Fire Nation comes into view as the sun sets over the waves.
“Your new home, princess,” Zuko tells her.
Her hand rests next to his on the railing. There is a hair’s breadth between their pinky fingers. His hand burns against the space that separates him from her. Zuko hates that space. He needs it desperately.
“How strange,” she whispers, and for a long moment the ship tilts and it seems that Katara is leaning towards him. Zuko yearns to reach out for her, to pull her in close and let her collapse for just a second.
But then the tide flows back the other way and the space between them increases, and Katara is once again holding herself up with the sheer, inimitable force of her will.
Zuko wonders if she would lean on his arm if he offered it.
He does not offer it. He merely stands at the railing of the ship, staring at the shoreline of his homeland, helplessly and hopelessly aware of the slim margin of space between his hand and Katara’s.
He wonders if he will spend the rest of his life being aware of how much space there is between him and Katara.
***
Zuko’s life has suddenly shrunk down to two measurements.
The first: the amount of space between Zuko and Katara. That distance is always too much — it is never enough.
The second: the range between the prow of Zuko’s ship and the shore of the Fire Nation. That will never, never be enough.
The sway of the ship beneath his feet is intrinsically tied to the way that he feels when the Southern princess smiles at him. The smell of the salt spray is the same as the scent of her hair.
Prince Captain Zuko will never again be so happy as he is on the sea.
***
The docks of the Caldera are lined with people, and all of them are wearing red.
Katara stands at the railing of Zuko’s ship, dressed head-to-toe in blue, and her face is calm and relaxed and confident as Zuko barks out landing orders. Her knuckles have gone white from her grip on the railing.
Zuko wishes he could comfort her. He wishes he could give her some sort of support.
If wishes were dragons, his mother’s voice whispers, we would all fly.
“Princess,” says Lu Ten as he bows to Katara with flawless formality. “We welcome you to the Fire Nation, and hope that you will find comfort in your new home.”
She bows fluidly in return. “My lord,” she says. “The Southern Water Tribe sends her greetings and her goodwill. I am glad to meet you, and to make my home in your country.”
Katara slowly, slowly, slowly reaches out and places her hand on Lu Ten’s proffered arm. As the prince leads her away, she meets Zuko’s eyes.
He is in full military uniform, on a ship under his command, surrounded by sailors who would rather die than disobey him — but he has never felt smaller than he does when Katara walks away from him on Lu Ten’s arm.
***
She marries the prince dressed in red.
“It’s for luck,” Zuko assures her before the ceremony.
“I should wear blue,” she tells him with a frown. “I am still the Southern princess.”
“You will always be that,” he says. “But you are going to be the Queen Consort. You are ours, too, now.”
She smiles up at him. “It sounds so much better when you phrase it that way, Captain,” she says, and they say no more about it. But her wedding dress is red.
Zuko stands next to Lu Ten as the royal couple makes their way through the formal ceremony. He maintains his composure while Katara makes her first formal bow as Princess Consort of the Fire Nation. Zuko keeps his calm when Katara takes her seat next to Lu Ten at the wedding feast. He smiles and raises his wine glass to toast the happy couple.
He does not think about the fact that the red silk that makes her look so flushed and vibrant is her wedding gown. He does not think about the fact that she will be Queen Consort of the Fire Nation — to Lu Ten’s Fire Lord. He will not think about it.
Fire Lord Iroh is watching him. Zuko smirks as he lifts his glass again.
There is a hollow place deep in Zuko’s belly, but that is no one’s business but his.
***
“I’m leaving on shore patrol in the morning,” Zuko says to Lu Ten.
The prince’s eyes are distant. He has a thousand other worries, a million other concerns.
“Be safe,” Lu Ten says. “Come home to us soon.”
The princess consort (of only a few weeks) frowns. “Be safe, Captain,” Katara says. It is all she will say. It is all she can say.
“Safe travels,” Lu Ten says.
Zuko leaves.
***
The sea churns beneath his ship, and it is wild and angry and untamed. The tide moves them away from the rocky beaches of the Fire Nation, and Zuko does not correct course.
The early-morning sun shines weakly through the peaks of the waves, and the sea turns Katara-blue.
Zuko refuses to think about it.