Archive of Our Own

Zuko knows he is dead the minute he opens his eyes.

He’s not sure how he’s so certain of this, only that there is an absence of something within him, like someone’s carved him out and left only the shell of who he used to be behind. It’s a feeling he’s more than acquainted with over the past year, now simply accompanied by the lack of flame when he holds out his open hand.

This must be the spirit world then.

Zuko has never set foot in the spirit lands before, but the sight around him isn’t even remotely similar to the stories Uncle told him all those years ago in exile. There is no thorny jungle, no mystical ethereal twilight or even any actual spirits to be seen.

There’s simply… nothing.

No colour, no smell, no sound, not even anything to touch. The only thing that surrounds him is a soft, constant glow, which emanates from nowhere and seems to have no end.

The heart of a void.

Of course, Zuko would end up here. He’s never been able to do anything right in life; why would dying be any different?

He walks into the infinite emptiness, mostly because there isn’t anything else to do and he’s never been good at waiting around. Try as he might, he cannot recall his death; flashes return to him now and then, memories of blood and sudden, blinding pain and someone – Uncle? – screaming his name.

The thought of Uncle invokes the only sadness he feels about his demise. Uncle deserves better than losing both his sons.

But then Uncle has always deserved better than Zuko as a son.

Maybe he can find his new home in what is left of their Team Avatar. It feels wrong to call them a team when only a shadow remains of what was once shining and glorious, a hollow husk held together by the cracked fissures of shared memory and a duty bigger and more important than them all.

He wonders if any of them will attend his funeral. He will hardly blame them if they don’t.

(This is your fault, the Avatar snarls at the last funeral they attend together, not yet thirteen and already master of a hatred that should have been decades in the making. You have no right showing your face here.)

Still, he hopes they will be there for Iroh. It is not fair to ask them to shoulder this, no more than it is fair to ask Uncle to take up the mantle of Fire Lord again, but if Zuko has learned anything in his brief life, it is that the world is never fair.

At least his people will get a proper Fire Lord on the throne now, one who actually knows what he’s doing. A Fire Lord who isn’t despised by his closest allies, who doesn’t spend most nights drowning in memory and hallucination, whose crowning achievement isn’t garnering the largest number of assassination attempts in history.  

What has Zuko done, beyond failing at utterly everything?

He couldn’t be a good Fire Lord. He couldn’t be a good son, a good brother, a good friend. He couldn’t even save what mattered most when it counted.

It’s better this way.

He is sorry his friends (they will always be his friends, even if he is no longer theirs) must take on one more burden, one more duty that should have been Zuko’s, but there is nothing he can do.

There is never, it turns out, anything he can do.

“I’ll show you lightning!”

Zuko is a seasoned practitioner in grief, an expert in navigating the thorny tangle of guilt and remorse and love that assaults him, but even he doesn’t expect it here – in this place that is supposed to be beyond mere mortal pain. He’s taken back to the first day he woke up in a world without her, like he’s experiencing it all anew.

A world without her. Even in his worst nightmares, he could never have imagined just how excruciating it would be.

Except – that isn’t true anymore, is it?

It is no longer a world without her; it is a world without both of them, barred forever with no way of return. There is no impossible task to accomplish, no one to plead with, no means of going back. As he knows all too well, death is final; unchangeable, irrevocable, absolute.

And if they have both left the world behind, then…

The change happens so seamlessly that he doesn’t notice it at first.

One moment, the horizon before him stretches out long and infinite, an unbroken line at the edge of existence. In the next, it’s split down the middle, glowing lines intersected by a faded spot of greying darkness. There’s no visible shift or moment he sees it happen – it simply goes from unbroken to divided in the blink of an eye, as if that’s the way it’s always been.

There is still no end to the void that surrounds him, but now, suddenly, there is direction. Two directions, each heading the opposite way from the other.

A crossroads.

He is taken back to Ba Sing Se, emerald light and stone-hard crystal and a cool hand on his cheek. The tantalizing promise of redemption at his fingertips, confusion and desire warring in his heart.

A crack of lightning. A terrible fall.

He’s made the wrong choice too many times. He will not – cannot – do it again.

Zuko reaches the fork in the path that separates one infinite road from the other. There is no sign to tell him what differentiates them, what they lead to, but he doesn’t need one. He knows what awaits at the end of one path, knows it with the same certainty that told him he was dead.

He thinks he’s known since he first woke up here, that the truth has simply been slumbering in the back of his mind, waiting for the moment he will finally bring it to the light. Somewhere beyond, somewhere down one of the roads that stretch out before him –

“You are wondering if you will find what you seek.”

Zuko spins at the sudden, unexpected voice. His immediate instinct is to conjure a whip of fire, at least until he remembers where he is and sees who waits before him – a spirit he has never met but recognizes instantly from Iroh’s stories.

Koh the Face-Stealer greets him with a pleasant smile.

His face – or at least, the face he wears – is thin and worn, surveying Zuko with a hungry glint in that dark, stolen gaze. Uncle’s warnings about Koh ring in his head, loud and blaring, but unaccompanied by the terror he used to feel as a child. He wonders vaguely if he should be scared, but fear is a luxury he hasn’t been able to afford since he fought his sister.

Besides what can Koh do to him now, when death has taken Zuko so far beyond his reach?

“Or perhaps,” the spirit continues, when Zuko says nothing, “I should say who you seek.”

The words arrest him, tie lead weights to his feet and root him to the ground. A wild desperation takes hold, dead heart pounding a frantic rhythm against his rib cage like a cornered animal seeking escape.

“What do you know about her?”

“Only what you do,” Koh says placidly. “But I know enough about you, Fire Lord. I know who it is you wish to see.”

It is decidedly not the smart move to reveal his hand so early and give Koh exactly what he wants, but logic and reason are no match for three hundred and sixty-five days of agony. “Then tell me,” he demands, placing himself right in the path of the Face-Stealer. “Is she there?”

A dozen faces appear and shift as Koh watches him. The silence stretches on and on, longer than even the roads before him, until he thinks he might just throttle the answer out of the spirit himself.  

“Even if I were inclined to tell you,” Koh says at last, “I cannot. There are some places forbidden to even the great spirits.”

Had he been the Zuko of old, the Zuko who didn’t age a hundred years in the span of one, he would have let rage claim him, let smoke and flame consume everything in his path. But he is no longer young and brash, tempered by grief, and the only thing he feels is complete, utter emptiness.

Here, there are no tears to shed, no air to steal from his lungs, no way to shatter a heart that no longer beats. There is nothing to do but sink to the floor, watching the last remnants of his hope vanish into an infinite, blazing horizon.  

He can feel Koh’s gaze on him, watchful and almost curious. The face he wears is young and chubby, but behind innocent green eyes lurks a vast, ancient darkness that could never belong to any child.

“Whatever it is you want,” Zuko says dully, “just get it out and leave me alone.”

Koh smiles with the toddler’s face, awful and terrible.

“Perhaps I simply want to give you a gift.”

“You never give anyone anything.”

“Not usually, no,” the spirit allows. “But I have watched you for a long time now, Fire Lord. I am, shall we say, sympathetic to your cause.”

The thought is almost laughable. “Sympathetic indeed, for someone who won’t help me.”

“I cannot tell you what awaits in the lands beyond.” Koh’s face changes once more, this time to an old man whose empty eyes stare blankly at Zuko. “Death is forbidden to us all. But time…time is different. Just as vast, just as infinite, but malleable. It is possible to shape, in the right hands. Possible, even, to change.”

Something buds in Zuko’s chest, small and fragile.

“And there is certainly something you wish to change, is there not?”

The air is suddenly tinged with blue, filled with the acrid smell of burning flesh. His ears ring with the sound of agonized screaming, high and never ending, and he cannot speak, cannot think, cannot move –

“I offer you, Fire Lord, your greatest desire.”

The long, sinuous body folds around Zuko in a mockery of an embrace.

“I offer you a second chance,” Koh says, in a voice like spider silk. “A chance to save Katara of the Southern Water Tribe.”  

o–0–o

The comet arrives, and Zuko burns.

The pull in his veins is unlike anything he has ever known, anything he could have prepared for. For the first time he truly understands the might that Sozin wielded against the Nomads, that Ozai will now wield against the Earth Kingdom. This is the power that razed civilizations and burned cities to the ground. This is the power that sparked a hundred, terrible years of fighting.

This is the power that will let him end it.

Good and evil. Yin and Yang.

Katara’s face is set when she climbs onto Appa’s back, her hair streaming in the breeze like a war banner. She looks every inch the glorious warrior, the righteous sword come to strike down the evil and unworthy.

The comet gives him strength, but her presence makes him feel invincible, like the energy of a thousand suns is coursing through his body. It seems suddenly inconceivable that anything should stand in their way, not even Azula.

For the first time in his life, he feels no fear at the thought of facing his sister.

Not when he has Katara.

o–0–o

“You’re lying.”

There is no cold beyond death, and he cannot feel it even if there is, but Zuko finds that he is shaking from head to toe - a leaf in the wind, tossed about at whim, ripped from everything familiar and pulled to new, dangerous shores.

Koh clicks his tongue against pearly white teeth and chuckles. “Is that how lowly you think of me, your highness?”

“What you’re offering,” Zuko says roughly, “is impossible.”

The great spirit merely sighs, as if Zuko has given a wrong answer on a test. “You mortals… you are all the same. So disbelieving, even in the face of everything that proves you wrong.”

The hundred and one legs scuttle forward, skittering across the endless ground in all directions. The motion is distinctly reminiscent of a fat spider sitting in a web, bulbous and grotesque as it waits to reel in its prey.

