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"I know that you love me," Ta Min says, rubbing a hand over her new husband's shoulder affectionately. "Just like I know that you love him."
"I'm sorry," says Roku. "I'm—"
"Don't be," she hushes him. "You can bend four elements; I don't think it's crazy to believe you could love two people."
It's for the best, she thinks as she watches the tall, gentle man she married slice the vegetables he bought from the markets that afternoon so that he could make her favourite dish. She loves who he is to her; all thoughtfulness and humour and quiet devotion, a man who has found his wings and will use them to show her all the beauties of the world, great and small. Steadfast and soft, warm and attentive. She loves the way that he loves her.
But she is not so naïve as to think that the Avatar can be these things and nothing else. Ta Min knows that while his fire glows for her it rages for someone else, and if she wants to keep him she will also have to give some of him up, sometimes. It is not as disappointing as it sounds; the way Roku loves Sozin—unsteady earth and boiling seas and whirlwinds, hopeless impasses and open wounds—is not a way in which Ta Min wants to be loved.
"Just... be careful." She asks only this of him.
"I will," he agrees, but it doesn't sound like a promise. The Avatar has too many responsibilities to promise his own security to anyone. Although, Ta Min senses, it is not really the Avatar she is speaking to now—just a man with a heart that sometimes beats too hard.
"You can talk to me about him, you know," she offers. And yes, part of her is just curious, but the rest wants to help. Wants to do all it can to keep him safe.
"Thank you... for understanding," he says sagely, but continues cutting the vegetables without elaboration.
*
They are not what they used to be, he and Roku. Their conversation since Roku returned has been the wrong mixture of formality and familiarity. The Avatar and the Firelord are more different from the Prince and his noble friend than Sozin foresaw they would be. The Avatar and the Fire Lord are getting in the way of what they had.
It's still Roku. Roku of bashful smiles and lovable awkwardness and eyes as smooth and sweet in their goldenness as honey. It's still Roku, and it isn't at all.
It's not envy. Sozin is the Fire Lord; why should he covet any alternative title? He may not possess the ability to bend water or earth or air but he is more than good enough at bending fire to compensate. He would not trade his fire or his throne for anything. Sozin reflects on this while he sits in a trade meeting. He pays attention to these things, as is his duty, but today's negotiations are so narrow and repetitive he has begun to tune them out. It isn't envy, he thinks with certainty, but perhaps it is jealousy—a fine distinction which makes all the difference. Jealousy, because one is jealous of what one already has but might be losing. Sozin's Roku is being divided and stolen away from him by the Avatar and Ta Min and the world.
The Avatar must be a man split between all nations; he spreads his goodness across the earth. But why should the Avatar be the only one? Sozin has the means to spread his goodness too. Greatness, even (a fine distinction which makes all the difference).
The wedding night hadn't gone the way it was supposed to. How it was supposed to go was like this:
Sozin arrives and asks to borrow Roku, knowing Ta Min will not refuse her Fire Lord's request.
Indeed, she nods. "It's not very traditional," she says, an interesting choice of words. They tell Sozin that she knows. He cares not; she has as much to lose as he does from making a scene, and less credibility.
He and Roku walk. Alone in one another's company they survey the city, the great capital of Sozin's empire-so-far. On Roku's wedding night Sozin makes a proposition and they become partners anew, partners in something bigger than ever before, an endeavour great enough to bind them for the rest of their years. They say their vows to this end, and Sozin, being fearless, seals them with a kiss.
But all that remains a daydream. That is not how it went.
The four nations are meant to be just that—four! Roku had opted for division.
Sozin feels more of the boy he always loved falling away, like a cliff rattling and collapsing. He isn't sure he'll be able to step back. He isn't sure what he'll do.
Part of him wants to do as Roku says not to, just to enflame him; to bite and be bitten back and in doing so achieve more intimacy than it seems he can through agreement. A bite is not so different from a kiss, is it? It's certainly closer than all the faraway crevices of the other nations that hold Roku's attention now. If Roku comes back to fight with him, then he comes back.
*
Ta Min bandages her husband's wrist, ankle, chest, bathes cuts on his knee and elbow, ices bruises on his forehead and forearms. She hands him a spare piece of bandage to wipe his eyes with as he weeps. He makes a comment insinuating that the tears are just because of the physical injuries he carried away from his battle with the Fire Lord—injuries which, Ta Min thinks with anxious relief, could easily have been more severe. She turns her eyes away after she sees his face crumple inwards. She feels him shaking as she works on his wounds, shaking until slowly his grief lulls to the occasional quiver of his spent body.
