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After the lightning, when the blue glow of Katara’s healing is filling the courtyard, Zuko leans up and does what he has wanted to do for months. And when his mouth presses against hers, Katara does what she has wanted to do for even longer, and she kisses him back.
It is steps from where generations of Fire Lords have been crowned that their destinies twist, bend, and tie together in a knot that half of the world will try to undo, without success.
**
He tells Mai. She tells Aang.
They think that this has been the hard part.
They are both very young. Because that was the easiest part.
**
The court never accepts her. It’s a constant, endless cascade of cuts, of whispered insults and petty cruelty.
He is an absolute monarch, he rules without question. And there is nothing he can do when every lady in the court turns their faces, so subtly, whenever Katara makes the smallest overture. When every lord mutters insults as she walks by.
She has him. And just him. She grew up in a tribe that valued closeness, where every face was one she had known from infancy, a community bound together with obligations tied by love. Then she was traveling, and she was a novelty in the Earth Kingdom, the Avatar’s waterbender, and earth offered so many cracks for her charm and frighteningly effective people skills to slip into, worming in like water into welcoming soil. She always had dozens of friends when by the time they left every new village or city.
She never faced fire before.
She grits her teeth and keeps trying. Zuko is in meetings, in ceremonies, buried with paperwork, from the moment he wakes up until he closes his eyes. He finds every minute in his schedule that they can spend together — at meals, for short walks stolen in the tiny gaps between his duties, or when they spar together. For a while she helps him with the paperwork until a hissed word from a secretary to a minister leads to a formal protest about a titleless waterbender having access to the most privileged information of the Fire Nation, and he has to agree not to let her see any of it anymore — which means that now she can’t even enter his office, where he spends half his days.
She tries longer than he could’ve reasonably asked. It still hurts on the day when she suggests that they try a different approach.
She goes through the countryside with a small outreach group. A waterbender is so useful, after all. She cleans waterways and wells, pulling out filth and contamination. She heals wherever she goes. Positive reports come back — the peasants warm to her — how could they not, really.
After all, the court gossips point out, she’s just a peasant herself. She’s among her own kind, now. The progress she makes with the regular citizens of the Fire Nation actually results in even more resistance at court.
And then there are the assassination attempts. Outside of the palace she’s such a tempting target, to so many groups. His father’s supporters can’t resist such a good way to get at him. His own supporters see a way to smooth the path toward a true Fire Lady. A few times it really does just seem that she walked into the wrong village, and someone just hated Water Tribe folk. Twice it’s war veterans who remember how many times her father’s fleet was so successful at cutting supply lines, bringing down troop ships.
And, of course, when she is traveling around and healing his country, they don’t see each other at all.
After two years, Sokka comes back on a Water Tribe trade ship and asks his sister to come back home, just for the winter. Her tribe needs her.
Sokka doesn’t say what anyone can see — that she needs her tribe even more. Zuko isn’t blind. He adds his voice to Sokka’s, promises that he’ll write letters all the time. And it will be temporary.
**
It is. She’s back on the first trade ship of the spring, and he’s waiting at the dock. Her eyes are shining after a winter of ice and storms, and she is so full of delight and happiness that it almost hurts him to see her.
Because it was from her own people. Within days he can see the joy dim, replaced by grim resolve. Because nothing changed.
She spends a season at court. Then a season traveling the countryside. Then a season at court again.
He finds one week — one full week when he finally convinces Uncle to close his tea shop and serve as regent for a damn week, and he and Katara go to Ember Island, together, with no servants and no staff and no reports. No whispers, no constant parade of women trying to catch his attention, no hissed epithets as she walks the halls. Just the two of them, an empty house, and a warm ocean.
She is seventeen, and he is nineteen, and the cracks are showing badly. But neither of them will let go, and it’s on the beach at Ember Island that they don’t stop at kissing anymore, clinging to each other and chasing the moments when they don’t have to think about anything beyond each other at all.
Then he goes back to the Fire Court and she gets on a trade ship to spend winter at home.
