Archive of Our Own ^beta

If you ask Katara, it begins the moment Zuko threw himself in front of Azula’s lightning.

Of course it began long before then. These sort of things didn’t arise from nowhere. But that moment, certain she was about to die one second and screaming for Zuko the next, defeating the feral firebender who hurt him the moment after that…

This is the moment it begins, for her.

—

If you ask Zuko, it begins as she is coaxing him back to consciousness.

Of course it began much earlier. He wouldn’t have thrown himself in the path of that much lightning if it hadn’t. But he’s lying in the dirt and the pain in his chest is somehow, unbelievably, receding. The cool light of her healing water pulses in the same rhythm as his heartbeat and…

This is the moment it begins, for him.

—

Aang joins them at the palace within a few days, a fire-less former fire lord in tow. Katara is so proud of him. So proud of how he found his own way forward.

She realizes how much of her confusion was tangled up in this. She needed to know he wouldn’t run again. She needed to know he could be counted on.

She has never loved him more than she does just then.

—

Mai is released from the prison Azula banished her to. Zuko is thrilled to see her. Happy to see her alive, and well, and ready to stand here with him while they change the world.

He loves her. He has for a long time.

And besides…this is better. He knows this with a pragmatism that he will get more and more familiar with, the longer he runs a country. A water tribe woman at his side would be too much for his fragile nation right now. Fighting to get them to accept a royal partner from a different nation would take time and effort and resources that he cannot spare right now, not while there is so much vital work to do.

Maybe a decade from now it would work, if he does his job correctly. But it would never work right now.

After his coronation, she leaves with Aang, to help repair the world.

He stays, to repair his.

—

It’s wonderful, traveling with Aang. Seeing corners of the world she’s never touched before. Going wherever their help is most needed and helping. Making change in a way that she can see and feel and touch.

And after nightfall, with Aang… there are ways they’ve never touched before too. Ways they didn’t dare to during the war. This, too, is wonderful. His touch is so gentle. He holds her like she’s his entire universe. Like she contains the stars.

Katara knows what she’s agreeing to, when she chooses to be his. She knows she’s agreeing to be the mother of a new generation of airbenders. She has always wanted children, and it does not worry her.

They are not trying, so to speak. But they are not exactly being careful either.

Her monthly cycles stop before the year is out.

—

Zuko marries Mai in a ceremony fit for a Fire Lord.

Beside him, his new wife is radiant. That small smile that on anyone else would mean quiet amusement, but on Mai means such happiness.

All their friends come to the banquet. Sokka and Suki, who beam and laugh. Toph, who punches him in the arm and calls him a number of silly nicknames she clearly crafted purely for this exact situation. Ty Lee, who bounds up to Mai and squeezes her like she might disappear if she doesn’t.

Aang and Katara, who arrive arm in arm and are rarely more than a few feet apart from each other all night.

It’s late in the evening when they finally find themselves face to face without their partners at their elbows. Katara throws her arms around him, and Zuko deliberately does not compare the feeling of her embrace to anyone else’s.

“Congratulations,” she says, when she steps back.

“Thanks,” he says, smiling. “Um… you too?”

It became clear, the moment she hugged him, that she is pregnant. Studying her now, he can see that her dress is cut in such a way that disguises it a little, but where her belly was flat the last time he saw her, there is now a distinct rise. Her hand settles there and she smiles too, soft and knowing.

“Thanks,” she says.

He hugs her again. Her arms clasp him tight.

“Are you happy?” She asks him, her voice low and quiet.

He takes a breath.

“Yes,” he says, and means it. “Are you?”

“Yes,” she says, “I am.”

And he believes her.

—

Their son is impatient, and is born a few weeks early. It’s the first in what will become a long chain of surprises from that boy, ones that will keep her and Aang on their toes for the rest of their lives.

Aside from a thick head of distinctly water tribe hair, he looks a great deal like Aang. They call him Bumi, after Aang’s oldest friend, a name they agreed on months ago. Bumi for a boy, Kya for a girl.

It quite doesn’t carry the same weight, that name, though Aang acts like it does. Gyatso might have been more of a parallel. But Katara doesn’t mind, really. Bumi is a good name. She loves her firstborn like a piece of her own soul.

—

Being Fire Lady does not suit Mai.

She plays her part perfectly. Zuko cannot fault her for that. She looks perfect on his arm, at his left hand at banquets, elegant and poised in her portraits.

But even Zuko can tell that she is bored.

And sure, bored was Mai’s default state when they were young. It had been sweet and enjoyable when they were kids, hating the world together and wishing it would change.

It’s harder now. Now that the world is actually changing and Mai doesn’t seem to want to move with it.

Zuko is always so busy with his work. With his meetings and all the demands on a Fire Lord’s time and attention. Mai trains, and entertains guests, and spends long afternoons with Ty Lee, and she has everything she could want, and it never seems to be enough.

She’s the one who asks about a child. About the business of providing an heir.

It’s sooner than Zuko planned, but if this will make her happy… Well, he would do just about anything to make Mai happy.

—

Bumi is not a bender. They try not to let him see how disappointing that is.

She is not disappointed in him. She makes that very clear. Katara could never be disappointed in her son for something he has no control over. But she’s mad at… at something. At whatever spirits decide who is given power and who isn’t. Aang is the last airbender. She is the last waterbender of the southern tribes. Aren’t they owed this?

She wraps Bumi in her love and makes sure he knows that he is valued. That he is strong. She lulls him to sleep at night with stories about his Uncle Sokka and his Aunt Suki, nonbenders both who played just as much a role in saving the world as she and Aang did.

And then Kya is born. And Kya looks so much like Katara it’s uncanny. Like Aang wasn’t even part of the equation.

She’ll be a waterbender. Katara knows it’s too early to tell, but she knows, somewhere deep in her bones, that it’s true.

And Aang is growing anxious.

—

Mai has three miscarriages.

In hindsight, Zuko will recognize this as the beginning of their end.

—

Mai is pregnant again.

Katara is one of the few who knows about their losses, Zuko telling her everything in the confines of their letters to one another. He has been so careful to keep the knowledge buried. To make sure his nation doesn’t even begin to question their royal couple’s ability to produce a viable heir.

It angers Katara in a way she can’t quite articulate, knowing her dearest friend can’t even properly grieve these losses for fear of gossip and the plots that may grow out of them. What kind of toll must it be taking on him and Mai?

Please come? He writes. We need your help. We cannot lose another one.

She tells Aang, and he is hesitant.

It was one of the acolytes, the nonbenders that flock to air temple island, hoping to help the Avatar rebuild his culture however they can, who mentioned to Katara how they never seem to fight anymore. She says it like it’s an accomplishment, but it sets Katara thinking.

It’s true that she and Aang rarely fight. She honestly can’t remember the last time they fought with any sort of real malice. But they did disagree often enough, in an earlier, younger version of their relationship.

Katara stops to think, and she can’t remember the last time she challenged him on…anything.

It was hard for him, when Kya began to waterbend. He was proud of course, still showering his daughter in that same playful, fatherly affection he has given her since she was born.

But that was the moment that Katara began treating her husband like he was fragile. Putting his feelings before almost everything. Before herself, certainly. Before everything except their children, she realizes when she stops to examine her actions properly. She hasn’t felt like this since before Sozin’s comet, when all of her energies were focused on making sure he was prepared to fight Fire Lord Ozai.

And she knows she needs to go help Zuko.

“Are we sure that’s the best idea?” Aang asks her. “Especially right now.”

His hand rests on her belly. She is -of course- pregnant again. She will keep carrying his children for as long as she has to. She has to, or airbending will die with him.

“I’ll be ok,” she says. All her pregnancies so far have been without complications, “and where else is as safe as the Fire Palace?”

Still, he wavers.

“Aang,” she says, taking his hands in both of hers. “Imagine it was me. If I had lost three children, and was about to try again.”

That gets through to him.

Katara prepares to spend the upcoming months in the Fire Palace.

—

It’s killing Mai, this pregnancy.