Ta Min wonders against her will whether Roku would cry like this if the two of them separated. Part of her doesn't want to imagine causing this kind of pain for any reason. Part of her wants to know she is loved deeply enough to undo him this way. He had shown up at the door, posture stiff like if he moved the pieces would begin to topple. Face dulled, dormant.
"He wants to take over the world," Roku had muttered. "He did exactly what I asked him not to do."
*
The Lady Ta Min has requested an audience with you, Fire Lord.
She bows, but only briefly. She stands before him in clothes he knows are not her finest. There has always been a simple beauty about her, a round-faced, round-eyed sweetness. Age is doing her no favours, however, Sozin judges. Her complexion has already begun to wilt. A consequence of time spent worrying about her husband and missing him while he travels to perform his duties. So Sozin imagines (does not have to imagine).
It has been just weeks since the Avatar strung him up on a pillar of earth and threatened to kill him if he misstepped again. Roku has just departed from his island on a new Avatar mission. Ta Min waited for him to go before coming to Sozin. Sozin's ribs have been in poor shape since that fight, and the physicians say (nervously, as though their own ribs are on the line) that they may never be the same again. Despite medicine and exhaustion he has been getting very little sleep thanks to the pain in his chest, where a broken bone punctured something close to his heart.
"Why are you here, Ta Min?" he asks, already irritable, not troubling himself with politeness.
"Partly out of curiosity," Ta Min admits, "and partly to make a request."
"A request, hmm? Well, spit it out."
"Fix it," she demands, no please or thank you or my lord. "Undo what you have done. It isn't too late to close the rift between you."
"You say this as though I am the one who opened it," Sozin says, his voice harsh.
"A taut string is pulled at both ends," Ta Min shrugs. "But the Avatar has duties to the world whether he likes it or not. The Fire Lord has duties only to the Fire Nation. Roku is not the one overstepping his role."
Anger pushes Sozin to his feet. "My role? You dare tell me what is and is not my role? I am the Fire Lord!"
"That's what I just said."
Sozin huffs. Wisps of smoke stream out his nose, but no flames.
"You don't seem to fear me as you should," he observes her after a steadying breath. She does not bend fire, but she is certainly not lacking in it when she speaks her mind.
"Could you hate me any more, my lord?" she asks, now using the language of politeness although not the inflection. "And if it would do you any favours to lock Roku's wife up or burn her down, would you not have done it already?"
Sozin, still on his feet, strides down from the throne towards her.
"So timid in your youth," he says, looking down at her with only the height advantage of a greater stature now. "You have grown into quite the dragon, Lady Ta Min." But no replacement for me, Sozin thinks to himself. No fitting replacement for me. "You said you came half out of curiosity; I am curious as to what you meant."
"I wanted to see how you spoke about him," she explains simply. "He has never said much on the subject of you. I suppose I'm curious as to why anyone would want a love like yours."
Sozin stops, narrows his eyes. Decides to humour her in case he can extract any new information about what Roku's feelings are. "And what do you presume this 'love' of ours is like?"
"Landing on the surface of the sun," says Ta Min. (Has she prepared poetry for this occasion? He would laugh, but the ribs would protest.) "Why burn when you could see it from a safe distance? Feel its warmth without blistering?"
Sozin thinks about the time he has spent looking out to Roku's island, the tiny lights of its village windows twinkling in the night. The whole process is as good as stargazing. Not even for navigational purposes—just out of ineffectual longing. There is no warmth to be found in it, only a greater consciousness of distance. Even if I could see him right now, Sozin has thought on these occasions, out there giving off light like a star, it would be because of the glowing of the Avatar state. The Avatar, not Roku. My Roku has been eclipsed.
"To play your moronic game of metaphors," he replies, patronising in tone but secretly appreciative of the safety leant by vague confessions, "it's the clouds. Too many clouds. One cannot always see or feel the sun from the ground."
*
Ta Min is not blind, nor has she ever been. Even if she was she'd still never have been able to block her ears to news of the Prince and his best friend in her youth. No one who lived in the capital could have. The handsome young royal and his good-natured, easily flustered friend who was practically a prince himself, for the one seldom went anywhere without the other. Thus both were prominent features in any occasion of importance.