Then, the year she turns eighteen, they realize that this was actually not the worst of it.
Not even close.
**
It’s like his ministers were just waiting, hoping that she would give up, or he would give up. Because when she comes back at the start of spring, she’s Fire Nation marital age, everything explodes.
Literally, once. She’s in Caldera City, walking in the market, and there’s an assassination attempt with explosives. Four bystanders are killed, and she would’ve died as well if the blast hadn’t knocked her near a puddle that had just enough water in it for her to close the serious wounds and hold off the attackers until royal guards can make it to her.
Even with all her healing abilities, and two more Northern healers who Aang flies down, there are permanent scars all down her back.
She’s still in bandages, confined to bed, when Zuko has the surviving conspirators publically executed.
No one knows how, but a note in Ozai’s handwriting is found on Zuko’s desk the next night.
How proud I am of you, my son. Now you see how it is to rule.
**
Now Katara can’t move an inch outside the palace without a full guard. The guard is supplemented by a pair of Kyoshi warriors as soon as Suki hears about what happened, because Katara’s sister-in-law is very clear about how much she trusts Fire Nation guards with Katara’s safety, and it’s as far as she can throw an ostrich-horse.
The ministers speak out endlessly against marriage. Zuko can’t get a single other piece of business into meetings, because all they want to do is talk about Katara. He has to promise that no marriage will happen that year before he can even get anyone to talk about things like the basic budget.
When speaking to their Fire Lord, the ministers who are feeling deferential to him refer to Katara as his girlfriend. The ones who do not feel inclined towards deference call her the waterbender.
When his eyes are not on them, hissing quietly at the edge of his hearing, they call her the concubine.
Since one minister and his entire family were banished, no one dares to call her a whore.
Not in the same room as Zuko, anyway.
Katara has lost count of how many people have called her a whore to her face during her years in the Fire Court.
Sokka and Hakoda arrive at the beginning of fall that year, and it isn’t on a trade ship. It’s on a Water Tribe war ship, slicing through the waves. They suggest that maybe Katara should spend two seasons at home this year, and it’s very obvious that isn’t a suggestion, either.
**
In spring, she comes back.
And this time the Fire Sages start weighing in.
The next three years drag by. She starts coming back a few weeks into spring, rather than on the first tide. Then halfway through spring.
Zuko negotiates with his ministers. Too many other things are tied up, things that the country needs, so he bargains. He offers. He counter-offers.
He won’t marry a Fire Nation woman. No matter how many are pushed in his direction. And he won’t keep Katara as a mistress in a quiet, discreet house, no matter how many ministers suggest this and are sent from court in disgrace. “Disgrace” is a relative term, of course. Zuko is all too aware of how tenuous his hold on his throne is at this moment, and disgrace becomes a bit of theater. He sends the offending ministers away, and they stay at their country estates for a few months before sending him a florid, yet totally insincere apology, and a great show is made of his forgiveness. In truth, he needs any crumb of support too nakedly.
Eventually, an agreement is reached.
He agrees that a marriage to Katara would only be a Water Tribe marriage, not a Fire Nation one. She will never be the Fire Lady in truth.
And he agrees that any children he has with Katara won’t inherit the throne. In the eyes of the Fire Nation, those children would be illegitimate.
He sails to the South Pole, a scroll tucked into the bottom of his trunk like a coiled snake.
And for the first time he feels the smallest part of what she feels in the Fire Court.
That he is Fire Nation is part of the problem, of course. The fact that he threatened half of the village, and ruined their ice wall, is not doing him any favors.
But they hate him for much, much more personal reasons than that. And since they are Water Tribe, and his relationship with Katara makes him part of the tribe, no one has any compunction about cornering him and telling him what they think, right to his face.
That he is a selfish, useless royal asshole. That if he will not marry Katara, who is now twenty-two, then he needs to end it.
Right now.
