AN: Happy New Years everyone! This is a two-shot, look out for the next chapter in 2018!

News travels slow to an Earth Kingdom village without a name.

No word of Gansu or Sensu, her husband and son, ever reaches her door. There's not a day where she ever forgets them. The weight of their vacancy sits heavy on Sela's shoulders. She doesn't blame them - Sensu went to fight in the war and Gansu left to find him - but farmwork is hard to do together, and hopeless to do alone.

"I'll help," Lee, her son, says with a grin, "I can do it. Don't worry."

I'll be Sensu. I'll be Gansu, he meant. Maybe if I can do all the work they did, we won't notice they're gone.

But Lee is not his father, or his brother, and if he was it still wouldn't have filled the empty spaces in their lives. Lee works by her side, dawn to dusk, but the brunt of losing two grown men on the farm is not unfelt. Fields go untended. Money runs short. The bones of their stock stick out under their skin.

Lee tries to stay optimistic for the both of them. The sunflower fields are still blooming, he tells her. The roof hasn't leaked after the rains. Best of all, those bullying soldiers have long since left them alone.

Sela is an appreciative woman, but with that last gift, she has trouble leveling thanks. It's true that if those soldiers had stayed, their hardships would be worse than even now, but the reason those thugs were gone is a subject no one wanted to broach. Who had scared those thugs away, is what unsettles her. It was a case of the buzzard-wasp scaring the rat-vipers away; she doesn't want one or the other and neither of their losses are missed.

Yet some evenings, Lee stares out the window, as if expecting a stranger to stride up on an ostrich horse once more.

"Who was he?" he asks.

"A firebender," is all she ever answers. That is all he is to her. A firebender, no different than those that took her other son away.

Except, Lee knew who he was. He's told them clear enough: My name is Zuko. Son of Ursa and Fire Lord Ozai. Prince of the Fire Nation, and heir to the throne.

She tries to forget that part, has no reason to know that man as anything more than a war-mongering firebender. News travels slow to an Earth Kingdom village without a name, so she has time to forget, but when news finally reaches them, the name brings the memory back to life.

Firelord Ozai has been defeated. Firelord Zuko sits on the throne, and he has declared the war over.

She is shocked still, unlike her fellow villagers who roar and cheer at the messenger's words. Some do murmur about that day, about that firebender, but they're drowned out by celebration over the war's end.

Don't get her wrong, she's elated that the hundred years of madness have come to an end, but she's dazed by who had ended it. A firebender, a firebender with the support of the Avatar, but still a firebender.

The firebender ended the war, a war started and embroiled by those that came before him, a war that had plunged the world into destruction and suffering. He broke off the path of his ancestors and ended the war. So, what did that make him? And if she had turned him away, what did that make her?

That night, Lee asks her if that meant his father and brother would be back soon. That is all she needs to settle her mind. The war may be over but the scars have not healed. He's stopped the war but nothing has changed. A firebender is still a firebender.

She tells Lee, as gently as she can, "One day."

A caravan of Fire Nation soldiers barrel through the town, not long after. She remembers seeing the red flag whipping in the breeze, she remembers calling Lee into the house and locking the door behind him, she remembers holding back shudders as knocks echoed from the doorway. They don't come out until a neighbour taps on their windowsill.

She's appalled when she steps outside and the Fire Nation is still there. The scene leaves her mind hazy: Fire Nation soldiers making conversation with Earth Kingdom citizens as they unload packages from the backs of komodo-rhino driven caravans. The packages are full of food, grain, cloth and other supplies, she learns. A small repayment to hold them over until more permanent restoration campaigns were worked out between the Earth King and the Firelord, the red armored soldier tells them.

She loathes to accept the gifts, but Sela is in no place to be proud. The bag of grain she carries home that day is not heavy, but if feels as if she were lugging solid stone. The Firelord sent them this. It meant nothing, she tells herself, the Fire Nation was distributing aid to all villages, regardless. But news travels slow to an Earth Kingdom village without a name, yet caravans from a once enemy nation come strikingly fast.

The supplies lighten their burdens, but at the price of weighing her conscience.

Sela questions herself every time she pours grain for the animals, everytime she walks down to the village for rations, everytime she sees Lee in the sunflower fields whirling two planks of wood as if blades.

She thinks of that day when the soldiers had taken Lee, and she thinks of how she'd turned the firebender away after all he had done. No, not just a firebender, a boy. A boy who was starving and in dire straits, who raised his sword to help her son without a second thought. Yet, once the fire left his hands, he might as well have been covered in blood. He was a firebender. Nothing else he'd ever done mattered. It was… cruel, in hindsight. But she had been scared. Sela couldn't lose another son to the Fire Nation.

She wonders what could've been if she hadn't been so quick to judge. Perhaps he would have helped more. Perhaps she wouldn't have to sleep every night wondering when the food would run out.

But the thoughts of the future, of Firelords in far off lands, come far and in-between. She thinks most times of the empty pieces in her life, and of Lee working himself to the bone.

The months after Gansu left, after Zuko came and disappeared from their lives, are long and not easily forgotten. Though, on the day that three silhouettes appear against the sunset, those months seem to mean nothing. Lee laughs like she hasn't heard him laugh in so long. Another laugh echoes him, one she hasn't heard in even longer.

News travels slow. Men on the backs of ostrich-horses, are a long time coming.