“I was born to the Mother of Faces, young Fire Lord.” For the first time, Koh’s voice loses its casual amusement. “But before she shed her first name, long before there ever was an Avatar, she was known as Benzaiten. Spirit of all that flows, whether that was a rushing river, or the march of time itself.”

A spirit that controls time. He has never heard of such a thing, not even from Uncle.

“I am the master of identity,” the Face-Stealer says, and the faces he owns begin to flash one after another, a never-ending blur of the lost and stolen. “I know every face you have worn through your life, every version of yourself you have ever been or will be. You carry the flow of time within you, within every one of your past selves. Do you think it is beyond my power to restore you to them?”

A trick, Iroh’s cautious voice whispers in his head.

“If I believe you,” Zuko starts slowly, “and I’m not saying I do, what are you suggesting? That you’ll – send me back into my past self?”

The spirit smiles. “Not exactly.”

Before he can even lift a finger, Koh touches the tip of a thin, hooked leg to Zuko’s chest. There is a burning flash, a tug in his solar plexus, and then he is stumbling backward, something hot and heavy glowing within him like a living ember.

“Congratulations, Fire Lord,” Koh croons, sounding almost delighted with himself. “You hold within you now a kernel of my power, more than enough for you to send yourself back. It is yours to command for as long as you wish, as many times as you wish.”

Zuko presses a hand to the place that Koh touched him, and feels a sudden, sharp tingle, as though he’s holding lightning in the palm of his hand.

Wariness sets in, like tinder slowly catching flame.

“You offer nothing for free,” Zuko says carefully, searching the spirit’s face for a flash of something – anything. “Why are you doing this?”

Koh winks a heavy-lidded eye, painted with red like Kyoshi warrior makeup. “I have my reasons, Fire Lord. You would be wise to accept that.”

“That’s it?” he blurts out. “You just… give me your power, the power to change time, and I can do it? What’s the catch?”

“No catch.” The Face-Eater smiles, though it is neither nice nor kind. There is something ugly threaded beneath it, a glittering malice that raises the hairs on the back of Zuko’s neck. “There are, however, certain… rules, to put it nicely. Meddling with time is, I’m afraid, a rather finicky business.”

“What rules?”

Koh draws a line in the air, a golden thread that mimics the one currently pulling at Zuko. He draws a second parallel line next to it, so the two burning strands hang side by side, and blows. The lines draw together, curving inward and then back out, crossing over each other, pulling ever closer until, finally, they come to an abrupt stop in mid-air, connected at one final point.

“This is your destiny,” he announces, gesturing to the lines in the air. “Yours, and the waterbender’s.”

The lines begin to pulse, certain areas glowing stronger and brighter than others.

“And those,” the spirit continues, “are crossroads. Places where your destiny collides with the waterbender’s, where fate could have tilted one way or another. Intersections where time itself can be bent to your command. You can only send yourself back here, to the moments that tie you and the girl you love together.”

Koh turns to him, and though nothing in his face has changed, Zuko suddenly sees the spirit his uncle must have met, the spectre that haunted his nightmares years later. But there is no room in his heart for fear, not when it is already being pulled in two by the alternate forces of hope and denial.

It cannot be true. It cannot, and yet if is – if it is –

He has carried the weight of the worst day of his life for so long that dislodging it now seems almost unthinkable, and yet that is exactly what lies in reach. The greatest dream of his soul, merely inches from his fingertips.

“Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

The words tumble from his mouth in a swift rush, more a splattered hodge-podge of syllables than an actual answer, but Koh nods in approval anyway.

Zuko feels suddenly as though he is watching this happen from somewhere far away, like this is simply another day curled up in his mother’s chambers, reading yet another play of characters fighting to do the impossible. This is the moment the audience yells no, the moment all sense and wisdom warn against, the moment the tragic hero seals his own fate forever.

He understands, now. There is no choice to make. There is only the path ahead of him, glowing as bright as the shining line of destiny, and Katara awaits at the end of it.

Koh’s eyes gleam pure, dark obsidian. “Good luck, Fire Lord.”

Then he falls.

o–0–o

Zuko lands with the force of a whirlwind, snapping into himself like a rock from a slingshot.

For a moment, he thinks he’s still lost in the disorienting vortex of shape and sound and colour, an assault on his senses from all sides. There is a sickening, swooping feeling in his gut, though he does not know whether it is from the time travel or the roaring blaze of the comet tugging at his chi –

The comet.

Zuko freezes.

The soft down of fur beneath his knees. The whistle of the wind in his ears. The pulsing heat in the air, like the world itself is boiling over.

It worked.

Against every bit of skepticism, every shred of logic, everything that told him not to have hope, Koh kas kept his word. His fingers tremble, and he curls them into fists, but it does not stop the shaking for if he is truly on Appa’s back again, flying to face his sister once more, then that means –

“Zuko?”

The voice that drifts to him on a burning breeze holds no pain or terror. It is not the one that haunts his nightmares, nor the one that curls at the back of his mind, flinging words of blame and recrimination with the merciless fury of the ocean. It is sweet and familiar, tinged with concern.

Zuko’s beating heart stops once more.

There is a soft thud as someone leaps over the side of Appa’s saddle and lands gently beside him. “Are you okay?”

His breath comes in razor sharp blades, every inhale slicing his lungs to ribbons. He prays to every spirit he knows that this is not another dream to wake from, not another illusion that fades into the muted grey of daylight when he opens his eyes.

He will not survive that. Not this time.

A soft hand lands atop his, stilling his shaking fingers.

The touch is light, but he knows, knows who it belongs to with the kind of certainty that finds a home in his bones. He knows the lines of her palm better than his own, knows the crook of her knuckles when she bends, the pads of her fingertips on ruined skin.

He knows the way her hand feels when it goes limp in his.

“Zuko?” she asks again, and it is not until this moment that he realizes he has forgotten the exact cadence of her voice. “What’s wrong?”

When he opens his eyes, it is to a ghost.

Katara looks back at him with wide eyes, blue as the sea by the ice where he first saw her. Her fingers tighten on his and the world falls out from beneath his feet, sending him reeling, spinning, lost, scrambling to catch himself. He finds his anchor in the sapphire of her hair beads, the curve of her lower lip, the wink of indigo at the hollow of her throat.

The breeze catches her hair, curling it toward him, and the long strands brush across his cheek.

Real. Tangible. Here.

“Katara,” Zuko breathes, stumbling over the word, unused to the way it sounds without bitterness clinging to every syllable. The taste of her name on his tongue is both redemption and damnation, tearing him open and stitching him together.

The girl he loves, returned to him against every law of the universe, beautiful and alive, her lips already forming another question –

At long last, Zuko reaches out and pulls Katara into his arms.

She does not fold into him so much as she falls, almost knocking them both off Appa with the force of his tug. It is nothing like their first hug, but Zuko is beyond tentativeness and hesitancy, has long buried the uncertain boy who’d held her like fragile glass on an Ember Island jetty. There is not an inch of space between their bodies, but he wants her closer still, wants to imprint the feel of her into his skin.

He clings to her the way a drowning man might cling to a life raft, the way the waves cling to sand. She is solid and slender in his arms, the rise and fall of her chest (broken, singed, unmoving) mimicking his own. He knows now that she will not disappear into thin air as so many images of her have previously, but he still holds her to him as though he can singlehandedly root her to this world forever.

Katara’s hands wrap gently around his back, a little unsure. He buries his face in her hair, no longer smelling of smoke, no longer slick with blood as it splays across broken cobblestone. It is perfect and clean and whole, as is the rest of her, and for the first time in three hundred and sixty-five long, long days –

Zuko can breathe at last.  

“As nice as this,” Katara laughs, her breath whispering across his skin, “you’re kind of crushing me, Zuko.”  

He withdraws immediately, mumbling an apology as he pulls back. His hands stay on her shoulders, wanting to stay connected to her, wanting to remind himself that she’s actually here before him and not yet another delusion cooked up by his grieving mind.

He traces her face, following the slope of her nose and the slant of her cheekbones, the exact blue of her eyes, darker and more lovely than he remembered – committing to memory everything that time stole from him. He wants nothing more than to spend the rest of his life right by her side, learning and re-learning every facet of her, and now he can.

Now, he never needs to lose her again.

Katara’s hands come up to grasp his wrists, gently lowering them from her shoulders so she can take his hands into her own. He savours every bit of contact, clings to each one like a drop of water in the desert. He has been denied of her touch for so long that now every slight brush is almost dangerously addictive, wood to a dying flame.   

She squeezes his hands tightly, looking as fierce and indomitable as he remembers from the first time. How invincible he thought her then, buoyed by the sheer force of her faith.

He knows better now.

“Zuko, don’t worry,” she says with complete certainty. “We can take Azula.”

No, we couldn’t.

I couldn’t.

But that was then, and this is now, and now she is right. This time, Zuko will be the one taking and Azula will be the one giving. The tale of their childhood will not repeat itself, not today. He will not allow it.

His sister will never take anything from him ever again.

“I know,” he tells her, and tries to swallow past the sheer joy of simply being able to talk to Katara again. “We’ll defeat Azula.”

She peers at his face, furrowing her brow. He wants to kiss the crease in her forehead. He wants to kiss her everywhere she will allow him to, but he cannot – not yet. He’s whispered his confession only to the icy tundra, to the waves that took her body to its final resting place.

After, he promises himself.

After Azula, after the war, when they have nothing but time. He held back once before out of fear that she wouldn’t reciprocate – a fear that seems so distant now, so paltry in comparison to the suffering of losing her – and he will not make the same mistake again.

Once they win, once she is safe… he will tell Katara everything.

“Why do you look so worried?” she asks. “Is it Aang? Because he’ll come back. I know he will.”