Not literally, he knows. Katara wouldn’t allow it to continue if it was. But her recommendations, the careful diet, minimal exercise and no exertion, have Mai fraying at the edges and ready to crack.

But under Katara’s care, Mai’s pregnancy does progress. It progresses to the point that the court finally learns that she is pregnant.

There are celebrations. Zuko feels his hope rising in a way he almost can’t bear.

He holds her at night, sheltering her body with his own, until she restlessly turns over, pushing him away.

—

Katara is still in the Fire Palace when she goes into labor. Aang is there too. He has been coming and going these last months, still hard at work, but as the end of her pregnancy approaches he stays nearby.

Please, she thinks, begging anyone who might be listening, holding her belly even as it ripples with pain, please let this one be an airbender.

Tenzin, when a palace midwife places him in her arms, is a carbon copy of his father.

—

Birth nearly does kill Mai.

No one says this to him, but he can tell from the haggard look on Katara’s face, once Mai is finally resting peacefully. From the haunted way she meets his eyes.

Mai would have bled out had Katara not been here.

It took all of Katara’s skill to even get them this far. To convince Mai’s body to hold on to their child long enough that the baby could survive on her own, once she was born.

Izumi is still born a full month early.

It’s Zuko who holds their newborn daughter. Tiny. Impossibly tiny. Golden eyes and a little tuft of black hair. Katara is still feeding Tenzin, so it is her milk, in a carefully warmed bottle, that Zuko feeds to Izumi, so Mai can sleep.

Fragile. His wife and his daughter. They are both so fragile.

“She’ll be ok,” Katara says, settling next to Zuko as Izumi devours her meal. “Bumi was early too, and he grew right up into a perfect little terror.”

This makes something relax in him, finally. This is what he needed to hear. It’s such a relief, to hear her say it.

And he doesn’t understand, at first, why this is what makes him burst into tears.

He holds Izumi to his chest and sobs. He cries like he hasn’t in months, right there on the little sofa facing the bed where his wife, ravaged by bringing their girl into the world, sleeps.

Katara holds him. She lets him put his forehead down on her shoulder and cry until he is spent.

It has been five years since she pieced him back together when a bolt of lightning nearly pulled him apart, and still, she is the most dependable thing in his life.

—

She was only meant to stay at the Fire Palace through the end of Mai’s pregnancy. But with Izumi born so early, and with Mai still so delicate, she cannot leave. It is imperative that Izumi come out of her infancy strong. Mai, for her own health, will not be having any more children. Izumi is all the fire nation will get.

Aang has begun to come and go again. She misses him when he’s gone, but she’s needed here.

Her children are happy here too, in the Fire Palace. There is so much more to see, more to do, in a sprawling palace than an austere air temple monastery.

Izumi is doing well. Katara spends a lot of time with her, (anytime she isn’t occupied with her own trio of children, really,) making sure the young Fire Princess has every chance to succeed. Water-wrapped hands feeling at her little lungs, her tiny heart…all the things that keep a little body alive.

Izumi is doing well.

Mai isn’t.

—

“Is this… normal for her?” Katara asks him one day.

Izumi is a month old and finally about the size of a proper newborn. Zuko is cradling her and feeding her from a bottle of Mai’s milk because Mai has -once again- failed to get out of bed.

And he understands the question. He can see how Katara would look at Mai’s everyday attitude and wonder if she is just, in fact, like this sometimes.

But no. No, this is not normal for Mai.

—

Katara has seen it before. Mothers who fall into a melancholy after giving birth. Mothers who don’t - cannot perhaps- bond with their children. It happens all the more often with a pregnancy and delivery like Mai’s, so fraught with pain and danger.

But knowing it doesn’t mean she knows how to treat it. She can strengthen Mai’s body, and Izumi’s, but her waterbending cannot fix something this intangible.

It’s Gran Gran she writes to for advice. Gran has been a midwife, the tribe’s best midwife, for decades. She must know what to do about something like this.

Katara is in a healing session with Izumi when the reply arrives. Zuko is in a series of meetings and Mai is equally unreachable, so Izumi is with Katara.

Her older two children are with Aang, likely touring the city on Appa again. Tenzin is asleep in his cradle. He is an exceptionally good sleeper, her youngest.

So when the message comes in she tucks Izumi against her chest, sits down at her little table, and opens it. She reads quickly, hoping for anything that might help her best friend and this new family. She is still feeding Tenzin from her chest, so when the little child she’s holding kneads at her, her tunic is off her shoulder in an instant, pure reflex, as she keeps reading.

It takes several minutes before she remembers that the infant in her arms is Izumi, not Tenzin.

She is nursing Zuko’s child and didn’t even notice.

And Katara realizes exactly how much trouble she has been inviting.

—

It was one of Zuko’s top secretaries who said it to him. Such an innocuous observation, meant so kindly.

“It’s wonderful to hear you laugh again, your highness,” the man says. “It’s been so long since you laughed like that.”

If the secretary is aware that only Katara seems to draw that much joy from him…he is tactful enough to keep his mouth shut.

So when Katara says she needs to leave, he swallows his misgivings and agrees.

She’s been at the palace with them for nearly a year. The bulk of Mai’s pregnancy and now Izumi’s first several months. He has grown used to her company. Her children have begun calling him Uncle Zuko.

It is far longer than he should ever have asked her to stay. He knows, in his heart, that Izumi has been out of danger for months now.

But Agni he doesn’t want her to go.

The embrace she gives him as she prepares to depart is crushingly tight. As tight as the two of them can manage while they both have infants napping in wraps on their chests.

“I’m just a quick bison ride away if anything happens,” she says.

He doesn’t trust his voice, so he nods.

She releases him, but her hands stay on his forearms.

“You’ll be ok?” She asks him.

He has never been less certain of anything in his life. But he knows that if he says no, she’ll stay. And he cannot ask her to do that.

“Yeah,” he says, in a tone that even he doesn’t believe is genuine. “Yeah, we’ll be ok.”

A tear pulls from the corner of her eye. His hand lifts, like he wants to brush it away.

She catches it herself. She huffs a little mirthless laugh. She cooes at Izumi for a moment.

And then her touch falls away, and she turns to where Aang is waiting with Appa and the rest of their family, and she is gone.

—

Their house, full of the rooms that she so lovingly built with Aang, should feel comfortable to return to.

It doesn’t.

Air Temple Island, with its community and its sages and its acolytes, should feel welcoming.

It isn’t.

It’s bustling with people but it feels empty.

—

They were in love once, right?

They had to have been. Mai once put herself between him and Azula, covering his escape from the Boiling Rock, during the war.

Zuko knows quite intimately how much love it takes to throw yourself in front of his sister.

He clings to that. He does everything he can to help Mai.

Nothing works. They sleep on opposite ends of their massive palatial bed, never touching. When Izumi wakes in the night, it is Zuko, always Zuko, who goes to her.

He clings to the memory of being in love like he clings to Izumi, even when it cuts him to the bone.

—

When Tenzin is almost three, he airbends.

Katara actually collapses in relief. Her legs go out from under her and she catches herself on their kitchen counter. Finally her duty is done.

She loves Aang, loves each of their children more than she loves herself. She wouldn’t trade a single one of them for anything.

But she’s done. She can be done.

“Mom?” Bumi, seven now and bright and observant for his age, looks at her worriedly.

“I’m ok, baby,” she says.

She holds out an arm to him, still steadying herself against the countertop, and he presses himself against her legs.

“I’m ok,” she says again.

It occurs to her that it’s been years since she said that and actually meant it.

—

Izumi is two and a half when she sneezes and lights the carpet on fire.

Zuko scoops her off the floor and into his arms as she shrieks. First in surprise and then in happiness. She giggles and babbles with laughter as Zuko covers her little face with kisses.

There are proclamations and celebrations again. Their crown Princess is a firebender.

This, it seems, is the permission Mai needs.

—

Aang has always been the best father Katara could ever dream of having for their children. He loves and cherishes each of them. (Their first trip to go penguin sledding together is chaotic and joyful at truly historic levels.)

