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The report lay unrolled on the lacquered table, its edges curling from the heat radiating off Zuko's hands. He'd read it three times. The fourth time was unnecessary. The fifth didn't change the letters. Through the window, the harbor carried on its indifferent business—fishing boats setting out, gulls crying, the tide rising as it always did.
The clock, imported from Republic City, still ticked—unforgivably, mundanely—as though the world shouldn’t be stopping.
As though Sokka wasn’t dead.
The fire in Zuko’s chest—the old, familiar furnace he'd spent decades sealing beneath layers of discipline, beneath the patience of choosing peace—roared up his throat, tasting of copper and ash. He felt it in the hollows behind his eyes, in the marrow of his bones. It demanded the world burn with him. He didn't know if he had the strength to refuse.
Next to the window, the painted screen depicting the Golden Festival began to blacken at the edges, the ink curling and flaking. The dancers' painted eyes—once beautiful, now merely pigment—seemed to watch him with the same disinterest the universe had shown Sokka.
Zuko had known. Of course he'd known.
Sokka, who could calculate the trajectory of a boomerang while dodging a fireblast, who could negotiate a truce between feuding clans over a single pot of stew, had never considered the cost of his own life. He spent it like a miser spending someone else's money—lavishly, without a backward glance. His ruthless practicality had never been for himself. It had been a weapon honed for everyone else. A shield he held outward, leaving his own back bare.
Zuko's knuckles whitened against the table. The wood smoked, groaned.
Alone.
The word cracked through him like lightning. Sokka had died alone. Not in a bed, not with Zuko's hand in his, not with Katara's water soothing his brow. Not even with the new Avatar—that echo of their lost friend—beside him. She’d been hidden away in the time Sokka had bought them.
The report was sparse on details, clinical in its efficiency. Killed in the line of duty. Protecting the Avatar. Body recovered. No mention of who'd held him. No mention of who'd closed his eyes.
Zuko remembered a night, twenty years past, in an apartment in the Upper Ring of Ba Sing Se. Sokka, bright-eyed and indulgent, had mapped out their future on a napkin, sketching a small wobbly house by the sea, where the tides were gentle and the summers long.
When you step down, Sokka had said, the charcoal stick smudging between his fingers, I'll be there.
On that napkin, Sokka had drawn an X in the corner. Exactly there.
And Zuko—foolish, naïve, dreamy Zuko—had believed him. Had hauled Sokka into a bruising kiss, crushed under the weight of his hopeful love. Had let himself believe in the weight of Sokka's body beside his in a bed that faced the ocean. Had let himself imagine the salt spray on Sokka's graying hair, the creak of the porch steps under their matching canes.
Zuko had looked at that X and seen his heart’s compass—his North, his South, his East, his West, all in two wobbly lines. Zuko had thought that future was as certain as the guiding stars themselves.
He’d been wrong.
Across the room, the woven threads depicted the Sun Warriors' ancient dance, dragons of crimson and azure, a festival of color and the beauty of life. The fire ate the azure first, then the crimson, leaving only a blackened skeleton of threads. Zuko didn't extinguish it. Why would he? What were colors for now? What was any of it for?
He couldn’t remember, and his breath came in short, sharp rasps.
When Aang had passed, they'd been there. All of them. Toph had felt his heartbeat slow. Katara had held his hand until the very end. Suki had brought khapse. Zuko had stood vigil. Sokka had made terrible jokes to fill the silence, his voice cracking on the punchlines, refusing to let Aang face death in sadness.
They'd been there. His end had been as gentle as they could make it. He'd been witnessed, mourned, honored by the people who loved him. More importantly, by people who knew him.
No one had been there for Sokka. He had died in a place none of them would ever know, in a moment none of them would ever see. The universe had taken him in private, as if embarrassed by the enormity of what it was doing.
A crack split the windowpane to Zuko’s left, jagged lines spiderwebbing across the thick glass. The fire in his chest was bleeding out of him in waves of heat and pressure. The lacquered table blackened beneath his hands. The harbor beyond shimmered, distorted, matching the distortion of Zuko’s insides.
He'd thought, after everything—after Ozai, after the Agni Kai, after the long, grinding years of reconstruction—that they deserved a soft end. A kind life. He didn’t know when he'd grown so idealistic. Sokka, the cruel strategist, had probably done that. Had taken the sharp edges of Zuko's worldview and worn them smooth with relentless, insufferable reliability.