Hakoda and Sokka are thinking the same thing as the rest of the tribe, every minute, he knows, but they make him welcome in the family circle of huts. They offer him the best meat, they laugh when Sokka and Suki’s children tumble over him like polar puppies. He knows that they are doing this for Katara, not for him.
It’s Bato who goes the furthest. Bato is the one who shoves his shoulders, raging, and says, She won’t end it herself. She’ll hold on and let you drown her with you. So YOU need to do it.
But Zuko has lost too many people, and he is too alone in the Fire Court.
He knows he won’t let go. Even if it drowns them both.
He shows her the paper after two weeks. The best two weeks they’ve had in years, even though he can’t believe how cold and miserable this place is in the winter — he hated the South Pole when he saw it in the springtime, years ago, but this. This is daily agony, these endless nights and black days, the constant storms and howling wind. His feels his fire dim every day, and not even burying himself inside of her and holding onto her for dear life can kindle his inner fire again. Not with the sun hidden behind darkness.
He wasn’t made for this place. When she signs the paperwork, acknowledging every last insulting bylaw, disinheriting their unborn children, agreeing to make them bastards in his country before they are even conceived, they both know that this interlude on the ice can’t be any kind of solution.
They get married anyway. He learns later that no one in the village would agree to participate. That when he stands with her in the center of the village and they make promises, with only Sokka, Hakoda, Suki, and the kids around them, that this is not a traditional wedding. That everyone else is telling Katara what they think about her decision by their absence, and her family is only there because they would follow her literally anywhere, even here.
But Sokka and Hakoda do insist on one thing — three seasons. Three seasons at home.
**
He didn’t think the Court could be worse for her. When they go back together, him and his Water Tribe wife, he realizes he was wrong.
It’s worse.
**
Azula leaves the Fire Sage nunnery that she has lived in for years. He gets the letter telling him that she is married — to a third tier noble, barely any social standing at all. No power base.
Zuko visits his sister and when he walks in, sees that she is visibly pregnant.
Why. He asks. She didn’t have to. He knows she didn’t want to.
She doesn’t even like guys. He’s known that since they were kids, as hard as she tried to hide it from Father and the court, to be the perfect little princess.
She looks at him. How long do you really think they’ll even let you survive without a real Fire Nation heir, Zuzu?
She gives him the baby after the birth. She doesn’t even bother to choose a name. She hands the baby over, then goes back to her nunnery.
He doesn’t understand his sister. He never did. He loves her, has defended himself a dozen times when they tried to kill each other, but so rarely has he been able to follow the twists and turns of her mind.
This one is clear. It’s the very closest he will ever get to an apology for shooting lighting into his chest on the day of the comet.
Zuko installs Izumi in the royal nursery, announces her as his heir.
**
Azula was right. Having Izumi makes it easier for Zuko to get a lot of things done, loosens resistance to his reign significantly.
However, even with his Fire Nation heir, it is very clear that there are plenty of his citizens who have no intention of accepting Zuko’s children with his Water Tribe wife. This becomes very clear the moment the curve of Katara’s belly becomes too pronounced to hide anymore, and intensifies exponentially the first time Katara steps onto Fire Nation soil with their son tucked in her arms.
It doesn’t matter that they gave him a Water Tribe name, that his skin and eyes are a perfect match for his mother’s, that Katara could tell when he was still in her womb that he had a water spirit. All the documents that his parents signed, it doesn’t matter. The first attempt is when Kallik is seven weeks old, and somehow an assassin slips all the way into their bedroom, almost all the way to the cradle.
Zuko is the one who wakes up, some sixth sense rousing him enough to see the dark figure reaching toward the baby, see the glint of metal in the moonlight, and he doesn’t hesitate for a second. They find the knife among the assassin’s charred remains.
Katara’s decision to pass on the amenities of the royal nursery, where Izumi resides, and stick to the Water Tribe ways of childrearing have been prescient, as it turns out. On Fire Nation soil Kallik is never without one of his parents at his side, ever.
