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Fuck this, let gravity win like
You could leave it all behind
Even the Devil needs time alone sometimes
You could let it all go, you could let it all go
(It's called: Freefall // Rainbow Kitten Surprise)
He thinks he understands how his ancestors were so eager to watch the world burn.
To let everything fall away, for power.
For want.
He’s told himself he was different since he crawled begging and pleading to the Western Air Temple.
But whispers the grinning cynic in his psyche, isn't this the same greed that drove the world to ruin once before?
But
But
But
The guilt pounds in his temples as he sits before his council and tries to do as his birthright demands: govern.
But
But truth is he's barely popular, even among his own people.
The Northerners hate him.
The Earth Kingdom is indifferent.
The Southerners tolerate him.
And the Avatar...
Well, the Avatar might be the only other person who could understand him.
But here's the thing:
He'd gotten married too young. He knew it. His advisors, for all their pushing, knew it. Uncle knew it.
Mai knew it.
She'd told him as much when she upended generations of Royal Family precedent and left him. He never begrudged her for it. He'd been shit boyfriend and not a much better husband.
"You'll find the right person, Zuko."
Zuko had married too young but Aang hadn't married at all, not yet.
The Avatar was pining, clinging to his belief in true love persevering and well, Zuko was a horrible friend. And he'd feel guilty except--she'd never love Aang the way he loved her. Zuko was practically looking out for him.
(He wonders how many lies his ancestors told themselves when they stood among the devastation they'd wrought as they took and took and took what they wanted)
___
It starts with an insult.
Really, well before that. But the insult gets the ball rolling because insults cannot be left unanswered. Not in the Fire Nation. Not when honor demands it.
It's a mid-ranking officer who says no worse than Katara's heard years over. About her heritage, her gender, her influence over the world's most influential men.
Zuko, predictably, overreacts.
And really what’s an insult compared to near death experiences?
Sometimes she wonders if they had known each other longer, if the frost had thawed sooner between them— their trip to the southern raiders and every evil exposed between them— if they had been older, what would have happened after the war.
Would she have stayed, rather than constantly crossing the world, pretending it was for greater purpose rather than running away from a future that terrified her?
But detente had broken in the eleventh hour and they’d been young (painfully, painfully young) and it had been years before she stepped foot in the Fire Nation capital again.
She went at the behest of her brother to find purpose there in diplomacy, not war. She'd spent so long hating it, the beauty catches her off guard.
The only thing that startles her more is how much she wants to stay.
But the insult. Mai's eyes never leave hers as her husband bellows and roars and the not so silver tongued officer goes scampering from the throne room.
In many ways her relationship with the Fire Lady was not so different than that the Fire Lord-- solidified by pain and blood and relief in Katara's hands.
The Fire Lady had trusted her to patch her up the same way Katara had her husband and they’d never spoken of it again, not even after he returned home from his summit trip. Not when council grumbled behind their rulers back about duty.
Not when Mai left shortly after The Insult.
The disgraced official is gone, the council and ambassadors shuffle away and Mai watches her husband watch Katara and Katara...
Katara doesn't look away. She's rooted in place, her fleeing feet still and maybe there were other reasons than ancestral hatred she'd avoided the Fire Nation for so long. The heat has gone to her head and made her bold. Not in practice, not yet. Perhaps more, dangerously, in her heart.
___
They work together there the same way they fight-- two halves of the same sword, good on its own but great together.
And for a year he has hope for the first time in his life.
(even in the moments after Azula's defeat, even as the golden flame was placed on his head all he'd felt was dread)
They are great together and everyone must see it. It's so clear, so certain.
He broaches the topic once before his advisers and suddenly men and women who spend every waking moment bickering before him are locked together in opposition against the hypothetical he's proposed.
No matter how many times they nag him about duty. About the tradition. About the precarious place their country occupies more than a decade after he'd saved it from moral collapse. And for the first time in his life he has perfect clarity.
He's given everything for the greater good. Maybe he would have continued, emptying himself bit by bit until he was just a shell of a Fire Lord for everyone to project their ambitions or hate onto.
But how can he continue when he knows the feel of her body against his? He can never unlearn it, would never want to.
She's the greatest good he's ever be privileged enough to dedicate himself to.
Holding her is like redirecting lightening: dangerous and exhilarating all at once. Holding such terrible power in your body, knowing one wrong move will kill you but reveling on the knife's edge anyway.
She will destroy him and he’s happy to let her.
It’s some grand irony the way she's destroying him, the way she’s destroying the Fire Nation-- her great crusade when they first met all those years ago.
And all it took was a cocked brow, a challenge— the audacity to want for herself— and the Fire Lord was on his knees before her.
___
Mai clutches four scrolls in her hand-- one bound for the Southern Air Temple, one for Republic City & one for the Fire Nation. She attaches them to the slowest messenger hawk in the aviary.
The last is addressed to her, water tribe insignia pressed into the long-dried wax.
She throws it in the fire. Watches the fire curl around words she didn't need to read to know their contents. She makes a note to check her savings and send a letter to Kyoshi Island.
Neutrality might be nice, in unprecedented times.