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[Track One: House of Metal by Chelsea Wolfe]
Tui does not remember what it was to be without La.
They know there was once nothing. And then there was two. No in between. No wait. Just the two of them together in the water.
And there was the dance.
[Track Two: Here She Comes by Slowdive]
Zuko doesn’t know why he’s here.
He hates parties.
Ok, maybe that isn’t fair. Zuko doesn’t hate all parties. But he didn’t want to go to this one. Fresh from a break up and too tired to deal with all this noise, he doesn’t want to be here. Home, with his own blaring music and grumblings, would be a lot nicer. But on again off again friend and ex Jet insisted.
Zuko was sure he’d have dragged him out of his apartment kicking and screaming if he didn’t show is face.
So here he is.
It’s loud. It’s cramped. He only smells sweat and booze and smoke clouds and hears nothing but buzzing and buzzing and songs he doesn’t even like.
The basements dark to. Wood panels cover the walls, there’s a nice carpet on the floor that’s only a little stained.
But barely a light is on.
He can hardly see. He can hardly hear.
Gripping tight to his red cup, he pushes through bodies as he tries to get a breath of air that isn’t thick with people, finding himself in a corner by the stairs.
Amid the thumping bass from the blaring speakers that have been someone’s home made mix of dance beats and pop hits having long since over stayed it’s welcome since it’s on at least it’s second play, he hears footsteps coming down the hard wood.
He hears voices behind him and turns his head out of reflex.
And he sees her.
[Track Three: Home Soon by Vagabon]
A brain is a storm on the inside. One might not feel it always but that’s what it is. Thousands upon thousands of tiny lightning strikes, electricity buzzing through the wrinkles of the lobes, a landscape of valley’s and hills.
It holds a million and one things, collected from ancestors and scraped knees.
In this moment, a thousand neurons are going off inside his brain.
And one sparks.
It’s the smile.
She has the same smile.
[Track Four: Cinnamon by Jome]
Her lips curl brightly into her cheeks.
She doesn’t hate him anymore, so Zuko doesn’t mind noticing that kind of thing.
And it’s a cute smile. How it reaches to her eyes, making everything about her sparkle like the way untouched snow glistens.
That was the thing he didn’t expect about snow the first time he saw it at the South Pole. It glitters. It glints and reflects and sparkles. Like piles and piles of precious gems that have been ground up and laid out for miles .
Blinding, really. He understands entirely why the Water Tribe keeps snow visors to keep themselves safe.
Katara’s giggling about something now and he’s not exactly sure why, thoughts struggling to return back to proper form.
“What is it?” He’s asking and she reaches for something in front of him.
He blinks as she tilts up the tea pot in his hands and he glances down to realize he was dangerously close to pouring it all out on the floor.
“I think we want to drink that,” she says.
“Oh, yeah,” he replies, eyes squarely on the tea pot as he lifts it up higher, holding it more securely.
It’s strange how the days meander, so mundane in their happenings like there’s nothing at stake. They wake, have breakfast, joke and laugh. Then Aang begins lessons.
Zuko is first because he’s awake first.
Toph is second, because earth doesn’t care what time of day it is.
And Katara is last. Because the moon won’t have risen, but the sun will be low in the sky and it’s close enough.
Then there’s dinner. Lunch is free flowing like sand, whenever you can have it you have it. But dinners…dinners are done every night, after Katara’s training sessions. She’ll come down and set out to make something and Zuko falls in to help best he can. Everyone eats together, laughs more, joke more, then go back to sleep.
It’s almost so normal. Maybe it is normal. It’s not like any of them have known anything else but war and how it looms and looms. This might as well be the natural state of things. The only one of them who has ever known peace is Aang, and Zuko doesn’t want to ask him what it felt like.
But Zuko knows, in the back of his mind, the end of the world might as well be here in what feels like a handful of days. All slipping through their fingers.
It scares him.
The thought of that. Of what might happen, one way or the other.
At least Katara won’t let him spill all their tea.
[Track Five: First Light by Hozier]
It’s a sudden realization. Quiet as day break. That maybe he likes her.
She’s smoothed into his life so naturally and it feels hard to detangle her from it.
He seeks her out first in the morning and he stays up far too late so he can talk to her until she sleeps because she always goes to bed last. When he trains, she’s there. When she trains, he does the same. They wander into each other through the day and he never has any real goal. He just wants to see her. He’ll make up something to say. A joke, an observation, a story. But it’s just to see her.
It feels different then he’d felt before.
He’s liked girls before. He’s liked boys before to.