Ta Min had not been blind to the finer points back then either; the blush on Roku's cheeks when she passed him by. The muttered words that passed between him and Sozin just before she was out of earshot.
You must encourage him! her father had told her. The best friend of the Prince! Unless you can encourage His Royal Highness' affections instead.
Roku had been approaching sixteen; Ta Min herself was only thirteen and not quite as eager to see herself married as her father was. She hadn't disliked young Roku; she had found him endearing enough. But she had certainly not loved him. Embarrassed glances in her direction were not enough to cement a deep interest, coming from a Prince's friend or not.
Ta Min did not love Roku until he returned from his Avatar training—not because of the power he had gained during that time, but because of the way it made him hold himself: tall, like he knew his worth, like it fitted him properly at last. Because of the way he could approach her without tripping over his feet, hold a conversation without completely forgetting how words were supposed to work. Because of the way his hands didn't shake when they grasped hers, large and strong, their gentleness deliberate and not merely an offshoot of nerves. She loved him then because he was ready—and, twelve years having passed, Ta Min was ready too.
She hadn't been blind; she had seen the way Roku still looked at Sozin and the way Sozin looked back—even if ithad changed slightly since their youth, the once-clear eyes gathering storm clouds. Real love was rare enough among the nobles and royals that Ta Min knew it when she saw it. She saw it when Roku looked at her, too, none of its intensity compromised. It was different in shape, texture, temperature from what Roku and the Fire Lord had, but it was always whole. She never felt there was anything missing from the way he loved her.
She wonders now whether this is because her marriage borrowed the vital parts of what once held two young boys so close together. But no, she thinks. If—and that is an open question—it borrowed at all, it could only have salvaged the organs and soft inner workings of what was already torn open, already beyond repair.
*
When Roku was announced as the Avatar they'd only lived slightly more than a decade and a half. Comprehending that Roku would be gone for more years than Sozin could count on his fingers was impossible, like trying to fathom the distances between the stars out in space.
Sozin went to see Roku, leaned against the doorframe and let bravado pour out of his mouth to mask the fear of a loss he couldn't yet imagine, wouldn't understand the true depth of until it was upon him.
He unpinned his own hairpiece and handed it over. No worldly possessions, Roku had said—but this was no mere souvenir. He would still have to have clothes, so he should be allowed to wear such an artefact on his person, shouldn't he? Sozin realised then that he knew very little about what Roku's Avatar training would entail. Regardless, he did not hesitate as he held it out. Take me with you, the action begged. Wear this and don't forget me. Don't forget that I would even give up my crown for you.
They sat on the edge of Roku's bed, caught in a moment that suggested so many things: Sozin could take Roku's hand in his. He could wrap his arm around Roku's waist. Pull him close. Comb his fingers through that long silky hair and use his grip to guide their mouths together. That moment swirled like the universe, became too delicate to risk disrupting, sped too dizzily to keep up with.
And then they took Roku away, and Sozin learned just how much of himself he did not carry with him in his body.
The crown of a prince, he discovered in the grind of twelve lonely years, is not actually that much like the crown of the Fire Lord. One is much more easily relinquished than the other.
*
The volcanic gases force themselves into everything. Noses and mouths. Down windpipes into lungs. Veins, the fibres of muscles. Noxious and pungent, they do their best to strip eyes and mucous membranes. As the mountain coughs and splutters so do its fleeing inhabitants. And the one who has stayed behind.
This is how it was supposed to go:
Roku, pleading, extends a hand. Sozin looks down at him and sees his old friend for the first time in years, unadulterated by the Avatar. Just a man with wide eyes searching, needing Sozin.
And that is how it is going.
Catching sight of his Roku is, by now, something like seeing a ghost. A boy that hasn't truly existed since he was sixteen now appears behind the eyes of a wizened old man. Perhaps this is nothing but a fleeting moment, an anomaly brought about by the gases. Perhaps this is the closest Sozin will get to keeping his Roku, being the one by his side at the very end. He takes and savours this critical moment in lieu of whatever years, whatever decades could have lain ahead. Roku's death belongs to him the way his life stopped doing so long ago.
*
He finds out that it is perfectly possible to mourn what you yourself have destroyed.
Sozin takes the world in exchange, but it is not enough. The world, he remembers much too late, was the goal but never the prize.