But with Tenzin, Aang is a man reborn.

She can tell, just by the way he looks at her sometimes, that he wants another.

The three kids are playing in the yard when he asks her, Kya chasing her brothers across the grass and dousing them with water whenever they get close enough.

And Aang reaches for her hand, rubbing his thumb across her palm.

“What do you think about having another baby?” He asks, smiling that shy, sly smile that played no small part in the creation of the first three.

Katara takes a deep breath.

“Aang,” she says. “I can’t.”

He says nothing.

Her grip tightens on his.

“I love our family,” she says. “I love you. And I love our family the way it is.”

“Katara-”

“Please,” she says. “I don’t want to do it again. I can’t.”

She’s barely twenty-nine. She could absolutely have another baby if she wanted to. Probably several.

She doesn’t want to.

“Do you understand?” She asks him.

There is a single, swift moment where the emotion she sees on his face resembles anger.

It’s gone in an instant, replaced with quiet acceptance, and he nods.

“Thank you,” she says.

He nods again.

But in hindsight, Katara will recognize this moment as the beginning of their end.

—

Mai doesn’t so much leave him as vanish.

She tells him she’s going to visit her family. Her parents have a summer home on the outer archipelago. She’s going to winter there, with them. The sun and the ocean air will be good for her.

That should have been his first clue. She’d always hated her parents and thought their beach house frumpy.

Mai leaves.

The annulment papers arrive a week later.

Zuko stares at them. Drinks a few too many glasses of firewhiskey while he does.

He could fight her on this. He could. If he did he would likely win.

But by the annulment clause (the spirits-fucking annulment clause, the one he knows about but which hasn’t actually been invoked in generations), Mai’s duty as the Fire Lady is fulfilled. She has given him a firebender of the royal line, to succeed him.

He signs the papers.

Mai doesn’t return to the palace.

He worries about their daughter missing her, but it barely takes two months for Izumi to stop asking about her.

—

Zuko comes to visit them. He makes the trip to Air Temple Island. It’s only for a few days, but Katara is absurdly happy to see him.

He’s sullen, clearly shaken, in the wake of his separation from Mai.

Izumi seems, for now, unbothered. The optimism and resilience of youth. She’s tearing around the house with Bumi, Kya, and Tenzin before the adults even manage to boil water for tea. She’s small for her age still, Katara notices, but healthy as could be. Strong.

“She just…annulled your marriage?” Aang asks, clearly struggling to wrap his head around Fire Nation bureaucracy.

“Yeah,” Zuko says, sipping his tea. “It’s an old law but it’s valid. I have an heir, and that gives her the right to do it.”

Aang frowns, “just the one though, right?”

Katara stiffens in her chair.

“One is enough,” Zuko says, oblivious to the argument that has been building between Katara and Aang for months. The one he’s just stampeded into like a charging komodo rhino, completely unaware of the dangerous ground.

“What if something happens to her?” Aang asks.

Zuko’s face twists a little, that deep intrinsic fear that any parent feels, but he also shrugs.

“Not Mai’s responsibility,” he says. “Not anymore.”

Katara glares pointedly at Aang.

That night, they fight.

—

Zuko hears them. He pretends he doesn’t.

In the morning, he brews her favorite tea, even though he knows it’s one Aang doesn’t like. It’s petty, he knows. He decides he doesn’t care.

At the end of his and Izumi’s visit, they all come out to see them off. Izumi is clinging to Kya, who she’s been following worshipfully around the island for the last three days. Tenzin is watching happily from Aang’s shoulders. Bumi stands a little to the side, like a guard.

Zuko wraps Katara in an embrace.

“You’ll be ok?” She asks him, as if he is the one who needs worrying about.

“I’m ok,” he says.

It’s not even a lie this time. He’s hurting, (he feels like he failed), but he knows this is for the best. It has been years since Mai had been happy with him. It was making Zuko miserable too. This is better for the both of them, in the long run.

“You’ll be ok?” He echos back to her.

She hesitates before she says yes.

He wonders if this is how she felt, leaving him at the palace all those years ago. He can’t bear it.

But he calls to Izumi and they board the waiting ship.

—

She’s been quietly keeping count for years. With every message from Sokka, from Gran Gran, from her father, she adds to the tally. The southern tribes have been growing and rebuilding in the years since the war. More people means more children.

More children means waterbenders.

Aang may have a culture to rebuild, but Katara has traditions to shepherd too. She vows to personally train these new southern waterbenders. They, unlike her, will not need to travel to the northern tribe in order to learn.

The year that the bulk of those young benders are old enough, she tells Aang she wants to spend the summer in the South Pole with her tribe, teaching. Tenzin, of course, will stay with Aang. Kya and Bumi are given the choice of where to spend the season. Kya, of course, chooses to go. Bumi opts to stay.

Aang argues against it. Says he needs her here. Tenzin and Bumi need her here. And yes, leaving her sons behind makes her ache. But she will not be gone long. She’ll return when the summer tips toward fall. Bumi is nine, Tenzin five. They will be all right, for a short time.

And if her children really need both of their parents around at all times in order to be safe and happy, why did Aang spend so much of their early years working elsewhere?

It is her turn.

She and Kya set out for the south.

—

Word spreads that the Fire Lord is eligible again, and suddenly Zuko is fending off proposals like missiles in a firefight. He is barely past thirty. He has plenty of marriageable years left.

The women the noble families parade in front of him keep getting younger and younger.

It makes him feel sick. But he doesn’t have to remarry as long as he has an heir.

He quietly doubles Izumi’s guard, just in case

—

Katara is home.

She has visited often enough, in the years since the war, but for the first time since breaking Aang out of an iceberg she is home.

Hakoda meets her as she and Kya arrive, their little boat docking at her village’s astonishing harbor. It’s such a far cry from the tiny village she left.

Katara falls into his embrace. Since when did her father have so many gray hairs?

Sokka wastes no time in getting his niece to help him build a watchtower in the snow. Gran Gran makes an extravagant dinner with all of Katara’s favorites and serves her a double helping of sea prunes.

If her father has aged, her Gran has grown old. Who knows how many more summers Gran Gran will even have, and to think Katara nearly missed another of them.

Gran Gran catches her watching. Catches the way her tears shine in her eyes. She takes Katara’s face in her hands and wipes those tears away with her thumbs, just as she did when Katara was small.

“Welcome home, my little waterbender,” she says.

And the very next day, Katara pours herself into teaching the youngsters everything she knows.

Kya blooms like a spring snowdrop, coming alive in the company of other waterbenders.

Katara comes alive too, in a way she had forgotten she knows how to feel.

—

She writes to him less, from the South Pole.

Some of that is just logistics, Zuko knows. It is so hard for messages to get from the poles to the palace, even in summer.

But the handful of letters he does receive sound so happy. They sound more like the woman who wrote to him right after the war, rather than the woman the years have turned her into.

He is happy for her.

He tries hard not to let the slow correspondence make him feel lonely.

At this, like so many things, he fails.

—

At the end of the summer, Katara and Kya take the last ship out before the harbor closes down. In the peak of the winter blizzards and polar night, even the strongest ships cannot risk the seas around the poles.

She is not sure what she expects to feel when their boat finally arrives back at air temple island. What she does feel is even harder to parse.

Bumi running down the path to greet her as she arrives though, that feels like coming home.

Aang’s letters warned her that their son had gone through another growth spurt over the summer, but the boy seems to have sprung up another two inches.

His pants are about two inches too short.

“Aren’t your ankles cold?” She teases. There’s a chill wind off the water today. “Come on, let’s put on some longer pants.”

Bumi shrugs and laughs, “these are the longest ones I’ve got.”

He says it like it’s funny. Like it’s a joke. But something in Katara goes cold.

“Come on!” Bumi tugs her hand. “I’ll tell Dad and Tenzie you’re back!”

Katara braces herself as she approaches the house. If Aang couldn’t even manage to get Bumi pants he hadn’t grown out of she can’t even imagine how dirty the house is going t-

The house is spotless.

Katara smiles. She allows herself a small glimmer of happiness.