And maybe they were all different but this feels almost like a revelation. One as deep as the realization that Zuko was not good, that he had been raised to be very bad by people who wanted him to be very bad. It feels foundational, almost. This sudden little thought.
When was it seeded?
Maybe when he saw that she’d never slept on the way to avenge her mother?
Maybe the first night she leaned against his shoulder.
Maybe when she touched his scar and he let her.
Maybe now. Maybe all of it. All at once.
[Track Six: Flaws by Daughter]
Or maybe he’s always loved her.
Some bit of him.
Maybe not, that feels stupid.
But you think of a lot of stupid things when you’re dying and you wake up in the girls arms who’s been trying to save you and succeeded. And that was his first stupid thought. The very first thought when he saw her eyes again.
They sit together now, side by side, his sister flailing and sobbing behind them, gaze upwards.
He wants to hold Katara like she’d held him but he can’t bring himself to move his arms. He just leans into her, head on her head as she rests against his shoulder.
They look at the sky, nearly consumed by red.
And he thinks this is it.
This is the end of the world.
But she’s next to him at least.
Maybe that’s enough because she is the whole world.
Then the sky turns blue.
And he’ll need to figure out what else to say to her that isn’t the stumbling love confession that nearly tumbles from his lips because there’s going to be a tomorrow.
[Track Seven: Neptune by Sleeping at Last]
It seems simple. Easy enough.
But after they leave that courtyard, it’s no longer just him and her in the world. It’s everyone else to. A constantly moving performance and she’s getting further and further away across the stage.
He can’t think of what to say as she continues to visit and tend his wounds.
She talks about her father and going home and seeing the world and helping people and what her brother might do and what Aangs thinking and…and Zuko realizes how small a castle is.
How small the walls here are compared to the forests and the oceans and the miles upon miles of untouched snow.
He falls so easily back into Mai because she knows what it is to live in a small house with it’s tall, thin walls and paintings that watch you as you move.
He likes her enough, he thinks. He loves Mai enough in some sort of way.
They all need to leave him to, except for Mai. Aang is talking about finding Air Nomads and Sokka is talking about rebuilding and Suki is talking about returning home to make sure her affairs are squared and her island will thrive.
And Katara is full of grand adventure and life an-…she needs to leave, to.
He can’t trap her in here with him.
In these walls he hates, full of nothing but bitter memories. It’d be cruel to trap her in this place. She’s not used to it. Not like him, not like Mai.
They’re all laughing at dinner as he watches silently.
Only Katara notices.
Beside him, she quietly asks, “are you alright? Does something hurt?”
He swallows.
He smiles.
I wish you could stay, he thinks.
Everything hurts because you can’t stay. None of you can stay.
“No,” he says. “I’m fine.”
[Track Eight: Country Rain by Slowdive]
“Are you sure you can’t come?” She asks when she is finally ready to leave.
He nods.
“The new Fire Lord leaving so soon would be a bad look,” he says.
She’s ringed in the sunrise, painting her hair gold and her skin so rich. But her blue eyes look soft and sad.
But she nods anyway. Always brave.
“You better write me, then,” she says.
“You better visit me,” he says in return and she laughs a little.
She leans up onto her tip toes, Katara wrapping her arms so tightly and sweetly around Zukos neck.
He holds her tight enough to hurt his chest, clutching onto her like he might never let go.
He does, though.
Then she is gone.
[Track Nine: Spanish Sahara by Foals]
They’re on Ember Island, years after, in the sand with the water of the night tides kissing their toes.
The summer night is warm and the stars are plentiful. Her shoulder brushes against his.
He asks, “do you still think about it?”
She swallows.
“Think about what?”
“Everything.”
She hums.
“Yeah,” she says. “I have nightmares.” She sinks into her knees, arms tight around them and she glances to the moon. “Sometimes Yue can’t save us in the North Pole. Sometimes Aang dies in the catacombs. Sometimes I never find him. Sometimes you find him.”
They’re quiet in the push and pull of the sea.
She’s married to Aang. It was a lovely wedding in the spring. The whole thing was small and informal. As marriage customs in both the Southern Water Tribe and Air Nomads typically are.
He still see’s her though, dressed in the finest of Southern Water Tribe fabrics and beaming, in the back of his mind. Like he see’s her smiling in their camp right before the end of the world. Like he see’s her every visit, looking up at him with big blue eyes. Like he replays every letter in his mind, detailing her world travels.
He’s married to, he supposes.
Though him and Mai had a large ceremony in the winter. Both agreed it was best that way, given it would be coolest in the Fire Nation and both joked about how warm their ornate robes would be. And he supposes Mai had been beautiful to. He won’t begrudge his wife. He loves her in the way he does and she’s beautiful in the way she is.
