(after)life of the party.
characters: katara, zuko.
tumblr prompt: ghost/living person au.

…

i.

She comes to him, one night on the sea.

Zuko thinks it is a sailor's premonition, the beautiful siren come to forewarn him with a song of his death. That is the tale in the way his uncle has always told it, of the soul-heavy guardians of the oceans. But there is something different, a bit off-center, when she comes to rest at the side of his bed.

The water has never made him dizzy before, but the blink of the ocean in her eyes makes his head spin, and presses needles into his knees.

Her head lulls to one side and waves of curls slide over her shoulders. "Finally," she whispers, and Zuko is alarmed at the sound of excitement pitched in her voice. It spikes his blood with a nervous heat that pools in his stomach, and it's all his effort not to clutch his guts and shrivel back from this translucent spell of a girl.

"What do you want?" He asks, but she only leans closer towards him, the tip of her nose a chilling presence in front of his face.

She smiles, and her teeth bleed together like she has bitten the moon. "I've been looking for you," she floats, floats in the air like steam, flashes of color against a pale blue soul, "I've come to help you."

ii.

"You're not dreaming, Prince Zuko."

"I'm dreaming. I have to be dreaming."

"I'm real!"

"You're dead."

"That doesn't mean I'm not real—being dead doesn't mean I don't exist."

"Now you're not making any sense!"

And she can't be more real when her fingers glide into the hollows of his cheek, a freezing touch that is meant to be more cathartic than anything else. "No one ever stops existing, Prince Zuko. Even out on this sea, you are still in existence. So is the Avatar."

"A ghost. A ghost who says the Avatar is alive, I'd better write Father."

"You don't have to believe. It doesn't stop being true."

"Right. Yeah, right."

"I suppose if you see it, then, you'll believe it?"

iii.

It has been three weeks, and she has come to him every single night. Zuko doesn't know whether being in the middle of the ocean has left him out of touch with the world. There are parts of him that rely on his uncle's stories when they are away, of his encounters with spirits and sensations slightly out of this world.

Zuko doesn't have the strength to tell his uncle about the girl ghost he sees every night. (His uncle has a funny way of making him believe in anything, an uncanny resemblance to his brand new moonlit friend, and it turns several screws in his head a bit loose.)

"You know," she floats down in a spiral until she is seated beside him, her body a flickering show of lights and faded colors, "not once since I have come to counsel you have you doubted my existence."

He snorts, though very involuntarily. "I have—I continue to do it, silently, on a daily basis."

She laughs, is what he would like to think if there was a noise to the action, "but you don't even know my name, Prince Zuko. You don't know anything about me, except that I am here. So, maybe you are right. You have doubted my existence plenty of times that I might just disappear on your words alone."

There is something in the twist of her lips around her teeth that is sinister, in a way that paints itself as nearly harmless. "You may doubt it, but you accept my existence here. You don't seek to disprove it. You need it."

He doesn't want to. But Zuko is entirely sure that he does.

iv.

"You're all sailing in the right direction, aren't you?"

"I've been at sea for three years."

"I didn't ask you that, Prince Zuko. I asked if you're—"

"Yes, okay? Yes, we're sailing in the right direction."

"Are you ready?"

"Do you think I'm ready? Have you helped enough?"

"I don't know. It's hard to say, at the moment."

"But you're going to let me find him anyway, aren't you?"

"I was never here to stop you, just to help your destiny along a little bit."

"Right. Well, then, I'm ready."

v.

They are so far down south that even in the warmth of his cabin, Zuko is bundled with scarves and gloves, his armor abandoned by nightfall. When she finds him on this moonless night, his knees are pulled up to his chest, and his hands are cupped around his mouth, breathing hard.

"Are you okay?" Her voice is soft, barely intrusive, and his eyes find hers in the dark.

"You've gained a lot more color since we've started." And as he says it, her cheeks flush a faint red. There are parts of her that come to color every now and again, flickering in and out of existence until she is a pale soul's outline against the shadows of the night, but now she is almost a permanent thing in the air.

She still floats, gently beside him. "It's because…well, we're closest to where I…where I died. Where my remains are."

Zuko presses his lips together thoughtfully, looks at her. "I don't want to say I thought that was it, because I don't really want to think about this—about you—more than my brain can handle. But…"

"But what?"