“Did you and dad clean up before I got home?” She asks, smiling down at Bumi.

“No,” Bumi said, already darting through the house toward the back garden. “Tamani did!”

That glimmer vanishes.

“…who?” She calls after her son.

—

Izumi has always been both curious and observant. It’s one of her best qualities. Zuko loves it when her tutors complain to him about how his daughter is constantly asking the kinds of questions that they have to look up the answers to first.

It’s less endearing when he catches her going through his desk.

“What are you doing in here?” He asks, mock seriously.

She snatches her hand out of his desk drawer like it’s burned her and stuffs her hands behind her back, sheepish. She giggles.

Ok, it’s still pretty endearing.

He crouches down beside her, wondering what he’s going to have to explain this time. It can’t possibly be worse than the time she poked around in his bedside table and found a few things he definitely couldn’t explain to her.

But behind Izumi’s back is a portrait of him and Mai.

Zuko’s heart sinks into his knees. He takes it from her, gently, and sits down on the floor. She crawls into his lap.

“Who’s that?” She asks, pointing at Mai.

—

There’s a woman in Katara’s kitchen.

An air acolyte, by her yellow and orange clothing. Katara recognizes her, after the initial moment of shock passes. She’s seen this woman around the temple before. The name, Tamani, locks into place after a moment too. She’s a recent addition to the community at the temple. Or, well, she was recent six months ago, when Katara left. Earth kingdom descent, by her appearance, though Katara knows that can be misleading.

“Oh!” Tamani says, “Master Katara!”

She gives Katara a flustered little bow.

“I’m so sorry,” she says, though she turns to stir something on the wood burning stove as she does. “We didn’t expect you for another few days.”

“We had good winds,” Katara says, flatly.

“The blessings of the airbenders,” Tamani says, “guiding you home.”

Tamani smiles at her. Katara does not smile back.

“Are you hungry?” Tamani asks. “I made udon.”

And Katara sits at her own kitchen table while an air acolyte brings her a bowl of noodles.

She hears the door at the back of the house. She hears Aang’s voice, and her sons’.

Tamani slips out of the kitchen, says something Katara doesn’t quite catch, and Aang’s voice drops to a level she can’t hear.

And then, he appears in the kitchen. He smiles at her.

“Katara,” he says, holding his arms out to her.

She meets him in an embrace.

He lets her go quickly.

“You made good time!” He says. “It’s good to have you back.”

He dishes himself up a bowl of the noodles and takes the seat across from hers at the table.

“Thanks,” she says.

“How was the South Pole?” He asks, around mouthfuls. “How were the waterbenders?”

“Wonderful,” she tells him, honestly, despite how weird this feels.

“Good,” he says, and his smile seems genuine. “I’m…really glad to hear that.”

He fought her so hard when she made her plans to leave. This sudden change in stance has her reeling. She senses danger, though she isn’t sure why. Like she’s being stalked and at any moment, something deadly might pounce.

“Sorry you ran into Tamani like that,” Aang says, still eating, looking sheepish. “But she’s been a big help while you were away.”

“You didn’t mention her in your letters,” Katara says.

It feels petty. She doesn’t care.

“Not much to mention,” Aang says. “She’s just been helping out around the house. And she’s a really good cook.”

Katara still hasn’t touched her udon.

“So you asked her to help out with the chores?” She asks.

Aang smiles sheepishly again, running a hand over his freshly shaved scalp.

“She offered, actually,” Aang said. “She saw how messy the house was getting and-”

“So you just let the house get messier and messier until someone noticed and started cleaning up after you?” She cuts him off.

His eyes narrow, “I was busy with-”

“With what?” Katara silences him again. “With finding clothes for our son that actually fit him? Except I know you haven’t done that.”

Aang sets down his chopsticks, “Katara, can we talk about this like adults?”

“I don’t know,” Katara counters. “Can we?”

Spirits, Katara has been doing everything for Aang their entire lives, hasn’t she? Maintaining their home and preparing their meals and keeping their children clothed and making sure he was free to do whatever latest Avatar business he found himself facing next.

She thinks back to their earliest years. Years flying around the world, preparing to save it. Even while falling for her Aang had behaved like a child. A child who couldn’t be trusted to carry their money when they went into villages, lest he spend it on useless trinkets. A child who had to be coaxed and cajoled into training, even when it was the entire world that was at stake. Who had to be soothed and mothered every time he became the tiniest bit upset, her own feelings be damned.

Spirits they’re supposed to be partners.

But she is all too aware of how quiet the house is. She knows their children are likely right in the hall, listening.

She controls her breath. Picks up her chopsticks.

“I don’t think it’s too much to ask for you to take a little more responsibility for our home and our family,” she says.

She takes a bite. The noodles are delicious.

That doesn’t help.

Aang sighs, “can we talk about this later? It’s your first day back.”

Katara suppresses a sigh of her own. Like it or not her husband is an airbender. He will avoid and evade like his life depends on it.

“Fine,” she says.

She will bring it up with him later. She will not be letting it go this time.

But Tenzin bursts into the room, leaping airbender-light straight into her arms, and his aim is much better than it was six months ago, and she’s holding her son, and his father is laughing, and for a moment, it’s enough.

—

Agni.

Izumi was so young when Mai left. She knows about Mai, of course. She’s smart enough to realize that other kids her age usually know who their mothers are. He’s told her that her mom went to live somewhere else when Izumi was very little. That her mom was sick, and she had to go somewhere else to get better. It’s a version of the truth. The one that he can stomach telling to a five year old. She seems to accept that answer, especially when Zuko follows it up with a game, chasing her around and sweeping her up in his arms. “It means I get to love you twice as much, my little firebird.”

It never occurred to him that Izumi wouldn’t remember what she looks like.

“That’s Mai,” he says to her, though his voice cracks as he does. “That’s your mom.”

Izumi tips her head, studying the portrait.

“She’s pretty,” is all Izumi says.

“Yes,” Zuko says, holding Izumi a little tighter. “And she’s strong, and brave, and smart. Just like you.”

All the other words he could use for Mai, he keeps to himself.

“Were these hers?” Izumi asks, reaching for something else in the open drawer.

And she pulls out a handful of hair beads strung on a silk cord.

And those… those are Katara’s.

Zuko found them in the rooms she vacated after Izumi was born, left behind in the chaos of packing. He knows they’re just ornamental ones. Some of her hair beads signify her family members. Others, like these, are simply worn like jewelry on special occasions. He always meant to return them to her, but kept forgetting. Trying to return them now, five years later, would be ridiculous.

“No, those belonged to your Aunt Katara,” he tells Izumi. “She would wear them in her hair.”

“They’re so pretty!” Izumi says. “Can I wear them??”

Zuko smiles. He combs a loose strand of his daughter’s hair behind her ear.

“We’ll get Aunt Katara to show you how next time we see her,” he says. “Sound good?”

Izumi nods vigorously, and when he sets her on her feet she vanishes out of his study with Katara’s beads still clasped in her hand.

—

Their truce only lasts until sundown.

The kids are all in bed, Kya worn out from travel and the boys only slightly less sleepy. They all turn in for the night without complaint.

Aang sits down next to her on the edge of their bed. He reaches for her hand, and she takes it. He presses a little, light kiss to her cheek.

And Tui and La if that isn’t enough. Complicated feelings aside it has been six months since they were last together.

They kiss as if to make up for lost time. His hand on her cheek. Hers on his chest.

But she stops him before they can get too far. She’s been away from him for six months, and she’s been letting her moon tea regimen slide. She got more on the return journey, but it’ll take a full cycle before she can trust that it’ll actually be effective.

“Would that be such a bad thing?” Aang asks, his lips still on her neck. “If it isn’t?”

And it’s like Katara has been doused with ice water. She shoves Aang back. He goes, but he looks hurt.

“Yes,” she says. “It would. I don’t want any more children, Aang. You know that.”

His face falls. He sits back, cross-legged, elbows on his knees.

“I thought maybe a little time away would help you change your mind,” he says, not meeting her eyes.