But she’s…he keeps his eyes on the water. The moon reflecting off of the soft ripples.
“The worst ones, you die,” Katara says. “I can’t save you.”
“In mine, she kills you,” he replies. “And there’s nothing I can do to save you. I’m just a fire bender.”
He turns to her to find her looking at him, thoroughly alive and thoroughly lovely.
She hesitates, then reaches for his chest with the hand nearest to him. She feels for the knots of his scar, the one she knit together, and both of their bones relax.
“We made it, though,” she says.
He nods.
Her fingers don’t move.
[Track Ten: Lullabies by Yuna]
Quietly, she tells him, “I think I loved you.”
Quietly, he tells her, “I think I still love you.”
[Track Eleven: Fire in the Water by Feist]
They speak in little codes when they see each other now, both navigating the shards of broken glass they’ve both scattered across the world.
“How long?”
“The Southern Raiders, maybe. Forever, maybe.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“It was too hard, it was too long, it wasn’t the time.”
“What do we do?”
Nothing, he wants to say.
Everything, he wants to say.
She visits often for diplomatic reasons and neither has come up with a succinct answer. They’ll just stand too close, arms brushing, alone in rooms and hallways and the gardens.
They’ve made it worse, they both know. Having drug Mai and Aang unknowingly (still unknowingly) into their mess. Into their disaster. Into the sinking pit they’ve made of their lives.
Because they now both know, is the thing. Is the problem. Is the greatest and worst gift of the universe. That knowing can’t be put back.
She loves him.
And he loves her.
If only it could ever be so simple.
[Track Twelve: Cherry Tree by the National]
Glass to ground shards of sharp dust.
Lips to lips, fingers to skin. Hasty and warm. So, so warm.
It’s a loss of control at first.
They’re alone and too close and everything breaks. More then it already had.
It…it stops being a loss of control, though. It turns into a game. The heat, the closeness, the warmth.
Maybe this is enough.
Hiding out together behind locked doors. Code in letters and in conversation. Her fingers brushing against his as they pass in halls.
It feels less complicated as they lay together at night, awake and bare, fingers tangled together.
The problem though…the problem…well, it’s the same problem.
It’s always the same problem.
[Track Thirteen: Earth by Sleeping at Last]
He’s in the South Pole. Katara is alone. She takes him with her through the banks, to the cost of the southern sea.
Together, they agree this is not enough.
And together they agree that it can’t be more.
“If only-” he starts and stops when he sees her eyes. Her blue, glossy gaze pleads.
But she understands.
“If only,” she agrees quietly.
“It was beautiful, though,” he says quietly. She swallows, eyes shutting and she turns her head.
“It will always be beautiful,” she says.
They look to the sea.
He reaches for her gloved hand with his and she reaches back.
[Track Fourteen: Good Day Sunshine by Slowdive]
There is a cave between two long gone cities where to lovers lay.
There is a pool of water in the north where two beings dance and dance.
There is a party in 1994 where a boy has just seen a girl.
There is a time before time where two little sparks saw each other. Where one saw the sky and one saw the water and they thought yes, yes, I shall come to you each time you call.
There is a cave where two lovers lay who loved each other until one could not and the other changed the world for them.
There is a 100 year war where a boy saw a girl in the snow and none quite realized the world was changed.
There is a party in 1994 where there is a girl heading down a set of stairs, talking as she see’s a set of amber eyes and remembers something.
There is-there is-there is-
[Track Fifteen: Samson by Regina Spektor]
There are history books upon history books written on the 100 Years War and how it ended. Of the acclaimed master Katara of the Southern Water Tribe and her beloved Avatar Aang. Of Prince Zuko, turned Fire Lord Zuko.
And there’s more, sometimes, written about how Zuko’s life was saved by Katara. Of how this simple action of a Water Tribe girl saving a Fire Nation boy could symbolize what the world was to become.
There’s more cataloging carefully saved letters letters of Fire Lord Zuko between many of his friends. He wrote them all regularly and had quite a collection of letters in return. And tied with a gentle, blue ribbon in a delicately carved blue box was his largest collection of all. Those sent to him by Katara of the Southern Water Tribe.
There are similarly the letters he’d sent to Katara which surfaced after her grand daughter recovered them hidden in the back of her grandmothers old room.
There’s theories about how things may have been. About plays that were then contemporary suggesting the two might have been lovers. About how Sokka wrote to Suki during brief times apart, mentioning Toph joking that the Fire Lord and Water Bending Master are in love. And how Suki would write back, questioning if they should be concerned. About Aangs own reluctant writings, worrying his wife was keeping a secret from him and how he would just like to know. About Mai’s long kept diaries which, while missing sections due to time, detail her certainty that her husband not only loved her but also his long held best friend. About the sad realization that while she had him, she was sure if he could, he would be at the water benders feet in a moment.