But Zuko hadn't been as reliable. He hadn’t been there for most of Sokka’s life, and he hadn’t been there for his death. He couldn’t tell which was the greater sin.
The doors at the far end of the corridor buckled inward. Not from his fire. From water. A sheet of ice coated the hinges, cracking and reforming as pressure built behind it. The wood splintered, and Katara stepped through the steam.
Her face was wet. He'd never seen her face so wet, not since the day they'd carried Aang's body to the top of the temple.
She raised her hands, and the air around him cooled, the superheated atmosphere condensing into droplets. He felt her waterbending wrap around the flames licking the ceiling, smothering them. For a moment, the room was a battlefield again—fire against water, blood prince against luminous hero. Neither element cared that the man they were fighting over would have told them both to calm down and eat something.
But Zuko did. Katara did.
She walked toward him, her steps crunching over the now-frozen floor, and his fire relented. Her hair was white now, the same shade as the snows of her Southern home. The same shade as Sokka’s.
She reached for his hands, pulling them from the table, and the heat of his skin made the water coating her palms hiss and steam. He let her take them. He had no strength left to pull away.
"He was alone," Zuko said. The words spilled out like smoke, thin and burning. "He died alone, Katara. No one was there. No one held him."
"Don't." Katara's grip turned bruising, the water icy. "Don't tell me what happened to my brother. I know what happened to my brother." Her face fractured, a glacier breaking. "I should have been there. I should have—"
"You couldn't have known—"
"I could have felt it." Her voice splintered further. "I should have felt it. I'm a water healer. I should have felt him—" She stopped, swallowing back a wail.
Katara was connected to the moon, to the tides, to the life in the world's veins. And she hadn't felt her own brother's stop. The universe had let her down. Or perhaps, the universe had simply revealed how small they truly were.
How meaningless their bonds were, in the face of death. Still, they mattered.
"He was my brother, Zuko. He was mine before he was yours."
Zuko looked at her. The scarred side of his face felt hot—that familiar, familiar shame that had never quite healed. He knew the loss of a sibling. He knew how it gutted a person, how it left a space that nothing else could fill.
And yet, seeing Katara, he felt the unfairness of it anew. She'd lost Aang. Now she'd lost Sokka. The two pillars of her life, gone. And she hadn't been there for one of them. She'd been the one to kiss Aang's brow and close Aang's eyes. But Sokka had died without her, without anyone, and that was a wound that would never close.
Never.
"I promised him a home by the sea," Zuko said. More smoke, more guilt. "I told him I would wake up with him every morning. For the rest of our lives. I promised him soon."
Katara's grip loosened, just slightly. The water around her palms warmed, turning to slush.
"He knew you meant it."
"That's what I hate."
That Sokka had believed Zuko, a liar worse than his sister. Azula, at least, had never dared to promise something she couldn’t confirm herself. Never dared to trust the world and forget the cruelty it begot on them.
The fire in Zuko's chest, the fire they both inherited, still burned, a low, smoldering thing that he was holding at bay with every shred of will he possessed. He could feel it pressing against the walls of his self-control, testing them, looking for cracks. He'd spent decades learning to master it, to bend it to his will, to make it a tool rather than Ozai’s weapon.
But this felt different. This was grief, pure and blinding, and it didn't care about discipline. It didn't care about the capital. It didn't care about the people who would burn if he let it loose.
It only cared that his heart was gone.
A crack split the floor at his feet, the ground groaning as heat radiated from his body. The water at Katara's feet boiled, steam rising in thick clouds.
"Zuko." Katara's voice was sharp, cutting through the haze of his grief. "Zuko, look at me."
He forced himself to look at her. She was pale, her face streaked with tears and soot, but her eyes—the same vast blue as Sokka's—were firm.
They'd been through too much together, Katara and Zuko. They'd walked through fire and ice, through the ruin of nations and families. She'd pulled him back from the edge before, when he'd been young, lost and full of rage. He'd done the same for her.
She was still here, like him. She was still holding on.
"He died protecting Korra," she said. Her voice was steadier now, though her hands trembled, the water turbulent. "He died doing what he always did. Saving someone. Being Sokka."
And that, Zuko thought, was the cruelest part.
Sokka had given everything, and the universe had taken him as payment. He didn't understand how Katara could find comfort in that. How she could speak of it as if Sokka's choices made his death any less obscene. As if the world's indifference could be answered by the goodness of the man it had consumed.
"He died alone," he repeated, picking at the never-healing wound. Katara shook her head.