"But you were right," he chews out in a quiet mumble, so quiet that he is certain she hears it because there is a certain type of silence in death, one that leaves space for things that slip past the living. "Why…why do you want to help me, Katara?"

He thinks there is the sound of peace shattering, of a silence tensing up in the air around him. Her eyes are wide and for the first time, Zuko thinks he notices the color—a deep, ocean-black that is nothing like the transparent blue he'd seen the first time she stared into his eyes.

"You know my name."

"You always knew mine," he says slowly.

vi.

"So."

"So."

"That's all you have to say? You don't have any questions?"

"I have a lot of questions, but none for you."

"So, you know, then? You know who killed me?"

"Not by name, but the expedition by the Southern Raiders wasn't really a secret."

"I was a child, then."

"So was I, you know," and he can't help it, under the pressure of the hardened look in her eyes. He pictures her as a round-cheeked child, he feels the fire in his veins cool and imagines it flowing from her tiny fingers, imagines the way they probably wrapped her up in flames and thought nothing less of it.

"I know. I have no ill feelings towards you, Prince Zuko. I never expected you to care enough to find my name."

"You were the only girl-child that age to be captured."

"Don't look at me that way. It doesn't matter, not once you bring the Avatar back."

"And then what?"

"That is up to you, Prince Zuko. But now that you know my name, I think you're ready."

vii.

It's stupid. Zuko can't erase any other mantra from his mind as he thinks about the Avatar, as he thinks about the prospect of what Katara has told him about the last airbender. An airbender.

Stupid.

And perhaps it is that and the thoughts of why her name is so important now, so important that he finds himself practicing the syllables on the deck under the scarce sunlight. Katara, he thinks, because there is something about having known, some act of kindness within that simple bit of knowledge.

He should have asked her. Definitely, probably should have asked her all those months ago.

Maybe she would have disappeared then, knowing that he couldn't give less than the skin of his teeth about her life. But it was different, knowing. He knew the names of her parents and her brother whom she left behind, the day marked in the journals for the triumphant capture of the last waterbender and the way her remains were scattered in the arctic ocean.

He knew too much, and his heart didn't like what he knew.

viii.

"We're a day away."

"I wish I could waterbend you there faster."

"Funny. That's real funny."

"I still wish I could!"

"Do you think about it often?"

"About waterbending?"

"…And about life. About living."

"Why should I have to? I am living, sort of."

"But Katara—"

"No, seriously. You're about to unearth the Avatar about fifty years before you could have ever thought to look for him, and you still don't think I have a life? That our lives intersected?"

"I guess."

"You guess. It's a good thing nothing hangs in the balance over your resolve, Prince Zuko. We'd have half a world and no one held accountable."

ix.

Zuko expects himself to be a little more nervous when they drop anchor in the middle of the icy sea, but for some reason his shoulders are square and his breathing is even and nothing but anticipation needles its way between his bones.

His crew is silent, wondering. He can't blame them; he has transformed from a well of anger and charred pieces to a calm force on the ocean, a hardened shell chipped at by the tides. He is only sturdy and confident and giving orders quietly, like there is no fanfare to this.

Even his uncle sees the gentleness in his features, the slack in his intentions when they discuss dissolving the ice barriers in the ocean. Iroh does not question his nephew, does not ask anything other than for him to pass greetings onto his young spectral friend.

Heat melts the ice away, floes dripping into the ocean and bringing the water to a boil, and Zuko stands still until the ice bobs to the surface underneath his ship. It rolls to the side, and he can see limp fingers through the edges of the ice, and it is then that he knows.

x.

"Aang. His name is Aang."

"And that thing…"

"A bison. Aang…and his bison."

"He's the Avatar, you know."

"He's just one child. I can't."

"Can't what?"

"You know what," he says. He hates the way her eyes twinkle, as if she has known this entire time. Zuko wonders if maybe this was her intention, maybe this was what he needed to be ready for. He needed to be ready to learn his name and see its worth, needed to be ready to push against the goal he'd wanted since his face had been peeled apart. "But I can't do this, either. I can't go against my father."

"You have Aang, now."

"Aang."

"And Zuko?"

"Hm?"

"You'll both have me, still."

"Right, Katara." He breathes evenly, watching her smile between exhalations, "right."