The two would die third and second last out of their friends, only survived by Toph. Katara would go first, Zuko assuring all arrangements for her burial. He’d commented publicly that, at least, she had not been left alone. She had always feared being left alone.
He would die some months later, receiving a burial befitting a Fire Lord though in his letters he often reflected his distaste for the role.
What is true, what everyone knows, is this.
There was a Fire Nation boy who changed and a Water Bending girl who saw hope for the world. They cared for one another deeply.
And they likely always will.
[Track Sixteen: Welcome Home (Reprise) by Radical Face]
“Maybe in another lifetime,” she says to him.
Things are soft here, on the other side of death, in the waiting space between lifetimes. It’s hazy, how things linger. Many of their friends have gone but not all of them just yet. Not all of them. Some of them waited for him to return to say goodbye. Some will wait still for others. He’s not quite sure how it works, how they move from lifetime to lifetime. Half here, half there, until they’re not.
All he knows for certain is she waited for him in this timeless place.
He looks at her and he see’s a thousand different hers. Her young, her old, her as he last saw her, her as he first saw her. Her a hundred lifetimes ago. Her in the last life. Her in the next.
He looks at himself in reflections and he see’s the same. A thousand different faces, each his.
And he looks at her now and see’s her like he saw her right before the end of the world, tilting up his tea kettle.
She smiles at him as she always has. Holds his hand as he always liked. Dances with him like they seldom could.
She’d waited for him, he recalls.
Time, after all, means nothing here and what is the few months between her arrival and his?
“Maybe in another lifetime,” he agrees. “Maybe in all of them but this one.”
And she laughs, eyes crinkling.
“It was a good life though, wasn’t it?”
And he smiles and he says, “it was. It was. And it will be next time I see you.”
[Track Seventeen: When the Sun Hits by Slowdive]
Katara doesn’t know why she’s here.
Ok, maybe that’s not entirely true.
See, it’s Sokka’s new house with his roommates. They got the place a couple of weeks ago, down the street from campus. It’s not really a big deal. He’s rented places with friends before. But he’s excited about this one, because Sokka’s always excitable. And he kept insisting she show up. ‘It’ll be small, Katara,’ he’d promised. ‘Like a house warming party.’
House warming party.
Katara brought a goddamn plant.
But see, her brother wasn’t always the best at figuring this sort of shit out. Because when you factor in all of his college roommates and word of mouth that’d spread between all of them, any party here was going to end up huge. And huge it was.
She’d signed up for a small party.
Not this.
And she swears she can hear her ex, Jet, when she enters. Who would invite him, she doesn’t know. Certainly not Sokka, but she doesn’t know who his roommates are. She’s not even sure he knows who his roommates are. Sure, some are likely his friends. But some are likely friends of those friends he’s met a handful of times at best.
She’s going to try and write the sound of Jet off as a ghost or something to keep her bad evening from going worse.
When she’d arrived, she’d been told to go to the basement but the floor above was covered in people to, like little ants all over a piece of trash so she’s not exactly sure where the basement is. And she still doesn’t know what to do with her ‘gift’ which was sure to die by the time the evening was over.
Poor plant.
She wades, trying to find somewhere to set it down. Thats when her savior appears.
Suki finds her when she comes into the kitchen, pouring herself a drink amidst the noise until she sees Katara, eyes widening in excitement as she goes and grabs her arm. There’s a flurry of greetings that Katara doesn’t quite understand until Suki’s starting to gesture to the plant.
“Just put that down on the counter!” Suki yells over the music. “It’s even cooler downstairs! Come on!”
With Suki now guiding her, Katara’s moved smoothly through the crowd. Suki sways with the music, greets people she knows and people she doesn’t, until they find the stairs.
They’re both laughing about Katara’s plant on the way down to the bottom floor.
She gets to the basement, Suki still holding onto her hand, and Katara glances around the packed room. The music is not her taste, it’s way too dark down here, and it smells like shit.
There’s not a lot of people she knows as she scopes out the room. But everyone’s so packed together…she’s not even sure she’d recognize the faces in this sea. Suki whispers to her as she skims the crowd, filling her in on little dramas and mysteries that have occupied the evening thus far.
Then Katara’s eyes graze the corner to find a boy there. Tall, hair dark and to his shoulders. He has a scar on his face that she feels like she knows. And he has these amber eyes that haven’t left her.
She thinks something about him feels right.
So she smiles.