Anger boils up in her chest.

“No,” she says, fighting very hard to keep her voice even. “I am not going to change my mind.”

Aang looks at her. Then he shifts so he’s sitting on the edge of the bed again and puts his head in his hands. He sighs like he’s carrying the weight of the world. Then he swears under his breath.

“I didn’t want to talk about this your first night back,” he says.

Katara waits, her breath held, heart racing painfully, to see if he will speak.

Finally, he does.

“You were right,” he says, “at the start of the summer. You owe it to your people to be there with them when you can, training their waterbenders.”

She senses the trap, but still she says, “thank you.”

Aang winces.

The trap springs closed.

“I think…” he hesitates. “I think I might owe my people something similar.”

Fear runs a cold fingertip down her spine.

“What do you mean?” She asks him.

“We…” he pauses again, and it’s interminable. “We just want such different things, Katara.”

She can’t breathe. She feels like she’s been punched in the chest.

“What are you saying?” She manages.

He looks at her, his eyes guilty, but pleading. She knows what he is saying. He doesn’t want to say it.

Even now, he is hoping she will make this easier for him.

She sets her teeth. If this is what he wants, she will make him say it.

He sighs.

“I think we should separate, Katara.”

She expects anger. What she finds is grief.

She wishes it was anger. Anger would be easier.

“Why?” She asks.

“Because we don’t want the same things,” Aang says, avoiding her eyes. “We have…different priorities.”

“Really?” She says. “Becuase it looks to me like I made one choice because it was what I wanted, and then you wrote me out of your life.”

Ah. There’s the anger.

Aang flinches. He reaches for her.

“No, Katara, it’s not like that-”

She swats his hand away.

“Then what is it like?” She snaps.

He sits back, “it’s like… it’s like Mai and Zuko. You don’t owe me anything else.”

Something inside her breaks.

“I don’t owe you anything?” She spits it at him. “What about the things we wanted? I thought we loved each other!”

“Katara-”

“Is that all I ever was to you?” She asks, her voice going hard and cold. “A caretaker? A mother for your children?”

She can see the way that that wounds him. But it wounds her that he doesn’t know what to say in return.

She gets to her feet.

“Katara, wait!”

“This is what you want, right?” She whirls back. “A separation? An end to our marriage?”

He says nothing. She is shattering, but she holds her head high.

“Good bye, Aang,” she says.

This time, she doesn’t turn back.

He has plenty of time to stop her as she leaves.

He doesn’t.

She even takes the time to wake her children before she goes. She lets each of them know that she has to go away for a few days, but she’ll see them again very soon. She suspects it’ll be a great deal longer than a few days before she returns to air temple island, but she hopes it won’t be nearly that long before she sees them again.

Aang, in his infinite avatar wisdom, cannot come up with a reason to ask her not to go.

The acolyte at the docks is surprised to see her, but when she asks for a boat, he gives her one. She is the Avatar’s wife. They won’t forbid her anything.

The Avatar’s ex-wife, she thinks to herself as her little craft cuts out into the water.

And that is the moment that she breaks down, pouring years worth of grief into the water, just off the shores of what was, maybe, never a real home.

—

Zuko sees Izumi off to her lessons (no matter how busy he is, he starts his day having breakfast with his daughter), and pockets one of the late autumn apples as he leaves. He’s still nibbling at it absently as he arrives in his meeting room, where his undersecretary is already stacking a pile of scrolls on his desk.

“Remind me what we have today?” Zuko asks, reaching for the schedule sheet that the man holds out to him.

A great man, his head undersecretary. Keeps Zuko’s days organized like it’s a damn art form (which it is). Zuko would be lost without him.

“Before you get started, your highness,” the man says, “…you have a visitor.”

Zuko picks up his head, confused. He peers out into the anteroom.

It’s Katara. A traveling bag at her feet. Sitting on the chaise with her head in her hands, looking like she’s been through the depths of hell and back out again.

He hands the schedule sheet back to his undersecretary.

“Cancel all my meetings,” Zuko says.

“Your highness?” He asks.

“Cancel everything,” Zuko repeats. “I need to help a friend.”

—

She tells him everything. And when she is done she is a puddle of tears in his arms.

She was running toward Caldera last night before she even realized it. There weren’t many other options. The South Pole would be snowed in and unreachable by now. She and Kya had taken the last boat out, after all.

The only other place that has ever felt remotely like a home is the Fire Palace.

And now Zuko holds her, and lets her cry, and promises she can stay here at the palace as long as she needs to.

It has been ten years since he threw himself in front of lightning for her, and still, at his side is the safest place in the world for her to be.

—

“We were in love once, right?” She asks.

Zuko nearly chokes on his wine. His heart lurches. They are several glasses deep and his mind cannot keep up.

“What?” He manages.

“Me and Aang,” she says. She sips again from her own glass, “we were in love at first. Right?”

Zuko swallows hard.

“It… it seemed like you were,” he says. “You seemed…happy.”

“We were,” she says. Drinks again, “but then…so were you and Mai.”

Zuko winces. Gulps his wine.

This is something they both share now. Everyone they know has been touched by loss, but he and Katara both know how it feels to be left.

A door slams.

“Dad?” Izumi calls.

“Get ready,” he says to Katara, setting down his glass, “she’s going to ask you to do her hair.”

Katara picks herself up, “what?”

And that’s all they have time to say before Izumi barrels out onto the terrace to join them. She bypasses Zuko entirely in favor of throwing herself at her Auntie ‘Tara. She already has the little string of water tribe beads in her hand. Katara gives him a quizzical look over Izumi’s head, clearly wondering where he came upon water tribe beads. He just shrugs. He’ll explain later, if she asks.

Katara braids his daughter's hair.

—

Settling everything is surprisingly easy, and also the hardest thing she has ever done.

Between the army of air acolytes assisting Aang, and the veritable compendium of servants Zuko allows her to make requests of, moments where they actually have to speak face to face are sparse.

Their marriage was never as formal as it could have been. An air nomad marriage. There are no contracts or binding agreements. Ending it is simply a matter of attesting to it in front of witnesses.

Aang brings an air acolyte, an older man twice Aang’s age.

Lacking anyone from the water tribe, Zuko witnesses for Katara.

Katara will stay at the Fire Palace until she decides where she wants to settle. She suspects she’ll go back to the South Pole, once the ice pack melts in the spring.

She knows it isn’t a contest, but she still feels fiercely vindicated when Bumi and Kya both choose to come live with her. She won’t keep them from Aang, just like Aang won’t keep Tenzin from her. But she’s proud, and a little smug, when her older two children are settled into rooms down the hall from her own.

Izumi is thrilled.

—

Breakfasts at the Fire Palace now often consist of three small children around his table. Three children and two old friends.

It starts when Izumi begins bringing Kya to their breakfasts. And then Bumi begins to wonder why he hasn’t been invited, so they invite him. And it feels ridiculous to sit down to a meal with Katara’s kids without having Katara there and so…

He and Katara have breakfast together most mornings.

She sits across the table from him, encourages her son to eat both the meat and the vegetables in his breakfast (you’re just like your Uncle, I swear…), and works identical braids into both Kya’s and Izumi’s hair (Izumi always wants her hair to look exactly like Kya’s.)

Zuko refills her teacup. She smiles at him, the hair bands she will use to tie off Izumi’s braids held between her teeth.

Zuko feels emotions he knows he absolutely should not be feeling about his friend’s ex-wife.

—

It makes sense for Katara to set up a permanent home in Caldera. It makes sense for a great deal of reasons.

First, it helps her children be able to stay in contact with both of their parents. If she relocated permanently back to the South Pole, she would never see Tenzin, and Bumi and Kya would never see Aang.

Second, even in just a few months, she’s begun helping Zuko communicate better with the water tribes. She’s been doing this on a smaller scale for a decade, helping smooth over misunderstandings and answer the kind of questions about water tribe culture that Zuko would be embarrassed to ask anyone else. But now it seems like barely a day goes by where he does not ask her opinion on something. She sees the way this helps, how good it is for both his people and hers, and she cannot stop now.