"He died being brave. That's what matters. That's what he would have wanted. Not—" Her voice broke. Fixed itself. Zuko never understood where Katara got her strength from. "He would have wanted us to be better than this. You know he would have."
But Sokka wasn't here to want anything. That was the problem. That was always going to be the problem.
Rather than screaming, rather than burning down the world, Zuko closed his eyes.
The fire in his chest still clawed at him, but Katara's hands were cold against his. He focused on it. The water condensing on his skin. The ice at his feet. The winter of her grief, bleeding into his summer.
"I can feel it," he said. His voice was barely a whisper. "The fire. It's—I can't—"
"I know." Katara squeezed his hands. "I know. I can feel it too. The water wants to freeze everything. It wants to be blood. Make the world still and silent, like Sokka—but I won't let it. I won't let it, Zuko. My brother deserves better than that."
With that, at least, he could agree. Sokka deserved everything.
Zuko opened his eyes. Tears were streaming down his cheeks now, hot against his scarred skin. He hadn't even noticed when they started. He never cried, not after the death of his uncle and the outpouring of rage that had nearly destroyed his court. Zuko had trained himself not to, had learned to swallow the grief and lock it away in a box.
But Sokka had broken that box. Sokka had always broken everything.
"I love him," Zuko said. The words were a coal in his throat. "I love him so much, Katara. So much, and I didn't tell him. Not enough. Not the way I should have. I never—"
He never said soon when it mattered. He never said now. Why? Agni, why?
"He knew." Katara's voice allowed no argument, no further spiral into despair. "He knew. He always knew. He was an idiot about a lot of things, but he wasn't an idiot about that. He knew you loved him. He knew—"
She stopped. Her face crumpled again. "He knew he was going to die someday. Lady Wu, she—he used to talk about it. He used to say he didn't want a grand funeral. He just wanted us to remember him. To be happy."
Zuko laughed. It was a terrible sound.
"He wanted us to be happy." Did he really think that was possible? Truly?
"He was an idiot," Katara repeated, and her breath caught on the last word. "He was such a fucking idiot, and I miss him so much. I miss him so much, Zuko."
He pulled her into his arms. She was so thin, so brittle, as if she might shatter at any moment. He held her as tight as he dared, and she pressed her face against his chest. They stood there in the ruins of the Fire Lord’s study. Two old soldiers who'd survived wars, disasters, and the slow march of years, and now faced a battle they couldn't win.
Just endure. Endure.
Zuko thought of the harbor. He thought of the ships, the merchant vessels, the fishing boats. He thought of the homes that clung to the cliffsides. They were still there, impossibly, as if nothing had changed. He thought of his daughter, who would take the throne one day, this terrible burden. He thought of the life he still had to live, the duty he still had to fulfill, the people who still needed him to be strong.
He thought of Sokka.
You old fool, Sokka would have said, his voice fond and exasperated. Are you going to burn the palace? Again? It's not that bad, your Dramaticness. I'm just—
He didn't finish the thought. There was no end to that sentence. There would never be an end again.
Still, the hours passed, and other ends neared. Though the guards worried and the servants fussed, Zuko hadn't moved. Katara had pulled away eventually, had left to find her children, to break the news to them personally, to bear that weight alone. He'd let her go. The doors groaned behind her, no longer able to close.
Time, that relentless tyrant, was still passing. He could feel it slipping through him like sand through fingers. Zuko pressed the heel of his palm against his sternum. His heart was still beating. It seemed an obscene waste of effort.
The doors creaked again. A lighter footfall.
Izumi.
She stood in the threshold, her face pale, her robes immaculate. She looked at the destruction—the blackened walls, the skeletal tapestry, the puddles on the floor—and her jaw tightened. She had his blood, his stubbornness, and her mother's composure. Sokka had adored her, always sending gifts, plying her with books on topics only they could follow.
She stepped forward, and Zuko saw the guilt in her eyes before she spoke.
"Father," she said. The honorific was formal, applied where it shouldn't be. "I'm sorry. I should have been ready. I should have taken the crown years ago."
He looked at her. His heir. His daughter, whom he loved with a steadiness that had surprised him—a quiet, uncomplicated hearth-fire, banked, patient and eternal. He’d dedicated the best of himself to her, making himself an unbreakable wall she could lean on. She'd delayed her ascension because she'd wanted to be certain, to be worthy. He'd encouraged the caution. He'd told her to take her time, that the throne would wait. That Zuko would wait.