When he and Katara go down to Ember Island with the baby, the whole area is surrounded by the Kyoshi warriors for the week. The feelings against his son are running too high, especially in the army. He can’t trust anyone not to pass on an easy strike.
Kallik goes back to the South Pole with Katara, of course, as soon as fall arrives. Zuko writes letters. He gets letters from Katara. Describing how his son is growing. Changing.
Without him. Always without him.
**
Another pregnancy, two years later. Kya is just as clearly Water Tribe, and just as hated by his people.
Even with Izumi with him all the time, Zuko only feels truly alive when he sees purple sails at the beginning of the summer, carrying his family back to him for a few stolen months.
No one is foolish enough to attack the ship at sea. Not with a master waterbender on board.
Plus the three other Northern waterbenders on the accompanying ships that escort them. They did learn that lesson after the first year she sailed with Kallik. Now, with two children, a few more Water Tribe ships get added to the escort fleet every year. Just in case.
Izumi loves her cousins, but her supporters thirst for their blood.
And, as the years go by and the children get older, it turns out that there are quite a few layers to Izumi’s feelings about her cousins.
Zuko is walking down a hallway one day and he hears the phrase “royal bastards” and when he whips his head around, there is Izumi, talking to one of her friends. And she looks up, meets his eyes, and he knows that she is the one who said it.
And that she meant it.
Zuko signs proclamation after proclamation, but no one truly believes that he won’t try to put his own children on the throne. Not even Izumi.
Sometimes he looks at her and sees his mother, so clearly. Other times he sees Azula.
Sometimes he sees Ozai.
**
Kallik is a waterbender. Kya is a waterbender. They are Water Tribe through and through, the hints of Zuko only there if someone looks closely at the curves of Kya’s face or the texture of Kallik’s hair, and Zuko and Katara don’t say it, but it’s a relief.
For a few years, there’s a balance. Zuko focuses on his summers with his family, carving longer windows of time at Ember Island. It’s a struggle. For three years he manages a whole month.
But Iroh is getting older. Zuko gets a letter — Uncle has a cough that he can’t shake, can feel winter in his bones, even in the summer, and he can’t come this year.
Zuko has no one he can trust to be regent. That year there is no time at Ember Island at all.
The next summer, the sails are sighted, but it isn’t his family on board. It’s a letter from Katara.
Kallik wouldn’t set foot on the ship. He and Katara argued for hours, but his son is eleven, and he said no.
Zuko has always known that Katara would do anything for their children. It’s part of what he relies on so hard, that she’s a good mother in all the months that he can’t be there.
But for the first time he really understands what that means — because when their son stayed put, Katara didn’t get on the ship either. When the choice was him or their children, she chose their children.
Another letter arrives a few days later, and this one is from Kallik.
He hates the Fire Court. He loves his father, he misses him, but he won’t come back, because he won’t let his little sister go through what happened last summer. Not again. He talked it over with Sokka, and this is what Kallik decided.
That’s when Zuko has to face more than a few harsh truths — how much his children have gone through that he was helpless to shield them from, and, even harder, that Zuko might be his children’s father, but the one who is their dad is Sokka.
**
It’s Aang who finds a solution this time — a summit of all world leaders, to be held on the neutral ground of Republic City. Zuko has to attend — that’s very clear to all his ministers.
And when he arrives in Republic City, Katara and his children are waiting for him.
There are a lot of meetings. Zuko sends underlings whenever possible, including a few times when it really wasn’t, and spends every second that he can with his family. In regular clothes, with a hat pulled low and a patch across his scar, Zuko isn’t recognizable as the Fire Lord. And in Republic City, mixed marriages aren’t unknown. When Zuko and Katara walk together with their children, they get some curious looks, but no one makes a fuss.
There are actually not even any assassination attempts. He goes on walks with his kids, has the time to actually talk with them, learn about the people they are becoming. They go to festivals, visit parks. The whispers of the court are very far away.
It’s a hint of something better and new.