Third…she wants a place in this city that she can call home. She likes it here. And she has spent far too long talking herself out of the things she wants.

Her home is nothing extravagant, a small house with enough little bedrooms upstairs that all of her children can have their own, even when Tenzin is visiting.

But it is hers.

It’s also only a short walk from the palace. The court grants her a formal ambassador position, with the kind of salary she barely knows what to do with after a decade of trying to be an air nomad.

She spoils her kids with it, mostly.

Spoils herself a little too. She’s earned it, and every day she’s rediscovering all the things she used to love.

She’ll still spend several months each year in the South Pole, staying with her family and training the tribe’s waterbenders. But a future that includes both of these places… that’s the future she wants.

It’s such a relief. Knowing what she wants. Knowing she can have it. Knowing it’s hers.

—

Aang, to his credit, does wait a…decent amount of time.

But just over a year after Katara begins living in Caldera. Zuko receives an invitation to a wedding on Air Temple Island.

Katara doesn’t live in the palace anymore, so their time together is usually around lunch now, instead of breakfast. He misses the months when she was living in the palace in a way he is careful not to speak aloud.

But that day, sharing their meal while Katara reads over the latest correspondence he received from Agna Qel’a, Zuko studies her. She’s recently back from her latest visit to the South Pole, refreshed and invigorated by her time among her people and their young waterbenders. Bolstered by being reunited with Bumi, who tends to stay with Aang when she travels south.

He hates the thought of bringing her bad news.

But he clears his throat. She looks up at him, her chopsticks poised halfway to her mouth. He must already look uncomfortable, because her brow immediately furrows.

“What is it?” She asks.

He makes a face.

“I have some news, if you want to hear it,” he says, “…about Aang.”

Her expression tightens. She sets down her utensils and folds her hands in front of her. She looks up at him, expectant.

Better to rip the bandage off than draw it out. He used to avoid the updates Ty Lee would send him about Mai, letting those letters sit in his desk unopened for weeks at a time, but avoiding them only ever made it harder to finally face them.

Mai is happier, it seems. Away from him. Away from the palace. It hurts still, sometimes, but he is quietly glad that she is happy again.

“He’s getting married,” Zuko says. “To an air acolyte, I think.”

“Is it Tamani?” Katara asks.

“…yes,” Zuko says. That had indeed been the other name on the invitation.

Katara gives a dry little laugh, returning to her meal.

“Good for him,” she says. “She makes great udon.”

Zuko isn’t quite sure what to say to this.

“Are you ok?” He asks her.

“I’m fine,” she says, with a speed he doesn’t believe. “I’m happy for him.”

“Katara…”

She shrugs. The smile she gives him is sad.

—

Bumi and Kya go to their father’s second wedding.

She sends them both off with the team of air acolytes that arrive on the back of a sky bison. Bumi is eleven. Kya nine. Tenzin, already at Aang’s side, seven.

Zuko goes to the ceremony. He offered not to, out of respect for her, but Katara insisted he go. He’s the Fire Lord. For the Fire Lord not to attend the Avatar’s wedding would be a massive snub and would absolutely cause a scandal. Zuko can think whatever he wants to about Aang, but the Fire Lord and the Avatar need to get along with one another.

But makes her feel proud, though, that he offered. Proud and treasured in a way she hasn’t felt in a long time.

She still drinks enough plum wine that night to sink a ship, and falls asleep with a face wet with tears.

—

Katara is quiet and sullen for a while, in the wake of Aang’s second marriage.

Then, she comes alive.

There is a lightness in her step, a brightness in her eyes. She laughs easily and heartily at the smallest things.

She begins wearing more clothing that highlights her own culture. Water Tribe styles adapted for the Fire Nation’s heat. She cooks the most delicious meals, experimenting with both her nation’s flavors and his, and often shares them with him. The failures are almost as enjoyable as the successes, they way they laugh about them.

Her touch often lingers, (on his arm, his hand…) in a way he tries very hard not to examine.

Sometimes she returns to the palace after Bumi and Kya get out of their lessons for the day, and they all practice their forms and katas together in the palace gardens. Katara coaching Kya, Zuko working with Izumi, and also, increasingly, with Bumi, who is proving to be quite handy with a pair of swords. Nowhere near the swordsman Zuko was at eleven, but that, he thinks, is a good thing.

He watches Katara and Kya working through waterbending forms. Kya is extraordinarily skilled for a girl of nine, but Zuko isn’t surprised, considering who her teacher is.

He thinks about water. The element of change. The way Katara embodies it.

Change has never come easily for Zuko.

What does it mean, that Katara seems to be moving on from the loss of her marriage, while Zuko hasn’t been able to give himself the same permission?

In a moment of recklessness, he asks her to do something they haven’t done in years.

He asks her to spar with him.

She absolutely wrecks him in thirty seconds flat.

Zuko laughs. It has been so long since he’s sparred against a waterbender. He’s forgotten how agile they can be. Katara laughs too, extending an arm and pulling him back to his feet.

All three kids are looking at them with identical, slack-jawed expressions.

“Wow, Mom you kicked his ass!” Bumi says.

Katara turns to her son, eyebrows raised, “where did you learn that word?”

“Toph,” he, Katara, and Zuko all say at the same time, realizing the answer the moment the question is asked.

Katara shrugs, letting it go.

“Again,” Zuko says, setting his stance to square off with her a second time.

He is ready this time. This time, they are as evenly matched as he remembers. The garden becomes a maelstrom of his element and hers. There is a triumphant gleam in her eyes whenever they clash, and Zuko revels in moving with her, at being challenged.

It’s absolutely absurd that they waited this long to try this again. Why on earth haven't they done this before?

And then she steps in to sweep his arm away and she stumbles, his own foot placed to break her stance. She gives a startled little shriek and falls much harder than he meant her to.

In an instant he has reached for her. He tugs her to him and twists on instinct so when they hit the ground it’s him who hits first, Katara sheltered against his chest.

—

…and they are both barely twenty and they are falling as Katara takes him down and pins him on his back but she’s afraid that she’s hurt him so he overdramatizes his nonexistent pain until she laughs and then he laughs and she is still touching his chest and they are so young they’re just kids really and they are so scared and they are falling in love and-

—

Right. That’s why.

—

The next time the seasons turn and Katara makes plans to visit the South Pole, Zuko asks to travel with her.

“Not for the whole season,” he assures her, “just for a month or so. I’m overdue for a diplomatic visit, and I’d love for Izumi to see more of the water tribe.”

“You’d bring Izumi?” She asks.

“Yeah,” Zuko says. “She’s old enough. And I thought…”

He pauses.

“I thought maybe you’d be able to bring Bumi and Tenzin,” Zuko said. “They could travel back with me and Izumi, so they don’t have to stay the whole season if they don’t want to.”

This is the moment it begins again, for her.

—

Of course it has been building for much longer than that. Zuko thinks maybe it began when he first saw Katara weave water tribe braids into Izumi’s hair, watching her give his daughter the same gentle, casual, instinctive affection she gives her own children.

But watching Katara standing at the bow of one of his ships, all three of her children pressed against the rail next to her, Bumi at her side, Kya on tiptoe to be able to see, and Tenzin perched on the rail itself. Watching Izumi run up to join them, leaping onto Bumi’s back, knowing full well he will catch her. Seeing Katara turn to him, and watching her face break into a radiant smile, as she is framed by the setting sun as they approach her homeland…

This is the moment it begins again, for him.

—

It’s both strange and wonderful, having Zuko home with her.

He spends half of his days in meetings with various tribal leaders. Hearing the Fire Lord is at Wolf Cove, chiefs and leaders from other villages are coming into her home village just to speak with him.

They’ve begun bringing their waterbenders too, for lessons.

But Zuko spends the other half of his days participating in her culture. Attending their bonfires, joining their hunts, learning their traditions.

Izumi goes penguin sledding and the experience is transformative.

