Zuko is peaceful when he sleeps.
Katara doesn’t get many opportunities to see him like this so she takes her chance now, tracing the line of his jaw, the pall of his eyelashes against his cheekbones, the way the skin turns from ivory to rusted crimson just beyond the bridge of his nose. The early morning light softens the harsh edges of his scar, the furrow of his eyebrows; he is more a child now than he has ever been, ensconced in her arms.
She can stay here a little while longer, Katara decides, can let herself have this before the duties of a lifetime of war draw her away once more. Besides, she can’t bear to wake Zuko when he looks like this, content and undisturbed as he rarely is in life. He must be more tired than she thought, to sleep so far past the sunrise that calls to the fire in his blood.
The first rays of dawn wreathe his hair like Agni himself has come to crown him, the golden prince who reclaimed his kingdom, and he looks so very young suddenly that her entire being aches with the need to protect, to love, to pour in through his skin all that he’s ever lost so no hurt can ever touch him again.
He’ll wake any moment now, she knows. Blink at her with those sleep-dazed golden eyes and give her that lopsided half-smile that’s tender and disbelieving all at once, like he still can’t quite believe any of this is real.
(She hates herself for that, hates the girl of misplaced rage and caustic grief who pushed him away, hates that he always flinched like he expected a mortal blow. She’ll spend a lifetime in penance.)
But that’s okay, she thinks. Everything is okay now, because she has a lifetime to change that, to love him, to live. They have time, so much time that she doesn’t quite know what to do with all of it, but they’ll figure it out together.
Katara curls closer to Zuko, looping her arms around his neck and waist, and closes her eyes.
He’s still warm, the way he was when she first hugged him with the sunset at her back and the waves beneath her feet. Still warm, still burning, still here.
Her brilliant, beautiful firebender.
A hand settles on her shoulder.
The word comes to her across a great distance, as though Sokka is still back in the South Pole instead of right beside her. Or maybe she’s the one who’s far away, gone somewhere he cannot follow.
She blinks, and watches the final, fading trail of the comet recede into the blue, blue horizon. Blue for new beginnings, blue for peace, blue for the crack of Azula’s lightning.
“Katara,” Sokka says again, and now there’s something terrible in his voice, something she’s heard only once, almost seven years ago. “Please.”
At Zuko’s side, his uncle weeps. He’s bent to press his forehead to Zuko’s hand, murmuring words of guilt and love and sorrow.
There’s no need, she wants to say. Can’t you see? He’s right here.
She brushes the hair off Zuko’s face and gently kisses his scarred cheek.
“Katara.” There is no joking Sugar Queen, no teasing in Toph’s trembling voice. “You have to let him go.”
Katara shakes her head mutely, and curls her body around his.They’re partners, her and Zuko – them against the Southern Raiders, against Azula, against the world.
She’ll always have his back.
(Later, they’ll tell the stories of how the last Southern waterbender held the crown prince’s body through the night. Later, they’ll whisper about how she had to be dragged kicking and screaming from his side, how every bit of water in the courtyard rose to cover the fallen prince with a shield of ice, how they had to knock her unconscious to keep her from flooding the palace.)
Later, Sokka will not meet her eyes when she wakes.
Katara goes where he tells her to, in the days that come after. Follows him to a garden of white silk and ash, to the shaky beginnings of a new world, to a ship that carries her across the element that failed her.
She stands on deck and watches the long-hated land of her childhood fade into the distance until it is nothing more than a faint speck on the endless expanse of the sea. She thinks of a smoke-singed courtyard, the beat of a ruined heart; thinks of a beautiful boy lit in lightning and the sobbing girl he died to save and the story that died with him, forever unfinished, forever frozen.
“It’’ll be okay,” Sokka tells her gently, when a faintly familiar land of ice and snow forms in the distance. “Let’s go home.”
(She doesn’t, though. Not really. Not ever.
She never goes home again.)
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