“I’m not worried about Aang,” he says, and means it, safe in the comfort of hindsight. “He’ll be okay.”

He knows how Aang’s day will play out, knows that the journey that began months ago in an iceberg of the South Pole will come to its final, triumphant end on a plateau in the Earth Kingdom. Knows that Aang will return to the Fire Nation Palace victorious, flanked by Sokka and Toph and Suki, all of them whooping and cheering. Knows that they will run to his bent, shaking form, yelling something about Ozai and defeated and a bunch of childish insults before they finally draw close enough to see who lies in his arms and childhood becomes a distant dream.

Knows the split second Aang’s hand comes down on his shoulder, the last friendly touch he will ever feel from the boy.

That story will not unfold again, not now that he’s been gifted the power to rewrite it.

“Maybe my hope rubbed off on you after all,” Katara teases, tearing him from the depths of memory. “I knew I was a good influence.”

“The best,” he tells her with the utmost sincerity, and sees her eyes soften.

“I’m really proud of you, Zuko.”

Agni knows he deserves nothing from her – not her kindness, not her friendship, and certainly not her pride – but the words warm him more than his inner fire ever could. His hand is still in her grasp, and he turns his palm over to interlace his fingers with hers.

Surprise flashes across her face. He doesn’t blame her for the reaction, knows that he’s taking liberties that are straddling the boundary between friendship and something other. Their contact never exceeded anything more than what could be brushed off as friendship before – maybe hugs that were a little closer than normal, handholds that lingered just a touch too long when she pulled him up from the ground after spars, but nothing overtly romantic.

This isn’t quite strict friendship anymore, not with the way he’s looking at her, and he suspects she knows it. Her gaze flickers from their hands to his eyes, but she doesn’t pull away, only squeezes his fingers tighter and smiles in that way that’s uniquely Katara.

He’s lost count of how many days he spent begging the spirits for one more moment, one more day, one more chance to see that smile again. It is almost painful to see it break across her face now, bright and beautiful, with no knowledge of what he would have given for this moment.

Agni, he’s missed that smile.

Appa groans beneath them and he tears his gaze from her face for long enough to take in their surroundings. They’re descending, the sky growing darker and bloodier, and in the distance, he spies the familiar spires of his childhood home.

They’re almost out of time.

“Listen,” he says urgently, turning back to Katara. “When we get there, Azula is probably going to challenge me to an Agni Kai. It’s a traditional fire duel between two firebenders, and no one else is allowed to intervene. I think I should take it.”

She opens her mouth to argue immediately, as he knew she would, but he presses on to get his case out before she can. What he really wants her is to send her off on Appa, beg her to return to camp or Ember Island or the South Pole, anywhere far from the war, far from danger, but she would never agree to that in a million years.

It’s just one of the many reasons he loves her.

“If we both fight Azula, it might get messy,” he argues. “The Fire Sages will be there, there are servants in the palace, and when she’s cornered, she can and will do anything to win, no matter who gets caught in the crossfire. This way, no one else has to get hurt.”

This way, I can keep you safe.

Katara still looks deeply reluctant, but he can tell she sees the logic in his words.

“I don’t like this,” she says honestly, “but fine. Don’t even think about telling me to leave, though. I’m going to be right there in case you need backup.”

She means the words as nothing more than reassurance, but they cleave him apart like a blade to the chest. He knows she’ll be right there, knows she’ll be backup, knows it with the weight of the horror that flooded his entire body when the air split with lightning in the wrong direction and he turned to find his worst nightmare come to life.

“No!” he bursts out, too loud, too fearful, and she startles. He tries again, gentler, but panic is thrumming through his body, and the words come out far too desperate. “No, Katara – please. Please, no matter what you see, no matter what you think, just stay out of the fight. I’m begging you.”

He has never seen Katara frightened, but what flashes in her eyes now is the closest she’s ever come to it.

“Okay, that’s it,” she says firmly, almost able to conceal the tremor in her voice. “You’ve been acting strange the entire way here, and you weren’t like this back at camp, so something must be wrong. What happened?”

He cannot tell her, and she will never believe him anyway, but the urge to do so is so strong that the words almost tumble out of his mouth. He holds them back through sheer force of will and instead tells her the more important truth, the only one that matters.  

“I just don’t want you to get hurt, Katara.”

She doesn’t look like she believes him, but there is no time to press, for below them the giant volcano of the Caldera sweeps into view. Appa begins to descend and Zuko’s heart climbs into his throat. The life he’s lost, the life he’s dreamed of, is so close that he can almost reach out and grasp it.

Only Azula stands in his way.

“Please,” he says again, frantic now, turning back to Katara. “Please, that’s all I ask. Just stay out of the fight. No matter what you see or hear. I’ll be fine, so long as you stay out of it.”

He cups her face, beyond caring how intimate it is, beyond caring about anything but protecting her. “Promise me,” he breathes, his mouth so close to hers that he could lean forward and brush her lips. “Promise me you’ll stay out of it. I need you to trust me on this. Please.”

Her eyes search his – looking for answers, he knows, answers she’ll never find, never be able to make sense of even if she did. But perhaps she sees something in them regardless, for her hands come up over his own, and she nods.

“Okay,” she promises at last. “Okay, I’ll stay out of it. I trust you.”

The relief that floods him is almost dizzying. “Thank you.”

Then it is too late, for Appa is swooping downwards, down to where his sister’s manic, cruel voice slashes through the air like a whip, down to the place where his world once came to an end. Zuko doesn’t allow himself a last look at Katara before he vaults over Appa's side and drops to the ground before Azula.

“Sorry, but you’re not going to become Fire Lord today. I am.”

He meets his sister’s eyes, the eyes of their cursed family, and feels a startling, vicious stab of rage. The Azula he knows in his own time is too far gone to hate, too broken to inspire anything but despair and pity. The Azula before him teeters still on the precipice, balancing on the line between the forgivable and unforgivable, about to make the choice that will irreparably fracture them both.

If there was ever any part of him that loved his sister, it shrivels and dies now in the courtyard where they once played together.

The Agni Kai unfolds like the lines of a play he has read many, many times before.

Each move is muscle memory, as though he is following the steps of a dance he’s learned and practiced to perfection. Zuko swerves and blocks and attacks with deft ease, but now there is no comfort or confidence to be found in finally beating his sister. Every second that slips by only brings them closer to the inevitable climax, tension climbing and simmering beneath his skin as he counts down to the moment that he’s been waiting a lifetime for.

It arrives earlier and swifter than he expects.

Azula goes sprawling, crumpling across the ground like the paper dolls she destroyed as a child. She looks as fragile as one when she rises, a toy used and discarded before her time.

“No lightning today? What’s the matter, afraid I’ll redirect it?”

Stupid – so stupid – to goad Azula of all people, fuelled by reckless arrogance and the ever-burning comet in his blood –

“I’ll show you lightning!”

This time, at least, it will find its intended mark.

Azula's fingers cut through the air in a perfect parabola, the sheer power of a thousand volts of electricity held in her slender hand. He slides into position as she draws back, aims, prepares to shoot –

Then her gaze shifts to his right.

o–0–o

Later, Zuko will see it all in startling clarity.

His sister poised in the moment of release, her form still utterly perfect; a scorched courtyard lit in crackling sapphire; Katara frozen as death races for her; and him in the middle of it all, trying to defeat the undefeatable.

He leaps.

There is a second in which he thinks he’ll make it. His fingers stretch into the air, so tantalizingly close that he can feel the heat on his skin, almost there –

Almost, it turns out, is not enough.

Zuko comes crashing down just as Katara begins to scream.

The sound is the most terrible thing he has ever heard. It is worse than the sound of a dying Avatar, worse than the moon being ripped from the sky, worse than a child begging for his father’s mercy.

The silence that follows is the worst of all.

o–0–o

It’s alright, his mother whispers once during a thunderstorm. They are huddled in bed, because Zuko is four and scared, and Azula is a baby, and outside, the large oak tree that’s been there since his grandfather’s time has been split in half like a sapling.

He will never go into the garden again, he declares. Not after that.  

Don’t worry, Fire Princess Ursa says, and pulls him close. Azula curls a chubby hand around his little finger and yawns.

Lightning never strikes the same place twice.

It’s his mother’s lie he remembers when he falls.  

o–0–o

Katara is still alive when he reaches her.

She’s curled on her side, bent in towards herself the way she always does on Appa. He can almost believe she’ll sit up in just a few minutes, shoot a tired smile his way or yell at Sokka for being too loud. Nothing more than another day at camp, another day of pretending they aren’t children fighting a war too old for them.

The illusion breaks apart the minute he collapses to his knees at her side.

Something dark and viscous seeps from her limp body, pooling around her and soaking into the fabric of his trousers. He can tell himself it’s simply the scarlet skies and the comet that stains her red, but Zuko never has been good at lying.  

His hands flutter uselessly over her body, scrambling to staunch the bleeding. But there’s too much of it, leaking from her mouth and nose and the scorched hole in her abdomen that’s burned all the way down to bone.

“HELP!” Zuko screams, and though it’s been years, his voice is still that of the scared boy prostrate at his father's feet. Now he is Fire Lord, and yet still every bit as powerless as he was then.

“HELP! Someone please – anyone –”

There is no one, of course. No one who can heal this, even if they try. Not even Katara – Katara who brought a boy back from the grasp of death, who can bend a man’s body to her will, who works miracles like breathing – can lose blood like this and live.

A weak, frail hand grips his wrist.

His gaze shoots to her face. Her eyes are heavy-lidded, eyelids fluttering, like she is struggling to keep them open.

