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The storm came without warning.
That was the thing about the South Pole — it didn't announce itself. One moment the sky was pale and wide and open, and the next it was closing in, dark at the edges, the wind picking up its teeth. Katara had learned to read it, over the years. The particular way the air tasted before a blizzard. The heaviness that settled in her chest like a second heartbeat.
She was bending water from the training pool when she felt it.
She almost missed the knock at the door.
Almost.
She opened it expecting Gran-Gran, or Sokka back early from the hunting trip, or maybe one of the younger benders she'd been training, sheepish about something broken.
She did not expect Zuko.
He was soaking wet. His traveling cloak was dark with rain, his hair loose and plastered to his jaw, his gold eyes catching the light from inside like two coins thrown into a wishing well. He looked older than she remembered. Not worse, just more, like time had pressed something into the lines of his face that hadn't been there before.
He looked at her like no time had passed at all.
"I should have sent a messenger hawk," he said.
She stared at him for three full seconds.
"You think?"
She made him tea because it was the only reasonable thing to do when a Fire Lord showed up at your door uninvited and dripping on your floor.
(She also made it because her hands needed something to do.)
He sat at the low table in the common room, both hands wrapped around the cup she gave him, and she sat across from him and tried to remember how to be normal.
Seven years.
The last time she'd seen him was the coronation. She'd stood near the back, Sokka beside her, Suki's hand in his, Aang somewhere to her left with the biggest, most insufferably proud smile, and Toph somewhere behind them complaining about the heat. She watched them lower the crown onto Zuko's head. He'd looked terrified, she remembered that. And then he'd looked out at the crowd, and for just a moment his eyes had found hers, and something passed between them that she had never quite been able to name.
She'd left the next morning. There had been reasons. There were always reasons.
"How's the tribe?" he asked.
"Growing," she said. "We've had three new families settle in the last year. I've been training a group of girls proper waterbending, combat and healing both."
Something shifted in his expression. "You always said you would."
"I know."
A pause. The fire in the hearth crackled between them.
"How's the Fire Nation?" she asked.
"Stable," he said, which was a political answer, not a personal one. She let it go. Then he added, quieter: "Lonely, sometimes."
She hadn't expected that.
"Zuko-"
"I'm not looking for pity," he said quickly. "I just- I don't know why I said that. I'm sorry."
"Don't apologize for being honest."
He looked at her then, and she felt it the way she always had. Like something pulling at the water in her blood, like tide responding to the moon.
Okay, she thought. Okay.
He told her why he'd come, eventually.
There was a summit, there was always a summit, and the Southern Water Tribe had been formally invited. Sokka was supposed to come, but he had broken two ribs on the hunting trip (she was going to kill him), and Master Pakku was too old to travel in winter, and somehow the responsibility had fallen to her.
"You could have just sent the invitation," she said.
"I know."
"You didn't have to come yourself."
"I know," he said again.
She looked at him across the low table. The storm was howling outside now, properly furious, and inside it was warm and close and smelled like tea and the particular cedar-and-smoke scent she'd been trying not to think about for seven years.
"Why did you?" she asked.
He was quiet for a long moment. The fire shifted. Outside, something rattled against the window, ice, or wind, or the world trying to get in.
"Because I kept thinking about you standing at the back of the crowd," he said finally. "At the coronation. And then you were gone, and I kept... I don't know. I kept waiting for a letter that made sense. And then years went by and I told myself it didn't matter."
"But it did."
"But it did," he agreed.
Katara let out a long, slow breath.
"You're going to have to stay the night," she said. "The storm won't clear until morning."
"I know." A pause. The ghost of something that wasn't quite a smile at the corner of his mouth. "I planned around it."
She laughed before she could stop herself, a real laugh, surprised out of her, and his almost-smile became an actual one. And just like that, seven years collapsed like a wave, like something that had held its shape too long, finally allowed to break.
"You're impossible," she said.
"You've mentioned that before."
"I'll probably mention it again."
"Yeah," Zuko said softly, looking at her. "I'm counting on it."