When Zuko is in bed with Katara, he whispers in her ear — Izumi is twelve this year. When she’s twenty-one, he could abdicate. They could live wherever they could be together. Maybe even Republic City. He could be useful to Izumi here, not feel like he’s just dumping an entire country in his niece’s lap and running.
It’s an alluring fantasy for both of them. A way out of the darkness they’ve been struggling through for over two decades.
They get careless.
Katara was careful to time her pregnancies with Kallik and Kya so they were born in late spring, when Zuko could come to the South Pole and be with her during the last weeks, and the births, then they could go to the Fire Nation with the new baby, have a few months together as a family at the beginning.
This time, it’s not planned, and Katara gives birth in the deepest part of the winter, with Zuko a continent away. Hawks won’t fly to the poles in the winter. The Water Tribe fleet stays anchored in those months. Zuko sends an ice-cutter for news, but the storms are terrible that year, and it has to turn around.
He waits for months, feeling like he’s going out of his mind, imagining every worst possibility, all the ways that things can go wrong.
When news comes, it’s from Kyoshi Island, and it comes via the Avatar, riding Appa.
Everyone is fine, Aang tells him. Just shut up and get on the damn bison. A few trusted aides pretend that the Fire Lord has a cold, and they’re in the air within the hour.
Appa hasn’t flown this fast, with so few breaks, since the end of the war.
What is wrong, Zuko keeps asking.
Nothing, Aang keeps saying. No one is dead. No one is sick. You have another son. Everyone is waiting on Kyoshi Island.
Why Katara traveled to Kyoshi Island in the middle of the winter is not explained.
When Zuko arrives and rushes into the house she is staying at, he sees the baby and immediately realizes why she had to do it.
Their son has golden eyes and pale skin. And it’s of course years too early to say for sure, but this is a baby that was failing to thrive in the darkness of the polar winter, with no sun, and began finally putting on weight once Katara left the Pole and arrived in a temperate climate.
Zuko realizes, looking at him, seeing all fire and no water, that things just got worse.
Much. Much worse.
**
Siku lights his first candle when he is three. Zuko learns this by letter.
Kyoshi Island loves to gossip. The news that the Fire Lord’s new son looked like his father was at Caldera City only days after Zuko returned. That the Fire Lord’s bastard son might be a firebending prodigy on the level of his aunt is impossible to keep quiet outside of the South Pole, and Siku can’t take the winters there. Maybe the whispers come from Kyoshi Island, maybe from Republic City, perhaps even from Ba Sing Se after a springtime visit to their great-uncle, now a bedridden old man.
Word leaks.
Izumi’s supporters rally. Within months Zuko is signing a proclamation that reaffirms his niece as his heir, which he has done many times before, but this one also banishes all three of the royal bastards. His youngest son is banned from ever setting foot in the Fire Nation, under threat of execution.
Izumi watches him while he signs it.
This one, she wrote.
He loves his niece. But perhaps, so separated from his children, and those children always in his thoughts and desires, he allowed too many traditions of the Fire Court to continue unchecked and unconsidered. The nursery. The Royal Fire Academy for Girls. The tutors from all the right families. He raised Izumi to be his heir — and, apparently, he did quite well.
He offers Izumi the throne. She’s sixteen. That’s how old he was, after all. He offers it even knowing that it’s a poisoned chalice, but all he can think of is Katara and his children, now circling between the South Pole in the spring and summer and Republic City in the fall and winter. The Water Tribe always works together — Hakoda has resigned as chief so he can travel with his daughter and grandchildren. It’s too easy for Zuko to imagine a little house in Republic City, a nice ambassadorship. Never leaving Katara’s side again.
Izumi accepts.
**
It’s one of the happier days of his life when Zuko watches Izumi’s coronation.
At first, everything seems ideal, and it’s easy for Izumi’s excuses to work. He needs to help her with the transition, be there to smooth the way. He remembers how angry he was at how fast Iroh left him after the war, and he agrees easily.
After a few months, everything is going well. He starts to pack for Republic City.