“Katara,” he chokes, and gathers her into his arms. “I’m getting you help. You’re going to be okay, just stay awake –”

“Zuko,” she breathes, in a voice softer than he’s ever heard it. It’s more air than sound, barely an exhale of his name, but he clings to it anyway.

“I’m here,” he says. “I’m right here. I won’t leave you –”

He breaks on the last word, voice cutting off as though it has been torn from his mouth. It is not right that he should be here instead of Aang or Sokka, that it is him – weak, pathetic Zuko, nothing but a failure – who sees Katara into the next world.

Something gutters in her eyes, dangerously close to going out. Even in the red pallor of the comet, there is a sickly grey hue to her skin, as though all the colour is being leached from it. He gathers her close, presses her to him like he can breathe the life right back into her by doing so.

Her fingers, slick and sticky, curl between his own bloody ones.

Even in the worst tragedies he’s read, there is always time – time for a last goodbye, a last kiss, a last hug. At the end, that is the least the spirits can offer.

But the spirits have never been kind to Zuko.

She is gone in the breath between dawn and night, swift as the tides she once commanded.

o–0–o

The second time is not much different from the first.  

Katara lies sprawled across the ground, no longer curled gracefully on her side. The burn is not quite the one in the tableau that stalks his nightmares, scorched beneath her ribs instead of across her stomach. The rest of the scene – the scent of iron and ash, the charred singe of smoke, the bloodless pall of her lips – is hauntingly familiar. His vision blurs, the past and present distorting together until he isn’t sure what is real and what is memory.

“I’m sorry,” she mumbles faintly, yet another change, the words slurring together so that he has to lean in to hear her. “I didn’t listen –”

The words “I’m sorry” have been hanging on his lips for almost a year now, but Katara gets there first anyway. He shouldn’t be surprised, really; she has always been better than him in every way.

Her strength gives out as she tries to sit up, but Zuko catches her before she can fall, cradling her body with his own. He feels the stuttering rhythm of her heart against his, slowing, winding down to its inevitable stop.

There is a ringing in his head, something awful and shrill climbing up from the cracked and dark spaces within him to catch in his throat.

“It’s alright,” Zuko tells her, swallowing it down. “You’re alright. You’re alright – ”

He says the words as though his determination will make them true, will patch up the blood pooling from her body, repair her scorched veins and ruined heart. There can be no alternative, because he cannot lose her again – he cannot –

The light leaves her eyes just as the sun breaks over the horizon.

No.

“No,” he says aloud. “No, no, Katara – wake up. Wake up and look at me. Look at me!”  

He cannot bring himself to shake her, cannot be rough with her even in death, but he screams – at her, at Koh, at the entire fucking universe – over and over, until there is no voice left in his lungs any longer.  

He makes sure Katara is laid gently on the ground, blood cleaned from her mouth, arms folded over the gaping wound in her chest, before he turns to his fire.

The palace – already ravaged from the Agni Kai – doesn’t stand a chance.

Zuko burns it all, every pillar and arch and cobblestone, every inch of this terrible place that has taken and taken and taken everything from him. He doesn’t stop burning until the courtyard is scorched to ash, and Katara’s limp body is gilded in golden sunshine. He hates the sight of it. She belongs to the moonlight, not to the element that destroyed them both.

In the bright wash of day, her hair looks just like the shimmering thread of time still stretched taut within him.

It is yours to command for as long as you wish, as many times as you wish.

In the crystal-clear depths of his rage, he sees what he missed in the eagerness of a boy given an impossible chance, what Koh has told him from the start.

As many times as you wish.

It is not a single chance, after all. And that means Zuko has not failed.

Not yet.

I will save you.

He allows himself one last look at her, one last moment to mourn, before he calls to the power within him. It’s too late for this Katara, in this time, but she is not the end.

I promise.

o–0–o

The chaos of the camp just outside Ba Sing Se hits him all at once.

Zuko hasn’t been around this many people in months. His council are the largest group he ever interacts with now, and they all tiptoe around him as if he is made of glass, softspoken and meek. He can’t say they’re wrong to do so.

The ruckus of four different nations colliding in the same place is overwhelming. Conversation and laughter echoes from every corner, and he hears the occasional rumble of earthbending, the sharp twang of swords and knives being sharpened.

Iroh waits ahead of him, already surrounded by Sokka, Suki, Toph and Katara. He wants to avoid looking at her as he takes his own seat, but his treacherous gaze is pulled to her nonetheless, like the moon pulls the tides. He has always been helpless when it comes to her, even in the very beginning when she was nothing more than the Avatar’s waterbender and he was nothing more than an angry, wretched boy trying to win a monster’s love.

“I can take Azula,” he tells his uncle, and wonders if anyone else hears the way it rings hollow on his tongue.

He recites the next lines in his head along with Iroh. Not alone. You’ll need help.

This time, he knows the right answer.

“Toph,” he says, clear and unhesitant. “How would you like to help me put Azula in her place?”

There is a momentary silence as a ripple of surprise seems to spread through the group. He can sense Katara’s gaze on him, but he forces himself to keep his eyes trained on the little earthbender.

“Happy to,” Toph says at last, though it comes out almost like a question. “She’s going down.”

The meeting breaks up as they go their separate ways, not much different from how he remembers it. The only change is Toph at his side now instead of Katara. He has never fought with her, but he knows she’s more than capable of taking down Azula.

Still, everything in him sings out for Katara’s presence, for the spark in her that calls to the fire in his blood, but he squashes it. He would rather take Azula on his own a thousand times over, than risk her.

“Zuko!”

He stops where he is, arrested by the sound of her voice. At his side, Toph pauses and turns back.

“Toph, can you give us a minute?”

Unusually, she doesn’t argue. “Sure, Sweetness.”

Zuko waits until Toph is far enough away not to overhear before he turns to face Katara. “What is it?”

Her eyes catch his, and he sees something almost like hurt in them. “I just… why didn’t you – ”

She stops there and shakes her head, as if she’s suddenly embarrassed, but he knows what she wanted to say.

Because I did ask you, he wishes he could tell her. Because if I could, I would always pick you, and that cost you everything.

“You should be with Sokka,” he says instead. “He needs you.”

I need you.

Katara looks a little confused, but he sees her straighten, sees the fierce dedication he’s come to know and love so well shine on her face. She will never, he knows, turn her back on anyone who needs her.

Not even if it means her own life.

“Come back, okay?” It’s more a command than a question, and he cannot help but smile at the familiar tone. “Don’t be a stupid, reckless idiot.”

“When am I ever?”

The joke is a little too forced, loaded with the weight of his sins, but Katara laughs anyway. Something seems to teeter at the tip of her tongue, as if she’s questioning putting it out into the world, and for a moment his heart jumps in his throat.

Then she throws her arms around him and buries her head in his neck. He crushes her to him instantly, and wishes he never had to let go.

“Just…be careful,” she whispers in his ear, voice trembling. “Good luck.”

As it turns out, he doesn’t need it.

The challenge for an Agni Kai never comes, and the fight against Azula is almost absurdly easy.  

Despite never fighting together, he finds that he and Toph make a good pair. Zuko takes the aerial strikes that she can’t see, and Toph marks Azula’s movement across the ground when he is cut off by flames. It is not the seamless synchronicity of fighting with Katara, the push-and-pull balance of knowing your equal has your back, but it is good enough to bring his sister to her knees, nonetheless.

Triumph carries them high, bolstered by the news that the Avatar has defeated Ozai, and the airships have been destroyed before they could set fire to the Earth Kingdom. Zuko allows himself to get swept up in it, to ride the cresting wave until the moment Appa swoops overhead, circling the rooftops to land in the courtyard.  

He’s already there, searching, searching, searching –

He finds his answer in Suki’s red-rimmed eyes, the raw desolation blasted across Sokka’s bruised, bloodied face. The Avatar’s sobbing – still so young, still a child – echoes in the space between them, spirals into the clear morning sky to herald the world with devastation.

Zuko asks anyway.

“Where’s Katara?”

He doesn’t really hear what Suki says. There’s bits and pieces of a truth he doesn’t want to know; a sudden slip, a wrecked airship, a girl who vanished from sight and never returned. It’s enough to piece together the picture he painted, the death he drove Katara towards.

He runs.

A chorus of voices call after him, but he doesn’t listen to any of them. There is no grief or anger beating within him now; only a steady, cold will that refuses to give in. He has been gifted this power for a reason, and that cannot be failure.

He can fix this. He will fix this.

Zuko knocks on the gleaming door of time, and time answers.

o–0–o

The catacombs are greener than he remembers.

The fall down the tunnel hurts just as much as the previous time, his knees jarring from the impact with the cold, hard stone. There is a gasp above him, and a high, shocked voice calls his name.

Zuko looks up.

There is a brief flicker of surprise on Katara’s face, before cold anger takes its place. He is forcefully reminded of the day he stayed up all night outside her tent, wired on adrenaline and repentance and the desperate, bone-deep desire to earn her forgiveness.

He’s weathered the fierce storms and the vicious hurricanes of Katara’s rage, journeyed with her through her darkest depths and back again. In comparison, the girl now yelling at him seems younger, more innocent, her hatred almost shallow. This is a Katara who hasn’t yet seen her last hope fall from the sky, who hasn’t tasted the true price of betrayal.

The Avatar will leave Ba Sing Se alive and victorious today.

His sister will not.

He cannot touch his father, cannot end the war with a single stroke of a blade. That is Aang’s burden alone to shoulder. But Azula is his destiny, his and Katara’s, and apart from the Agni Kai this is the only place all three intersect, three crooked lines tangling around each other. This is his only chance to cut her out of it, rip her from their lives like a weed amongst the flowers.  

Katara paces, yelling, and he sits in silence and takes it all. He lets her lash her anger against him, batter him with the force of it like a boat tossed around in a storm, and waits.