That Sokka would wait.
"You were not ready," he said. He didn't mean it as an accusation. He meant it as a fact, a cold, practical fact that Sokka would have appreciated. But Izumi heard the accusation anyway. Her shoulders stiffened.
"I robbed you," she said. "I robbed you of the time. If I had been—if I'd been more—" She stopped, at a loss for the right words, as rare as that was.
She wasn't to blame. Sokka's death hadn't been her fault. And yet, the sick reasoning of her guilt was easy to follow. Zuko could see it.
Years. Years of mornings, of waking up together, of salt spray and porch steps. Years that Sokka had spent on his own, guarding Korra, sending letters in his crooked, barely legible handwriting, waiting for Zuko to say I am coming.
The letters had stopped arriving a week ago. Zuko hadn't thought anything of it. Zuko hadn't thought of many things over the years when he should have.
"I raised you to be careful," Zuko said. The words came slowly, chosen carefully. "I raised you to be wise. You didn't rob me. I gave you the time. I gave it willingly."
But even as he said it, he felt the lie. He hadn't been willing, not entirely. He'd given the time to his nation, to his duty, to the bloody legacy of his family, because he had to. He hadn't given it to Sokka. He'd hoarded it, parceled it out in small, manageable pieces, always promising the rest later.
And now later was a wasteland.
He had given it. He had squandered it. The difference, now, was meaningless.
Izumi's eyes glistened. She didn't cry. She was too much like Mai for that, always keeping an iron grip on her appearance. She stood straight, her hands clasped before her, and she nodded once.
"I will take the throne by the end of the season," she said. "I will not ask you to wait again."
She turned and walked out, her even footsteps fading into the long, cold corridor. Zuko watched the door swing behind her, never closing.
I will not ask you to wait again.
How long had Sokka waited for those exact words from Zuko? How many times had he watched Zuko walk away? How many years had he kept the door open, the lights on?
The fire in Zuko’s chest surged, choking him. He looked at his hands—old hands, spotted with age, the knuckles crooked. He'd held Sokka's face in these hands. He'd traced the line of Sokka's jaw, the laugh lines around his eyes. He'd promised him soon, asked just a little longer.
He'd been a fool. And Sokka had loved him for it. That was the worst part. Sokka, the most cautious of them all, had loved him for his foolishness, had called it hope, had called it the best part of him.
Sokka.
Sokka, who always calculated the odds and planned for the worst, who'd spent his whole life preparing for the blade that would finally find its mark. Sokka, who'd told Zuko once, with that infuriating all-knowing smirk, that hope was a luxury for people who could afford disappointment. Sokka, who doubted destiny, magic, and any spirit that wasn’t Yue.
And yet, for Zuko, he'd set aside every hard-won lesson from a war-torn childhood—every survival instinct, every careful defense against the world's cruelty—and chosen to believe. He'd given Zuko a dream of a house by the sea, of mornings and years that none of them were guaranteed, and then he'd made that dream the center of their future.
Sokka had never gambled like that—except when the people he loved pressed him into it.
Except when they pulled him into the impossible, the miraculous, and he walked forward anyway, his clever hands steady even as he knew the odds. He'd stand between a dozen blades for the chance to save one friend, trade his own safety for a single moment of theirs. His only gambles were the ones he couldn't afford to lose—and he always, always wagered himself.
And how much did he love Zuko?
Zuko stood motionless in the wreckage of his study, the weight of that question pressing down on his chest until his ribs ached. How much did Sokka love him?
Too much was the answer, damning and sweet, a verdict he'd carry forever.
He walked to the broken window with heavy steps and looked out at the harbor, the world. The sun was rising over the water, painting the waves in shades of gold and crimson. It was a performance, he thought. A tired, ancient trick the universe pulled every morning, expecting applause. What good was light when it illuminated nothing but absence? Nothing but cruelty?
Alone.
He couldn't stop thinking about it. Couldn't stop thinking about Sokka bleeding out, surrounded by strangers, his last thought maybe of his sister, maybe of the moon, maybe of Zuko, who'd been too slow, too cautious, too late—
Zuko turned from the broken window and walked back into the dark of the wing. He walked past the blackened screen that celebrated joy, past the skeletal threads of myth and history, past the puddles that reflected nothing. The corridors stretched ahead, dead and unfeeling.
There was no house by the sea. There was no porch. There was only the long, empty years.
Sokka wouldn't be at the end of them.