Delays continue to pile up. Tangled little issues that she needs help with. A few infrastructure projects that she insists that he handle personally. His opinion about her suitors, who are legion, so many eager to become the consort that it’s hard to keep them all straight. Then a royal procession around the country, so everyone can see that he had abdicated willingly.
Almost ten months have dragged by when he finally tells Izumi, enough. He loves her, but she’s doing fine, and he’ll be getting on a ship in the morning.
In the morning, there are guards at the doors who won’t follow his orders, and they block his way.
That’s when Zuko realizes that he is under house arrest.
It’s just temporary, Izumi assures him, when she finally comes to his rooms a few days later. Until the succession is assured. Until Izumi is sure that Zuko will not lead a coup against her, and attempt to declare his firebending son as his heir.
Zuko has no intention of waiting for Izumi to get married and have a baby, and has the strong suspicion that Izumi’s concerns about Siku will end only if his son is in a grave.
Zuko tries to break out three days later, and after that his accommodations are in Iroh’s old prison cell, right down the hall from Ozai, who finds this turn of fate absolutely hilarious.
**
Zuko had a few allies. Not many. Never many. But a few notes get slipped to him.
To say that Katara raises absolute hell is an understatement. She has the Southern Water Tribe demanding his release as her husband, which makes the former Fire Lord, she argues, technically a Water Tribe member.
Then she gets the Northern Water Tribe involved, which is impressive.
Then she somehow gets the kings of Omashu, Ba Sing Se, and another four Earth Kingdom cities involved, and Izumi has a real problem on her hands.
Aang doesn’t get involved. He’s the Avatar, after all. But he also refuses to negotiate on Izumi’s behalf, telling her, stone-faced, that the key to peace seems to rest in her uncle’s cell.
When a fleet of Water Tribe and Earth Kingdom ships blockade the harbor of Caldera City, that’s when everyone realizes exactly how serious Katara is.
Izumi tries to break the blockade. That’s when not only is she reminded that tangling with waterbenders on the ocean is a terrible idea, but everyone also learns that Toph and her whole school of metal benders are participating in the blockade.
It’s not a great day for the Fire Nation navy.
Zuko starts feeling a bit cautious about his food, knowing that Izumi’s problems could be solved with a tidy bit of familicide, but apparently Katara has that angle covered as well. The Avatar and his many children fly across Caldera City on gliders, dropping hundreds of fliers — if Zuko dies before he can be handed over, his wife is going to give the order to bombard the city. The palace being her preferred target, of course, but she makes no promises about the accuracy of their aim.
The Avatar is committed to peace, of course. He’s just delivering the message.
**
It’s a three month standoff, but eventually Izumi clearly realizes that if she doesn’t give up, Katara is more than willing to keep the blockade going indefinitely.
Zuko is handed over at midnight, rowed out to his wife’s flagship in a dinghy, and told that he is banished from the Fire Nation.
The second time around, being banished feels like distinctly good news. It certainly comes with quite a bit of company this time.
The first person he sees is Kallik, leaning over the side of the boat. He has just turned sixteen, and his hair is in a young warrior’s wolf tail, a look Zuko remembers clearly from when Sokka wore it. The second person he sees is Kya, her face popping out next to her brother’s, and they work together to bend a wave to lift Zuko onto the deck, and then Katara is in his arms, kissing him with all the intensity that began the night he threw himself in front of lightning for her, plus twenty-six years of interest. Siku doesn’t exactly recognize Zuko after so long apart, but clearly he is just excited to feel involved, and he snuggles against his parents’ knees.
Zuko is so relieved to be there, still wrapping his brain around the fact that he has his family and will never have to leave them again, the boat already turning to head out to open sea, Aang doing his part by filling the sails with a strong wind, that it’s almost an hour before he asks Katara what the fuck was she thinking, bringing a four-year-old on a warship?
Zuko is forty-two. Katara is forty. The sun is just brushing the edge of the horizon, the last stars fading from the sky, and the whole fleet is heading to Republic City, where the start of their new life awaits them.
After how it all started, the next fifty years are easy.