“The Fire Nation took my mother away from me.”

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, the words heavier and more painful than before. “That’s something we have in common.”

She turns, as he knows she will. He longs to wipe the tears from her face, to let her expend her grief and rage in the circle of his arms like she did after Yon Rha, with rain pouring down around them both.

“Your mother is gone?” she whispers back, almost disbelieving. “What happened to her?”

Zuko tells her the story, the pieces he’s supposed to know and the ones he learns later, on the day the sun vanishes from the sky. Katara listens to it all with quiet sorrow, and when he’s done, they are both facing one another.

“I’m sorry. About your mother. And for yelling at you before.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he echoes his past self, and then breaks from script. “You were right. All the things I did, trying to hurt you, trying to capture the Avatar… I was wrong. My father was wrong. The Fire Nation is wrong.”

Katara’s eyes go wide. “You… you aren’t on the Fire Nation’s side anymore?”

“No,” he admits. “Not for a long while. This war is wrong, and all I want to do is to play my part in ending it. I’m sorry I ever did otherwise.”

“Why did you?”

“Because I was banished, and capturing the Avatar was the only way I could go home.” Even now, he cannot forget the searing press of his own father’s hand on his face. He doubts he ever will. “And I wanted to go home – more than anything.”

There is a pause, and the air between them shifts with the weight of anticipation.

“My father did it,” he tells her, answering the question she is too kind to ask. “He burned me, then exiled me for speaking out in a war meeting and refusing to fight him. Finding the Avatar was the only way I could regain my honour.”

Across the cave, he hears Katara’s swift gasp of horror. It is a reaction he’s expected, though not the one he received from her counterpart in his own time. The Katara who hated and forgave and befriended him, who knew him better than most anyone, showed no hesitation in flinging her arms around his neck and brushing a gentle kiss to his scar.

“Your father is awful,” this Katara says, drawing closer. “You didn’t deserve that. No one does.”

He hasn’t thought about his father in so long. The reminder of him is like a shadow cast over the emerald glow of the catacombs, shrouding this moment that is just for him and Katara, and Zuko doesn’t want him here.

“I’m not going back to him,” he swears. “I’ll never go back to him again.”

Katara's gaze smooths over the mottled tissue on the left side of his face, then dips to her pocket and the vial she draws out from it.

“I have spirit water from the North Pole,” she says, a little hesitant. “I-I don’t know if it would work but… if you want, I can try to remove your scar. I have healing abilities.”

Zuko has long moved past something as trivial as insecurity, has come to accept his scar and everything he represents, but Katara is not something he can ever give up – not after so long without her.

He closes his eyes, and her fingers splay across his cheekbone.

The moment stretches out to an eternity, narrows to the brush of her gentle hands on his ruined skin and the press of her thumb on his lips. He lets himself lean into her touch, into the one moment of compassion that almost changed the course of a war. He never told her, he thinks, just how close she came to reshaping his destiny entirely.

When the wall bursts apart and the Avatar bursts in with his uncle, Zuko forces himself to stay where he is.

The look Aang gives him over Katara’s shoulder is almost laughable, a child’s imagination of anger and hostility. He knows what genuine hate looks like on the Avatar’s face, how it warps his beaming smile and innocent eyes into something ugly and ancient and awful.

Aang leaves and he watches Katara prepare to follow. She hesitates just once, at the cusp of the cave entrance, and looks back.

“Don’t let me down,” she whispers. “Please.”

He doesn’t.

The battle against Azula is more evenly matched with all three of them together, but still nowhere close to a fair fight. The Dai Li continue to overpower them, closing them in, and Zuko watches the inevitable realization dawn on Aang’s young face.

This is the moment he’s been waiting for. This is his opportunity to take down Azula, the best chance he will ever get.

He kicks and punches and sends scythes of fire across the ground, trying to clear a path through the Dai Li. He has only one chance to get it right – to time it exactly, so that he gets to her while she’s distracted with Aang in the Avatar State, before she can kill him.

The rock cave explodes and Aang rises into the sky, a glowing figure that inspires both terror and awe in equal parts.

The Dai Li freeze, distracted, and Zuko seizes the opportunity to slip through. Azula is close, so close, her eyes locked on the Avatar, blind to the approaching threat from her left. He races for her, sees the lightning begin sparking at her fingertips right before he sends a wall of fire at her.

His sister turns just in time, warned by the preternatural instinct she’s had since she was a child, but even Azula cannot attack and defend herself at once. The lightning that leaves her hand – not precise, not directed with two perfect fingers and exacting aim – spears not for the world’s last hope, but the girl desperately trying to save him.

Katara tumbles from the air like a puppet with its strings cut.

She is already lost to him when he catches her, bringing her to the ground with some vague notion of spirit water and healing and the Avatar. But Aang is beyond reaching, possessed with the righteous vengeance of a thousand spirits as he wreaks carnage on the Dai Li and Azula, and it is only him left to bear witness to the unbearable cost of victory. 

Zuko is gone by the time the Avatar returns to himself, the corpse of the girl they both love rested tenderly amidst the shattered crystals.

o–0–o

It is an entirely new type of grief to see the many, many times his destiny intersects with Katara – the hundred and one chances he might have had to choose different, to choose right, to choose her.

Time grows meaningless, immaterial, nothing more than a plaything to be pulled and prodded and used. He tears it apart, explores every road and alley and dirt path destiny has to offer, walks down them all and fights to shape them to his will.

The day at the Jasmine Dragon that sends him chasing after her ends with both of them trapped in the streets of Ba Sing Se, surrounded by the shadowy force that polices the city. There is no Ty Lee here to immobilise Katara, nothing to make her give in without a fight. Masters they may be, but power and skill alone do not last forever against the relentless march of the Dai Li, and here there is no Avatar and no Uncle Iroh to help them.

Even waterbenders, it seems, can be drowned in stone.

He leaves Ba Sing Se behind for good after that.

o–0–o

The dusty Earth Kingdom town where they first fought Azula together is the quickest.

It is only one second – one flash of surprise, one halt in disbelief, one temporary distraction in the form of the Prince of the Fire Nation fighting alongside the Avatar – but it is enough. There is no room for distraction in war, and even less in a crossfire.

Zuko stays just long enough to give her body to her brother before he vanishes.

He does not give up, does not cry, does not allow himself to so much as crack the stoic armour of the resolve that spurs him onward. He will not break for a single second, because he is all that Katara has, and this –

This is all that he has. 

o–0–o

After almost a year, Zuko has forgotten just how blindingly cold the North Pole is.

He hasn’t visited either tribe since Katara’s death, unable to stomach being surrounded by her element when she no longer exists to shape it. Her waterbending has always been the most beautiful thing he ever saw.

It is no less beautiful now in the light of the full moon, the waters of the Spirit Oasis sparkling amidst his fire as they fight side by side. Zhao approaches with single-minded purpose, greed written across his face, gaze fixed on the two koi fish that circle in the pond.

The world bleeds crimson as Tui dies.

The water in Katara’s hands drops to the ground. The fire in her opponent’s does not.

The Water Tribes mourn two princesses that night, and Zuko returns again to the task to which he has committed himself, the task which has no room for hopelessness or fear or the wild, crazed thing in his chest which feels a lot, now, like madness.

From somewhere far away, Azula’s laughter rings in his ears.

o–0–o

Returning to those early days of the hunt for the Avatar is, somehow, the most difficult.  

His destiny with Katara no longer takes the form of occasional intersections but a complex, entwined knot of lines, weaving and dancing around one another in an endless, eternal cycle. He begins to lose count of the different timelines, each one marked only by vague memories: a venomous shirshu and a fatal fall in an abbey, a pirate’s wrath and a waterbending scroll splattered with blood, a burning house in a village and a girl trapped within it. 

Finally, he goes back to the start, to the day Katara became a hero and he a villain. She worked her very first miracle here; is it too much to hope, then, that she might work her last?

(He should’ve known better. Of course, he should have.)

It is not him this time, but Zhao’s retinue behind him – scouts he leads directly to the Southern Water Tribe and the last waterbender in their midst. 

The beginning of their story, like their middle and end and everything in between, falls to tragedy.

o–0–o

The dark, desolate thing in him grows a little stronger, a little bigger, and demands to be set free. There is something in it that is both his mother’s quiet anguish and his father’s cruel rage, a perfect amalgamation of the worst of him.

Zuko smothers it, like a fire deprived of air, and wills it to die.

Within him, still, lies the remnants of the boy who spent three years chasing the impossible, and he will not fail Katara.  

No matter the cost.

o–0–o

He returns at last to the ending – or perhaps this, after all, is the real beginning.

At this point, he knows this day better than the back of his own hand. He doesn’t even need to look to picture the bloody sky and the salt-smoke smell of the air, the sense that the entire world has shifted its balance, waiting with bated breath to see how the scales will tip.

Zuko has exhausted every possibility but one. One he should have thought of long ago, had he not wanted to protect Katara more than anything else in the world.

The Agni Kai is issued and rejected.

The fight begins without warning.

Despite everything he knows, despite the fear radiating through every cell in his body, there is an instinctive delight that courses through him at fighting with Katara. She seems to know what he’s about to do before he does it, attacking where he defends, protecting when he advances, calling to and soothing his fire in perfect harmony.

When his sister’s gaze slides to Katara, Zuko is ready.

The impact sends him crashing down across heat-cracked stone, limbs still twitching as the lightning makes its way out of him and back up to the sky. His hand slips out from beneath him as he struggles to stand, chest burning from the inside out.

Katara, he thinks and tries to rise again to no avail. Just let her be okay. I can die right now, so long as she’s okay.