Now, Katara sits a few seats away from him around the fire. The kids have all gone to bed, but Gran Gran has kept them up well into the dark hours of the night, regaling Zuko with fantastical tellings of water tribe legends and spirit tales. She’s mending Bumi’s parka, for the third time already, and enjoying listening to her grandmother’s voice.

Hakoda eventually turns in for the night. And then at last, they outlast even Gran Gran.

She watches Zuko shift a little closer to the fire. Spring is tilting hard into summer, but even the spring warmth is much colder than Zuko is used to.

She hesitates, and then, she tucks herself right up next to him.

“What are you doing?” He asks.

“Ancient Water Tribe tradition,” she says, already turning back to her mending, “sharing body heat for warmth.”

“I’m not that cold,” he says with a laugh.

But he shifts a little closer to her as he does.

Almost without meaning to, she leans back against his chest.

Seemingly by reflex, his arms fold around her waist.

They both freeze.

—

He didn’t mean to do that. He didn’t mean to take her in his arms when she was clearly just being practical, platonically sharing body heat with him in the cold. Clearly he is taking advantage of-

“Zuko?” She says.

“Yeah?” He manages, his throat tight.

There is a long pause.

“Were we in love once?” She asks.

For a moment, he can’t breathe.

Then, he curls against her back, her forehead dropping to her shoulder.

“I think so,” he says.

She takes a breath. Then she tips her cheek toward him, resting her head against his.

“And…” she asks, “are we again?”

He picks up his head. She turns so she’s facing him. He takes the mending tools from her, setting them aside. She reaches for his hand and he takes it.

With the other, he gently brushes a loose lock of her hair out of her face.

“I… I think so,” he says.

He puts that hand on her cheek. He slowly, softly, traces her skin with the pad of his thumb. She presses into his touch, her eyes falling closed.

He pulls her toward him.

She meets him there.

He’s kissing Katara. He is kissing Katara and it’s like a drink of water on a hot day. Satisfying and invigorating and absolutely the thing that keeps you alive.

—

She’s kissing Zuko and it’s like circling up close to the fire during polar night. Sustaining and comforting and absolutely the thing that keeps you safe.

She has been trying to drown out the things she feels for him for far too long.

It’s time to stop trying.

—

They steal every moment they can manage. Every scrap of solitude they can cobble together. There are not many places that aren't occupied by prying neighbors. And if it isn’t the neighbors it’s their children.

But anytime they find themselves alone they are drawn to one another like they are the magnetic poles themselves. Zuko takes Katara in his arms and kisses her. He kisses her like he’s making up for lost time.

—

It isn’t long before half the village knows that her relationship with Zuko has changed. Despite their caution, Katara has never been able to keep secrets from her Gran. And once Gran Gran knows, secrecy is a lost cause.

She’s pretty sure Bumi has figured it out. The younger ones are still oblivious in the innocence of their youth.

She’s embarrassed for a short while, accepting her tribe's good-natured teasing about her taste in men with as much grace as she can manage.

“First the Avatar and now the Fire Lord,” one woman says, an eyebrow raised in her direction. “You must tell me your secret.”

But there’s no secret. Simply one man who fell into a naive sort of love with her, and her shutting herself away so she could be the person he wanted. And then another man who saw all of her truth, and fell in love with every scrap of it.

—

There’s a day, sun-drenched as only a polar summer can be, when Hakoda offers to take all four of the kids out onto the water.

“We’ll make a day of it,” he says. “See if I can’t show these summer children how to catch a fish.”

Hakoda says it to Katara, but he throws a glance at Zuko too as he speaks.

“I’m taking your Gran with us,” he adds. “And I imagine we’ll be gone for at least three hours.”

They don’t waste a second of it.

At first it’s rushed and frantic, tumbling into the soft pelts that make up Katara’s bed. Their clothes are haphazardly discarded and their mouths only separate when they gasp for breath. They cling to each other as the weeks (or is it months, or years) of buried wanting are thrown aside, never to be taken up again.

Then… they take their time.

He runs his hands over every inch of Katara’s body. He lies back in rapture as she does the same to him. They do not think about their younger selves. They worship who they are now, bodies softened by age and scarred by experience. She traces the mark on his chest. The wound he took a lifetime ago, for her. The place where she once held his heartbeat in her hands.

He learns where she most loves to feel his lips. His hands. He learns that his mouth on her chest makes her arch into him and gasp. He discovers exactly how she likes to be held, while he moves inside her. He learns the sounds she makes when she’s most lost to pleasure.

He knows, even then, that he will be a willing student in this course of study for the rest of his life.

—

He has already stayed longer than he meant to, she knows. He is running out of excuses to extend his “diplomatic visit.” His council and court grow insistent. Aang begins inquiring after Tenzin and Bumi.

She goes aboard his ship with him when he prepares to leave, just long enough to make sure her sons are settled into their cabin. They are both off exploring the ship within minutes, as if this is not the same ship they sailed down here on just weeks before.

Katara watches them go, shouting their goodbyes over their shoulders, and presses tears from her eyes.

She wonders, briefly, if Bumi will say anything to Aang. About her and Zuko. She decides equally quickly that she doesn’t care if he does. Aang is the one that left. Aang is the one already remarried. (Tamani, according to the things her kids tell her when they return from visiting their father, is already pregnant.)

Zuko steps up beside her, Izumi rushing past them to catch up with the boys.

“They’re good kids,” Zuko says, watching them vanish. “Kya too.”

She bumps him with her shoulder, “yours isn’t so bad either.”

It’s sweet, the way he tries to smile at her, even while his eyes are so sad.

She steps into his outstretched arms. They hold each other tight. Then her hands tangle in his hair as they kiss. The kind of kiss that has to last them several months.

Kya gave Zuko a water tribe braid as a parting gift. Katara tucks it behind his ear.

“Safe seas,” she whispers the blessing, willing her voice not to shake.

He hugs her to him again.

“I’ll see you again in no time,” he says.

Katara stands at the dock until the ship vanishes over the horizon.

—

Aang is cordial to him when he drops off Bumi and Tenzin. He asks about the delay in their return, and Zuko feeds him the same flimsy nonsense he’s been feeding his court. He’s at the poles so rarely. He wanted to leave nothing undone.

“How’s Katara?” Aang asks.

Zuko bristles at the question. As if Aang even has the right to ask after her.

“She’s well,” Zuko says, his face and his tone slipping behind his practiced Fire Lord mask.

Aang notices. If he suspects more, he doesn’t say it. But Zuko has always been a terrible liar, even by omission. He has always worn his emotions on his sleeve.

Bumi might tell him. Zuko is pretty sure Bumi has put two and two together.

He decides he doesn’t care if Aang knows. If Aang ever really had any claim on Katara (as if Katara was ever something to be claimed), he gave that up when he decided not to stay with her.

Katara deserves more than that. Katara deserves happiness.

He smiles as he leaves with Izumi, to return to the palace.

—

The summer passes in a brilliant blur.

The southern tribe’s waterbenders are becoming talented benders and gifted healers. She is watching her culture be rebuilt in front of her eyes and she has never been so proud of anything in her entire life.

But she plans to leave a little sooner this year than she has on her previous visits. She admits that she was pressing her luck in past years, waiting for the last ship out. Weather at the poles is unpredictable even in the best of times.

But as summer begins to slide into fall, Gran Gran falls ill.

She grows so ill that Katara writes to Sokka, who quickly arrives with Suki, just in case.

Katara cannot leave. Not now.

And the first blizzard of winter comes very early.

—

Katara’s grandmother recovers.

Zuko learns this in the last letter he receives from her that fall. With enough rest and Katara’s masterful care, Gran Gran will live to see another summer.

But Katara missed the chance to leave before the icepack settled in. He’s honestly astounded that a messenger bird even made it out with her letter.

She is safe. She is with her family and they are all safe, hunkering down to face the winter as they have done for generations.

But this is the last he will hear from her until spring.

—

It is the longest winter Katara can remember.

It has been over a decade since she experienced a true winter. It’s Kya’s first polar night. Her daughter struggles with the constant dark. Gets frustrated by the blizzards that last days. Sometimes weeks.