*
The Fire Lord does not hide his role in the Avatar's death. If anything, he stretches the truth to make himself more responsible. To defeat such a powerful figure makes for a strong opening to any crusade, after all. Word spreads, as word is wont to do, and Ta Min hears what is said. More than that, though, she hears what is not. While the rumour mill churns, Sozin himself is very quiet for a man revelling in a great victory.
Ta Min spends some time asking herself whether she should demand another audience, sweep in and confront him the way she did after his relationship with Roku first soured. Each day she wakes in the spare room of her daughter Rina's home in Hira'a, inspects herself in the mirror with puffy red eyes, and decides to wait one more day.
It so happens that she is summoned before she can make the decision to go. She barely has time to tie back her hair before she is being marched away. She holds her head high because she has no good reason to bow it.
She needn't have worried about the puffiness of her eyes. Sozin does not come out of his room to meet her; instead she is ushered along right to the door of his royal chamber. Her heart creeps up into her throat and thuds there, its pulsing a percussive accompaniment to the tapping of her shoes on the polished wooden floor. Each board she steps across feels like another log on her funeral pyre. Everything around her is ready to be sent up in smoke by the same man who has already killed the love of their lives. A guard pushes her through the doorway and shuts the door behind her.
"Lady Ta Min," says Sozin. "My, you look tired."
She meets his eyes and sees that they are as bloodshot as her own, as consumed by wrinkles and shadows and as ripe with fresh pain. Her heart slides back to its rightful place and the words come naturally after all.
"Too tired to play games, Sozin. Why am I here?" she gestures to the regally furnished surrounds of the vast room.
"He's gone. Roku—" says Sozin. His speech cuts off abruptly and Ta Min suspects she knows why, suffers from the same problem as her own upper lip trembles. A moment later he has collected himself enough to add, "I may not like it, but you are all I have left of him. The only one who knew."
Ta Min does not like it either, but (especially since their home and all their possessions were destroyed in the eruption) the Fire Lord is all she has left of Roku besides her memories (and Rina, who cannot fairly be burdened with all this). The rest of the world is so busy mourning its Avatar (that or celebrating his demise) that she feels all the lonelier in her grief.
"Do you at least have something to drink?"
"Of course." Sozin goes to a cabinet and pulls out a large bottle so heavy with liquor that he grunts as he sets it down on the table between them.
They drink it all. Sozin takes most of it, but Ta Min is not so accustomed to such strong drink and the few cups she has have the world swimming around her. In a pleasant reversal of the norm, it is easier to speak than to worry.
"We always used to want the same things," Sozin is mumbling. His eyes are trained on the far wall, not on Ta Min.
"For a long time you've loved a memory," she tells him. The syllables take some concentration to get out, but that is the only obstacle to frank speech now. "A memory and a fantasy."
"A memory, yes," Sozin replies, wistful, eyes losing focus and looking through the wall to a place Ta Min can't follow him. "But never quite a fantasy. Roku... my Roku, I do think he still existed. Just not for me."
For me, Ta Min thinks, recalling the decades of goofy smiles, held hands, sweet kisses, romantic gestures, protective embraces. New tears burn behind her eyes. Her breathing wettens, and she inhales carefully so as to keep it silent. Suddenly drunkenness feels less like an embrace and more like a trap. She wants it gone but it has made a home under her very skin and only time can flush it out.
"I would like to sleep," she declares, but Sozin doesn't stir from his reverie. She waits another minute for a response before rising, gripping the back of her chair for support and making her way out to find either a spare room or a servant to guide her to one.
She leaves the palace the following morning without bidding Sozin farewell. She does not see him again.
Ta Min has not outlived him, she thinks to herself as she sinks into a bed she knows she will not rise from. She can only swallow a little of the water Rina brings her. She has lost all interest in food. And yet the same thoughts continue to haunt her mind as pointedly as ever; she has not outlived the Fire Lord in the tally of her years, but she decides she has outlived him by making better use of those she had. His body could sustain him forever, she thinks, but he will still do no more living.
*
Sozin dies a very old and successful man. He dies with ink stains in the prints of his fingers, and the knowledge that the Fire Sages will keep his memories safe. He dies, veiled with glory but shrouded in regret.
His ashes blow on the winds out over the ocean and almost—or perhaps just—find the shores of Roku's island on their way.