From where he lies, he cannot see the fight. He hears only the sounds; Azula’s taunts, the crack of freezing water, and then a sudden and abrupt silence. It lasts one second, then two, then a thousand, and Zuko struggles to get up again, to find Katara, to save her –

The sound of rushing footsteps heralds her arrival a moment before Katara reaches his side.

The relief that floods him is astronomical, almost dizzying, accompanied by a tidal wave of absolute joy. It is tempered almost immediately by experience, by the memory of watching her die before his eyes over and over again.

“Are you really here?” he mumbles, delirious on triumph and pain and the soft balm of her hands on his chest, cloaked in healing water.

Katara lets out a sound somewhere between a sob and a laugh. “Thanks to you. How could you be so stupid, Zuko? Why would you do that?”

That is all he needs to know that this is no pain-induced illusion, no spirit curse, no hallucination brought on by desire strong enough to rewrite fate itself.

Katara is safe, real, alive.

After an eternity of agony – he has succeeded at last. 

o–0–o

The celebration for the end of the Hundred-Year War comes a week after the Fire Nation’s defeat.

The atmosphere in the grand ballroom is upbeat, almost electric. Nearly everyone he sees, from his friends to the servants to his people, has a smile on their face. Happiness surrounds Zuko, envelops him, and for once, he is more than capable of reciprocating.

“I’ve never seen you smile this much before,” Katara teases, knocking his shoulder with her own bare one. Her dress, made of dark indigo silk and dotted with silver, makes her look like a living constellation – like miracle made flesh.

“What’s there not to smile about?” he asks, grinning, and Sokka whoops.

“Damn right, buddy!”

The other boy claps a friendly hand on his shoulder, and Zuko sees in a dazzling instant everything he has lost and gained: not just Katara, but his friends, their trust and affection unmarred by grief. The future they were all robbed of, now returned to them in its perfect entirety.

The party grows louder and more boisterous as the night goes on, and it isn’t long before Katara slips her hand into his and whispers, “Follow me”.

She leads him through the throng, evading drunken revellers and brown-nosing noblemen and foreign ambassadors with ease. They reach the doors that lead to the balcony and push through them, emerging into the fresh air and out of the packed, hot chaos of the party.

Katara moves to the edge of the parapet, her eyes trained on the crescent moon. It’s nothing more than a sliver in the sky, a sickle the size of a fingernail.

“I turned fifteen today,” she announces abruptly.

It takes Zuko an embarrassing while to process this.

“You – it’s your birthday?” he asks, mouth open. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

Katara shrugs, looking almost a little shy. “I didn’t want to overshadow the celebrations or make it about me. But it didn’t feel right either, not telling you.”

“I’m glad you told me,” he murmurs. “Happy birthday, Katara.”

“Dance with me?”

Zuko has never learned how, but a dance is nothing when he’s already broken the laws of the universe for Katara.  

Her arms curve around his neck, his resting on the slender curve of her waist, and he is reminded of the first time they ever stood this way, on a creaky jetty outside his childhood home. Her hair still smells of cherry and lilac, brushing gently against his ruined cheek as they move together. There is no real music, but they don’t need it; he follows the rhythm of her body, swaying to a melody that is all their own.

It feels almost unreal. Any minute now, he thinks he will startle awake at his desk, the remnants of his tears dried on his cheeks, and find himself once again in a world without her.

“What are you thinking about?”

Katara pulls back enough to look at him. The moonlight gilds her bare shoulders, the elegant arch of her neck, and she is so unbearably lovely that he is unable to do anything but stare.

“Nothing,” he manages to say eventually, and it’s true. Even the shadows of his past cannot swoop too close in this night that belongs to them, this night they have both carved for themselves with bloody hands and a defiance stronger than the stars themselves.

Katara’s gaze dips to his chest, to the place where the scar he bore for her now lies. Her hand slips from his neck down to his torso, gingerly grazing the injury through his clothes.

The noise from the ballroom still spills through the doors, laughter and banter and the clink of glasses, but it feels as though they have suddenly stepped into their own bubble of silence. Zuko brings his hand up over hers and holds her there, covering her slim fingers with his.

They haven’t yet talked about it – the unspoken thing that lies between them. They have barely seen each other in the last week except for their healing sessions, pulled from one side by his council and responsibilities, and from the other by her family and friends.

This is the moment he’s waited eons for.

“Katara,” he breathes. “I – ”

There is the sudden sound of breaking glass, shrill and unmistakable over the din.

It happens as simply as this: Katara, still caught in the false security of peace, moves too slow. The assassin who drops down behind them, blade in hand, does not.

o–0–o

There is only so long you can leave something to wither in the shadows.

Sometimes it resurfaces smaller and less powerful, a shrivelled husk of its former glory. Sometimes it grows instead, swells to encompass everything around it until there’s no holding it back, no keeping it at bay any longer.

The thing inside him breaks open entirely, a wildfire unleashed to burn and burn and burn, and Zuko shatters.

o–0–o

Somewhere in the distance, there’s the sound of pleading.

It is a sound more animal than human, a low keening reminiscent of a creature in distress. Zuko should go help whoever it is, but doing so would mean leaving Katara, and that is beyond imagining. 

“Please – please no, not again, not her….”

Her skin, already so cool to the touch, is freezing. He gently sweeps her blood-slick hair out of her face, away from the gaping wound slashed across her neck, and slides her glassy eyes closed.

Like this, she is simply sleeping.

“Stay with me, please, please don’t go – don’t leave me –”

It’s only when the pleading turns to broken, anguished begging, the sound of her name ringing into the stars above, that he realises it’s coming from him.

Something slides into place then, a final thread pulled through a tapestry he never wished to see. The myriad roads of their destinies map themselves out before him, swooping and curling and winding through one another to the same, inevitable destination.

Katara dead, dying, gone.

Lost to him in every timeline, in every world, in every possible way, over and over and over again.

He reaches for hate, for rage, anything to shield him from the raw, guttural agony shredding him to pieces, and comes up empty. There is only the pain, vast and endless and immortal, that will do what Azula’s lightning could not.

Around him, the palace explodes with panic and terror. The ballroom is entirely deserted, fallen bodies marking those who weren’t lucky enough to flee in time.

Zuko is alone, as he always is, as he’s fated to be. There is no changing destiny, no matter how much he wills it so.

There never was.

o–0–o

Koh is waiting for him when he returns to the crossroads.

“You knew.” The words scrape his throat raw. “You knew I could never save her.”

“Correct.”

Zuko lunges for the Face-Eater but he simply vanishes, reforming a moment later with a young woman’s smiling visage. It doesn’t stop Zuko from rushing at him again, only for Koh to repeat the manoeuvre.

“Trying to hurt me is another endeavour doomed to fail, Fire Lord,” Koh says dismissively, like Zuko is simply a minor inconvenience, a fly to swat. “You cannot land a blow on me, just as you cannot save the girl you love.”

Ash coats his tongue.

“Why?”

“You might as well ask why the tides swell, or why the wind blows. Some things simply are; infinite, absolute, unquestionable. The sun must rise, the moon must wane, and Katara of the Southern Water Tribe must die.”

“Then why did you bring me here?” Zuko wants to scream but there seems to be no sound left in him, nothing at all except a hoarse, cracked whisper. “Why give me hope just to take it away?”

There is something almost pitying in the spirit’s ancient face when he answers, lurking just beneath the veneer of calm indifference.  

“For a year now, the spirits have watched you waste away. We have seen you poison yourself with your grief, and worse, your guilt. You had to see it for yourself.”

“See what?”

“That there is nothing you could have done for the waterbender.”

“You could have told me that,” Zuko snarls, seized by a sudden, choking violence that makes him want to rip Koh limb from limb. 

Had he been nothing more than a plaything for the spirits? Had they enjoyed it, seeing him try and fail again and again and again, watching the futility of it all tear him apart?

Koh tilts his head to the right, a predator sizing up its prey. “Would you have believed me if I had?”

No.

The spirit nods as if he can pluck the answer from Zuko’s mind. “You are many things, Fire Lord, but not a man who accepts defeat. This is the only way you would have seen the truth. You did not fail to save the waterbender. Her death was ordained before she was ever born.”

Perhaps the words are meant to be comforting, but they bring only the crushing weight of despair and horror, twin flames that curl around his shoulders and force him to the ground.

It isn’t fair.

It isn’t fair, cannot be fair, that Katara fought so long, so hard, to make a world she would never see. It isn’t fair that this is the fate ordained for the best person he knows, for the girl who gave everything of herself and expected nothing in return. It isn’t fair that the spirits, the universe, destiny, decided she would die before she ever got to witness peace.

Before she ever got to live.

“Why do you care?” Zuko spits. “I’m nothing but a lowly, dead human. Why do you care what happens to me?”

“Really, child.” Koh shakes his head in disappointment, a young woman’s thin eyebrow arching in derision, as if he expects Zuko to know better. “Have you not figured it out, yet?”  

“Figured what out?”

“That you are not, in fact, dead.”

Most people, he knows, would be happy to hear this. Zuko should be happy to hear this.

But all he feels is a terrible, weary exhaustion, a bone-deep ache that flares with sudden, blinding pain like salt rubbed in a wound. There is nothing in him that cares whether he lives or dies, that cares what happens to him at all.

“Your mortal body lies in stasis, back in your world,” Koh explains in a voice that’s almost a drone, like the details of Zuko’s mortality are entirely uninteresting. “You are in limbo, caught between the living and the dead.”

An image of Uncle flashes across his mind, holding vigil by his bed for another son who will never come home.