Sokka and Suki were also trapped by the early ice pack, and they are all grateful for one another’s company.

Katara does not regret her decision to stay. Every time Gran Gran serves up her incredible cooking, or fills the hours of a storm with songs and stories, or wraps Katara in a hug, or dotes on her great granddaughter, she knows her choice was the right one. It is all worth it, to have her grandmother healthy, and happy.

But it is the longest winter she knows. The longest, she thinks, she is ever likely to know.

—

He writes a letter, shortly after the year turns, and sends it.

He receives a reply from one of the southernmost waystops in the earth kingdom, saying they cannot send the letter on yet. The southern water tribes are still unreachable, even by bird.

I know, he writes back, please send it as soon as you are able.

—

The days are beginning to lighten again, daylight now stretching for a few hours each afternoon, and Katara is constantly watching the sky, watching for the return of the seabirds. The return of the seabirds mean the icepack is beginning to break, their food sources reappearing, drawing them back south.

So she spots the first messenger bird immediately as it sails over the village.

She barely dares to hope, but she stretches out her hand anyway.

It comes directly to her and lands on her arm, preening proudly.

The letter is from Zuko. The most important piece of it is this:

I am sending one of my strongest ships. As soon as the icepack clears, it can bring you home.

Home. That word resonates in her body and soul. Home has always been her village, this place where her people live and thrive even on the very edge of the word.

But somehow, home is also him.

The icepack breaks shortly after, and a fire nation cruiser sails in. She will later learn that it has been waiting at anchor for weeks, waiting for the ice to release the harbor from its grasp.

Within a day, Kya and Katara are on their way from home to home.

—

He is waiting for her when she returns. Not at the palace. At her house.

Izumi is with him, and she and Kya embrace like long lost sisters and are upstairs in Kya’s room almost before Zuko can greet her.

And he is alone with Katara.

They are in one another’s arms before they can so much as breathe. He is crushing her against his chest and she clings so tightly to his neck that it is beyond easy to lift her from the ground, holding her against him like it’s the only thing in the world that matters.

It is the only thing in the world that matters.

She smells a little of salt water and steamship soot as he kisses her, but he cannot get enough of her. He will never be able to get enough of her again. Not even if-

Remembering, he makes himself pull back.

—

Zuko sets her down, looking suddenly shy. A part of her wants to reach for him, even being an arm’s length from one another is too far apart, but she catches the way he worries his lip between his teeth and waits.

“What is it?” She asks.

He presents her with a series of gifts.

A stunning blue kimono, Fire Nation in style, but the delicately painted silk features a design resembling waves. An elegant tea set, black clay with a pattern of stars. An exquisite braided gold ring, set with a chain of small rubies and sapphires.

Katara has been immersed in Fire Nation culture long enough to know these gifts and what they mean, even before he asks it.

He asks her to marry him.

She says yes.

—

“I have conditions,” she says, the following morning, as they are leaving the wreckage of her bed and making tea in her new tea set in the kitchen.

“I thought you might,” he replies, pouring tea as Kya and Izumi tumble down the stairs, still flush from the excitement of their unscheduled sleepover.

They’re going to be so excited when he and Katara tell them.

Katara will retain the majority of her ambassador duties, which means there are traditional Fire Lady duties that will fall by the wayside. But this will be fine. It has been years since there was a Fire Lady in the palace. Many of those formalities and tasks have already been taken up by other members of his staff anyway.

She will be allowed to travel to the southern water tribe as often as she wants, to train the benders there and visit her family. His council argues for stricter schedules, but he refuses. Katara will come and go as she pleases.

He also makes it very clear that Katara is under no obligation to bear him any children. He has Izumi, and she is enough for him. And in case of the unthinkable…he is about to acquire three step-children.

There’s paperwork about that too. Affirming Izumi as his heir. Working Katara’s children into the line of succession. (Bumi is suddenly second in line for the throne of the Fire Nation, which he enjoys a little too much in a way that Zuko finds adorable.) Legalities they should never need, but which they write out anyway.

He does harbor worries that the frightening formality of a royal marriage, the miles upon miles of contracts and paperwork, will frighten her away. Instead, Katara leans in, working through every paragraph with the palace scribes until she understands every word.

“You don’t have to do this,” he assures her as he once again catches her going over the wording of some obscure clause. He brings her fresh tea, “even I don’t understand this contract this well.”

“I know,” says, making a note in the margin of her copy as she does, “I just don’t want…”

She hesitates.

“I don’t want to be ten years into a marriage and realize I didn’t understand what was expected from me,” she says. “Not again.”

His heart twists. He sits down next to her, reaching for her hand.

“All I want from you is your company,” he says. “Your partnership. All I want is to be with you, whatever form that takes.”

“That’s what Aang said too, at the beginning,” she says.

His mind races, cataloging all the ways that he and Aang are nothing alike, wondering which of them will reassure her. But before he can speak, she turns to him, taking both his hands in hers.

“Promise me one thing?” She asks.

“Anything.”

She takes a deep breath.

“You have to promise me that if there is something you want you will tell me,” she says. “Even if we’re going to disagree. Especially if we’re going to disagree.”

“Katara…”

But she isn’t done.

“If we can do that, then I won’t run away, and you won’t move on without me,” she says. “…That’s what I was doing, my first summer in the south. Running away. And… and when I came back he was already gone.”

Zuko pulls her close.

“I promise,” he says.

She clings to him, and when she pulls back a long moment later, she brushes tears from her eyes.

“What about you?” She asks him. “What can I promise you?”

The look in her eyes is so open. So earnest. So he thinks, really thinks, about what went wrong in his first marriage.

Mai was so unhappy, for so much of their time together. He can, and does, cast a lot of blame on the depression she fell into after Izumi’s birth, and that is neither of their fault. But he knows she was unhappy long before then. That life in the palace wasn’t what she expected it would be. Or maybe he wasn’t what she expected.

But he’d tried. Agni damn it he had tried, hadn't he?

She just hadn’t wanted what he was able to give. She’d pushed him away long before she left.

“Promise that you’ll let me try?” He says softly.

Katara’s brow furrows, “what do you mean?”

His breath shakes, “promise me…that if you’re unhappy you will let me try to make things better. That you’ll give me a chance. That…”

He swallows hard.

“That you’ll let me help you, when you need it.”

Katara pulls him to her.

“I promise,” she says.

He throws his arms around her and suddenly he is crying. Not the quiet tears that Katara wiped from her eyes after his promise to her. Crying. He has been carrying this hurt for too long without naming it. The fact that Mai was so unhappy, and she didn’t even trust him enough to let him try. That even at her lowest she wouldn’t accept his help.

Katara holds him, and lets him cry until he calms, his sadness, this round of it at least, released.

They rest there, forehead to forehead, breathing one another’s air.

“I love you,” she says.

“I love you too,” he echoes.

“And whatever happens, we’re going to do it together.”

He nods.

And then he kisses her.

This, he knows, is real. This, he understands, is a partnership.

—

They get married in a small, private ceremony in the palace gardens. There are only a handful of guests. Sokka and Suki. Toph. Iroh. A handful of close friends from the royal court. Hakoda and Gran Gran, flown in on an airship for the occasion. Their children.

Aang is invited. A courtesy from the Fire Lord to the Avatar. But the private nature of the ceremony gives him the excuse to decline, and Katara is grateful when he does.

Kya and Izumi run in front of them, scattering flowers, as they approach their altar under the cherry trees.

She stands across from Zuko, his hands in hers, and they make promises to one another.

She knows, like he does, that this is what real partnership is meant to feel like.

—

They celebrate long into the night. Bumi does a valiant job of trying to sit up with them, but even he is only thirteen. But eventually even the adults turn in, making their way through the palace toward their rooms. Katara leans sleepily against his shoulder, mumbles something about tired feet.

He sweeps her up into his arms.

She protests, laughing, insisting she’s actually completely fine, but her arms loop around his neck and she curls into his chest anyway.

This is the moment the rest of their lives begin.

Zuko presses a kiss to her forehead, and carries her home.

.