“You had to know the truth, to become the man the world needs you to be,” the spirit continues smoothly, as if he hasn’t driven a knife into Zuko’s ribs and twisted the hilt. “So that you could return home and take up the mantle of Fire Lord, free of the burdens you carried, free to make peace with the Avatar. That is the only way the worlds – human and spirit alike – will not destroy themselves.”  

Zuko considers his words briefly, then nods.

“You’re right,” he says. “I will return home.”

Something must have shown in his voice, for Koh stills, turns back, but it is too late. Zuko plunges deep into memory, unspools the brilliant threads of time, searching –

“Stop!” Koh orders, but Zuko has already leaped, and the world follows him into the vortex.

o–0–o

I promise, someday, you will find your own destiny.

His uncle, as always, is right.

Zuko dissects the glimmering lines of fate with exacting precision, unties the knots that wrap him and Katara together and rips them open. Destiny and time have given him nothing; why, with the power of both laid at his feet, should he choose to give it back in return?

The ending, he knows now, is not what is important. It does not matter that they fall to tragedy in this world, and a thousand others. It does not matter that they can only ever circle each other, pulled together in one instant and pushed apart in the next, fated to meet but never fated to last.

What matters, he realises, is what lies between the beginning and the end.

He comes to know each of their intersections like the sound of his own name, explores every possibility of every variation of every path. He learns what works, what to say and what to keep to himself, the little things that grant him an extra minute, another smile, one more brush of her fingers.

Slowly, surely, Zuko unravels the tale of the enemy prince and the last waterbender of the Southern Water Tribe.

The earlier timelines are the least forgiving, like every power in the universe comes together to punish him for who he used to be. The Zuko who hunted the Avatar across the world, who hurt and attacked and wrought a path of destruction in his wake, deserves nothing but vicious cruelty.

Katara dies, again and again and again.

Zuko flees, again and again and again.

o–0–o

You have no idea what you are bringing upon yourself.

Koh’s warning reaches him beneath Ba Sing Se, reverberating off the glowing emerald rock. Katara, turning to him with teary eyes, does not hear it.

Your body is not meant to last so long without your spirit, Fire Lord Zuko. Every day you spend here pulls you further from the world of the living.

The words are faint and distant, easily swallowed in the cadence of Katara’s gentle voice.

Wait too long – and you will never return home.

Home is the sister he once had, the father he never got, the family destroyed by greed and cruelty. Home is his friends trading stories around a campfire, his mother’s hands stroking through his hair, the sound of Katara's laugh beneath a sparkling night sky. 

Home is a child’s foolish dream, and Zuko has not been a child in a long, long time.

o–0–o

It takes countless tries before he figures out the pattern.

The earliest intersections are the shortest, the middle ones a little less so. The ones towards the end, dotted along lines that hover dangerously close to each other, just about to merge into one, are the most generous. He narrows it down with unceasing determination and unerring accuracy, finds the exact frame of time he is allowed to have with the girl he loves.

Twenty-seven days.

Twenty-seven days without war or betrayal lodged between them, without battles to fight or Avatars to find. Twenty-seven days on Ember Island.

That is all they get.  

o–0–o

Caught in an infinite circle, there is nothing else for Zuko to do but commit Katara to memory.

He learns the exact tone she uses when she’s stifling a laugh, the little furrow in her brow when she’s practising a new waterbending move, the pall of her eyelashes when she falls asleep against his side. They spend their days training Aang, and their nights sparring on the beach, and he immortalizes the way she looks in the starlight, her face turned to the full moon, in his mind.

Mostly, however, they talk.

He asks her a million and one questions, everything he kept to himself out of the foolish belief that there would be plenty of time later. She answers them all with an expression that’s bemused but pleased, telling him about childhood stories and embarrassing moments and her adventures with Aang and Sokka.

His list of happy memories is far shorter, but he finds enough to tell her in return: the time he and Azula sneaked into the kitchen and ate themselves sick on honeyed plums, the sight of the cherry blossom trees in full bloom in spring, the names of the turtleducks in his mother’s garden.

“Dumpling,” Katara protests, “is a horrible name for a turtleduck.”

“It’s a great name,” he says indignantly. “She was short and fat, like a dumpling.”

“So were you when you were born,” she retorts. “Maybe your mother should have named you that.”

Zuko tries to look cross, he really does, but he evidently doesn’t do a great job of it because Katara begins to giggle, and then they’re both collapsing into each other. The joke isn’t even that funny, but they don’t stop until they’re tired out, stomachs hurting and breath coming in a wheeze.

He can’t remember the last time he laughed this much. The last time he laughed at all.

When they are finally back to normal, Katara leans her head against his shoulder. “Well, now I have to meet Dumpling when this is all over.”

The bliss of momentary ignorance is blown to smoke in an instant by the stark reminder of reality, paralyzing him from head to toe and knocking the air from his lungs.

She tilts her head to look up at him. “Will you take me to meet her?”

“Yes,” he promises, and looks away, out to sea, so she doesn’t see the tears in his eyes.  

o–0–o

It is one thing to know how little time he has with Katara, and another entirely to live it.

The weeks before Sozin’s Comet come and go like a meteor flashing across the sky. He counts down the days to the night before the Avatar disappears and lies awake in dread, waiting for the moment that the sun breaks over the horizon and he must reset the loop once again.

Twenty-seven days for what should have been months, years, decades. Twenty-seven days to learn what should have taken him the span of a long, happy life, desperately clinging to every piece of Katara that she is willing to offer.

When they are done talking about the past, Katara turns to the future.

“I’ve never thought about it,” she admits quietly one night, sprawled on the sand where they can both look up at the stars. “About what will happen if – when – we win. Somehow, it feels like my whole life has been leading to this point, and… that’s it. There’s nothing beyond the end of this summer for me. Like I exist only as long as the war does.”

She huffs in exasperation and throws her hands up before her. “It’s stupid, I know.”

“It’s not,” he says softly, and wishes it was, wishes it was something silly and trivial and not unerringly, heartbreakingly real.

“What about you?” she asks then. “You’re going to be the Fire Lord.”

Zuko shakes his head and gazes at the glittering tapestry of constellations before him.

“No,” he says honestly. “Uncle will.”

The only sound he hears in response is the light crashing of waves on the sand, and the chirping of the cicadas in the grass nearby. Then her hand covers his, callused fingers curling around his palm.

“You’ll be a great Fire Lord, you know.”

He nearly laughs at that. He would trust Katara with his life on almost anything, but he cannot trust her on this – not when he has a year of living and breathing the job to prove otherwise.

Katara must sense what he’s thinking, because she raises herself on an elbow to look sternly at him. “I mean it, Zuko.”

“I don’t doubt that. I just – ”

“Doubt yourself,” she finishes gently. “That’s why you’ll be a great leader. Because you care about doing the right thing. You always do, in the end.”

Shame coils in his stomach at the memory of Koh’s words, of the uncle who won’t give up on him, the nation who needs him, but he doesn’t let himself dwell on it for long. He has spent what feels like his entire life on what everyone else needs, trying to change and fit and shape himself to be everything for his father, for his friends, for his country, and he is so – tired.

Just this once, he can have this for himself.

“Thank you, Katara.”

“Anytime, Fire Lord,” she teases. “Just don’t forget me when you’re all rich and mighty.”

“I could never forget you.”

The mere thought of it is horrifying, and the feeling bleeds through into his voice, sadder and more somber than their light-hearted conversation calls for. She sees it, as she has always seen him, and a tender smile curves her lips.

“Neither could I.”

They lie together for the rest of the night, side by side, and in the morning, he wakes to find her curled against his chest.

o–0–o

“Have you ever heard the tale of Oma and Shu?”

The candlelight catches on Katara’s hair as she tilts her head, turning it to flaming gold. The shadows she casts against the wall of the house flicker and wobble as she moves, sitting cross-legged and leaning forward with her fingers steepled beneath her chin.

Zuko shakes his head. 

The candle burns down to almost nothing as she talks, weaving the story of two forbidden lovers torn apart by war, by death, by the stars themselves. Katara is a good storyteller, he thinks, one who spins magic from thin air the way a weaver spins a loom.

(He sees her for an instant, the Katara-that-will-never-be – beloved and more adored than he could ever hope to be, a sickle moon crown pinned in her hair as she charms the crowds.)

The legend winds to its brutal, bloody close, finishing with a whisper as the candle at her feet goes out. Only the silvery light of the moon, full and round, illuminates the courtyard where they sit.

“What a tragic story,” Zuko says finally, unable to find another response. Maybe once he would have liked it more, back when he was still seven and devouring stories of grand romances with innocent naivete, but that boy is lost for good. Only bitter, raw anguish remains, a twin to Oma's, two dark iterations of the oldest tale in the world. 

“I don’t know,” Katara muses. Her tempestuous, swirling eyes are still and thoughtful. "I can’t imagine what that’s like – losing your soulmate the way Oma lost Shu, but – I think it’s a little hopeful too.”

“Hopeful?” he echoes in disbelief, and wonders if he heard right. “What about this awful, sad story gave you hope?”

“She didn’t give up,” Katara says simply, and he remembers an Earth Kingdom knife tossed in a forgotten corner, its blade dusty with disuse. “Despite everything she lost… she never stopped fighting.”

o–0–o

It is on the fourth cycle – or maybe the fifth, he’s losing count – that Zuko finally tells her the first, and most important, truth of his soul.

There is a moment in which Katara simply looks at him, and then she is in his arms, radiant with joy, and his heart is made whole in the same moment that it breaks beyond repair.

Twenty-seven days in which to love her.

He wrings them dry, squeezes out every square inch of time and space he can, finds every opportunity to be by her side. There is not much of it in the day, when he must rely on daily errand runs and spars in order to be alone with her in a house that demands most of her attention.

The night, though, belongs to them alone.

It is during these dark hours on the balcony, one week before Sozin’s Comet, that they see the twin stars.

Zuko sees it first, the double-quick flicker he spent nights waiting up for as a child. He thinks for a second that Katara hasn’t noticed it but then she blinks, narrowing her gaze as she peers up into the sky.

“What was that?”

“Tanabata,” Zuko murmurs, his mother’s voice ringing in his head. “I didn’t realize – I forgot, with the comet…”

“Tanabata?” Katara repeats, curiously. “What is that?”

“A celebration,” he tells her, “of the greatest love story in the Fire Nation.”

He points to the twin points of light outside, so close that they might almost be one, giant star. “The story of Orihime and Hikoboshi. The seven-cursed lovers.”  

He does not have Katara’s talent for storytelling, but he does his best, reciting the tale of the royal and the peasant, the romance that blossomed between the daughter of a god and the lowly son of a cowherd. The rage of the father who drove them apart, and the love that led him to show mercy.

"He allowed them to meet once in seven years?” Katara asks incredulously. “That is not mercy. That is cruel.”

As a child, he would have thought the same. As the boy he was a year ago, he would have agreed still.

“There are some fates worse than a seven-year separation,” he says now, remembering the world that awaits outside the time he has stolen for himself. “There are some lovers who are never allowed to reunite. Who never find each other again.”

“Maybe they do,” she argues, though there is no real heat behind it. “Maybe we just don’t know it.”

He wishes he could believe her.

“The stars are supposed to be a good omen.” The irony of that isn’t lost on him. “If they shine on young couples, it foretells a lasting commitment. A marriage to come.”

“Marriage?” Katara laughs, teasing. “A little soon for that, don’t you think?”

Zuko presses a kiss to the top of her head. “I would marry you tomorrow, if you wanted to.”

The grave solemnity, the utter lack of jest, is obvious to both of them. She turns to look at him, incandescent in the moonlight, and he wraps one more memory into his heart.

“Hey,” she says firmly. “Don’t worry. We’ll win this war.”

He understands, for the first time, the terrible burden of knowledge. “I know.”

“Then there’ll be plenty of time to marry,” Katara jokes, nudging him in the side. “Years of it. If you still want me then.”

Zuko pulls her into his chest and buries his face in her hair, where only the moon bears witness to the burning at the back of his eyes.  

“There is not a time in which I won’t want you, Katara.”

She wraps her arms around him. “Even when I’m old and grey?”

He chokes out a laugh, thick with tears. “Especially then.”

The stars wink at them both, and even though he knows it’s futile, he allows himself to dream – just for the flash of a heartbeat – of a world in which her face is lined with wrinkles and her hair faded to grey, where he holds her once more by his side beneath a full moon.

(She dies with his sister, lightning still crackling through the ice around them.)

o–0–o

He is destined to love her in a thousand lifetimes, doomed to lose her in all.

That is how it must be.    

o–0–o

When he wakes on the sixth day of the sixth cycle, he is burning.

I told you, Koh’s cool voice whispers in his head, that you did not know what you were doing.

The place within him where Koh’s power lies throbs with angry vengeance, as though a wildfire has been ignited in his stomach. Zuko stumbles out of bed and collapses, falling to all fours on the wooden floor. 

Your body withers away, pulled to the spirit world. If you do not return now, it will be too late.

The thread within him bursts into flame, dissolving, disappearing, and he clutches at it desperately. He knows, instinctually, that Koh is not telling a lie. There are to be no more jaunts with time, no more reckless playing with the laws of forces older and more powerful than he is. 

Choose.

Zuko grabs at whatever remains, and tumbles into the void.  

o–0–o

He does not know if it is chance or choice or sheer instinct that leads him back to his original time, back to the day that set him on his path – back to Katara.

Zuko falls to his knees at her feet, the way he did in the catacombs, the way he did before her tent. He is always prostrate before her, it seems, hungry for the absolution only she can offer.

Katara is his saving grace. Katara is his greatest failure.

He cannot reconcile them both.

“Zuko!” Her voice is alarmed. “What is it? Did something go wrong with General Iroh?”

The pull in his blood and the darkening sky tell him where he is without having to look. The camp at Ba Sing Se is almost eerily empty, deserted for war, and soon he and Katara will join suit. In just a matter of minutes, they will be in the air, racing to the final stop of their destiny.

He feels Katara kneel to meet him, her hands tentatively brushing along his shoulders in comfort. The touch is more than he can stand, more than the tattered shreds of his will can weather, and at long last, Fire Lord Zuko weeps.

Katara wraps her arms around him, and he lets himself fall into her, rest his head in the hollow of her neck and breathe in the scent of pine and sea salt. He would freeze time in this moment if he could, but even with the powers he has been given, even with the last, dying kernel at the base of his spine, he can feel it march onward without him – relentless and unstoppable. He would give everything he has, he thinks, simply to stay here, and the ache of that impossibility cuts him open from the inside out.

“I’m sorry,” he chokes out at last. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Katara.”

She leans back, frowning. “Why are you sorry?”

The words are confused but her face is worried, full of nothing but concern, and finally Zuko does what he has never been able to do before.

He tells the girl he loves the truth.

She does not interrupt, does not doubt, does not stop him. She only listens in perfect silence, and he sees the emotions flash across her face, one by one – fear, shock, horror, sadness, and below it all, the utter and overwhelming grief that is a perfect mirror to his own.

When he finishes, both their cheeks are wet with tears.

“I tried,” he whispers. “I really tried. I promise.”

“I know.” Katara’s hands cup his face, thumbs stroking over his cheekbones, over the ruined skin of his scar. “I know that you would never, not for a second, have given anything less than everything you have.”

 “It wasn’t enough.”

Her eyes fill with an old, familiar sorrow. “That’s not your fault.”

He shakes his head, but Katara holds him steady, forces him to look directly at her. “It’s not. No matter what anyone tells you, no matter what you tell yourself, you did not fail to save me. You cannot live the rest of your life in guilt, Zuko.”

“Forgive me,” he breathes. “Please – forgive me.”

“There’s nothing to forgive.”

She does not lean into him so much as she collapses, and for a heartbeat they simply cling to each other, two broken halves desperately trying to put themselves back together.

“Zuko,” she whispers, “you have to go back.”  

“I have nothing left,” he confesses. “My people hate me. Our friends hate me. Your brother and Aang hate me. I have nothing to go back for.”

“Is that really what you think?” Katara asks, her words backed by cold, hard steel. “That the world doesn’t need you? That the Fire Nation doesn’t need you?”

“I tried!” he shouts, pulling away. “I tried, and I failed, Katara. I’m of no use to them.”

“No,” she corrects, but her voice gentles. “You were not trying, Zuko. You were suffering. How could you possibly help anyone else, when you were in no position to even help yourself?”

“I wasn’t –”

He stops himself. He has never been able to lie to Katara, and he’s not about to start now.

“You have to forgive yourself.” Katara’s words soothe him in a way nothing else has ever been able to, a balm to the wound that has festered and rotted and poisoned him from the inside out. “You have to move on. You cannot help me anymore, Zuko, but there are others you can help, and they need you.”

It is a strange irony that Katara is the only person he wants to talk to about her death, the only person who can make that dark, twisted thing inside of him a little lighter, a little more bearable.

“I don’t think I can do this without you.”

This final admission leaves his lips as nothing more than a murmur. Katara hears it anyway.

“You can,” she says, with nothing less than absolute and complete faith. “You will, because for as long as I have known you, I have seen you do the impossible. And you’re not about to stop now.”

He meets her eyes.

There is only one thing left to say – the thing that has driven him here, that has fuelled him with burning will and unshakeable hope, that has been the source of both his greatest pain and his greatest joy.

“I love you, Katara.”

There is a singular moment in which the world goes absolutely, completely still.

Then she reaches for him – or perhaps he reaches for her – and the sound of I love you, too is muffled in the press of her lips against his as the story that has wound through space and time and death itself comes to its final, tender close.

Their first kiss is not bruising or passionate or grand, not the kind of kiss in the legends they tell around fires, or the kind that gets performed in opulent theatres. It is soft and salty and a little desperate; a beginning and an end, a meeting and a farewell.

When they pull apart from their last kiss, he knows.

He can never choose Katara over the world. She will never allow it, nor will he, and if they could – then they would never have loved each other at all.

Katara’s fingers fumble with something around her throat, and her necklace comes loose in her hand, the familiar blue stone winking at him in the carmine daylight. She drops it in his palm and folds his fingers around it.

“Give it to Sokka,” she instructs, sniffing with pretend condescension, though he can see right through it to the fierce tenderness that lies beneath. “And tell that big buffoon I’ll be keeping an eye on him even in the spirit world. On all of them. Tell them – ”

Her voice falters momentarily, although there is nothing but brilliant, unwavering resolve in her face. Utterly fearless, even in the face of death.

“Tell them that it’ll be okay,” she says at last. “Tell them that they’ll be happy again, one day.”

The final, burning ember of Koh’s power flickers inside him, guttering.

“Go,” Katara tells him, and though her eyes are filled with tears, the smile that breaks across her face is as radiant as the sun. “Go build a better world for me, Zuko.”

He grasps the shining thread for the last time, just before it disappears, and pulls.

In the second before the darkness swallows him whole, Zuko sees it all: the entire, sprawling saga of their history together, fights and reunions and betrayals and loss, an inextricable tangle of fate and destiny and love, always love, threaded through every version of themselves, everyone they ever were or ever would be.

The last thing he sees as the world spins around him is the soft blue of her eyes, as bright and lovely as the midsummer sea — and then she is gone, swallowed in the infinite light of an endless horizon.