Blistering palms pushing uselessly against the stone, Zuko groaned as he tried to right himself. It was a quiet, pained sound that escaped him, but it seemed to echo across the courtyard, piercing Katara with a fear she hadn't felt in years. The banished prince's faltering movement broke her out of the numb shock that had briefly overcome her when Azula's lightning connected to her brother's form. The female firebender herself laughed—the noise of it grinding against Katara's ears as Azula's manic grin showed off all her teeth—and launched another bolt of lightning towards Katara. She rolled away breathlessly, eyes immediately returning to her downed friends as electrical currents continued to shake him violently.

"I'd really rather our family physician look after little Zuzu, if you don't mind," Azula jeered. Katara wanted to wipe that manic grin from the other woman's face, but dodging took the priority as lightning arced towards her again. Raising water from the fountain to aid her escape was instinctual, but she wasn't the only master at work. Bursts of flames shot from Azula's palms, rushing and corralling the waterbender into the limited shelter behind the courtyard's columns. The stonework could barely handle Azula's rage, shattering to debris that rocketed through the air. Dust threatened to choke Katara, but she rolled away as soon as the onslaught lessened. Azula had the advantage, even without taking the comet into consideration. She knew the terrain better, and she didn't need to rely on drawing her bending medium from a source. More than that, though, Azula fought like she had nothing to lose. Eyes still finding their way to Zuko's prone body, Katara's heart pounded; it was painfully clear that she had so much to lose.

"Zuzu, you don't look so good!" Azula was taunting and mocking. She knew her advantage but didn't press it just yet She stayed on her vantage point on the roof, eyes drifting back to her brother before catching sight of her newest toy. The grin returned as she launched a new attack at Katara, barely missing as the waterbender sprinted away from the columns.

Breathing was difficult, but Katara forced air into her lungs as she pulled water from the courtyard fountain to surge towards the roof. Azula was long gone, however, and was flying forward, propelled by flames extending from her hands and feet. Katara drew more water around her, freezing the water into a curling wave to carry her away. Azula launched a fiery assault at the ice, but was too late to strike Katara. Still, the ice evaporated on contact and Azula prepared another attack. The water Katara had drawn from the fountain reached its end, tripping the waterbender and sending her to her knees above a grate. The sight beneath her was enough for her to ignore the stinging in her hands and the increasingly-deranged laughter behind her. Devising a plan quickly as she clambered to her feet, Katara leapt into action. She lured Azula onto the grate, allowing the firebender as close as she dared before pulling the water straight up, submerging them both and freezing it around them.

A cold firebender is a dead firebender. The words whispered through her mind, and the voice sounded like Zuko's. Katara wasn't sure who had told her those words first, but she hoped there was at least a little truth to them. She exhaled, melting the ice immediately around her, and prayed to the spirits that the ice around her was cold enough to give Azula pause.

Pause was all Katara would need. Any hesitation on either of their parts would have decided this match, and Katara was going to take full advantage of this moment. Seizing the chains she'd grabbed while baiting Azula into the trap, Katara shifted forward and looped the metal around Azula's hands, securing them around her middle before anchoring them into the grate beneath them.

The ice melted at Katara's direction and the two women both fell forward onto their knees, gasping and coughing for air. Katara tugged at the chains as Azula recovered, checking that they were secure, before pulling herself to her feet. Water already enveloped her hands by the time she fell to her knees again at Zuko's side.

There was a new scar on his muscled body—another mark that he'd bear for the rest of his days because of his family. The water on her hands was icy but warmed as it glowed and Katara closed her eyes as she held it to her companion's flesh, willing and demanding the damage to be healed. The spirits answered, and Zuko coughed—a wet, sick sound—as his golden eyes opened again.

"Thank you, Katara." His voice was weak and rasping, but relieved tears pricked and burned Katara's eyes. The water from healing had evaporated—or perhaps was absorbed, Katara wasn't paying much attention as she looked at his eyes—but her hands were still pressed into him. He was still here. He would be okay.

"I think I'm the one who should be thanking you." The fates of the rest of their family were still unknown to her, but she wouldn't be losing Zuko today. Thanks to Zuko, she was here as well. A surge of warmth that might have had something to do with the firebender beneath her coaxed a relieved sigh from Katara's lips, but the relief was short-lived as a pained cry ripped through the air. Appa!

The sound was like a physical blow to Katara, knocking her back and wrenching her head to draw her eyes to where she had imprisoned her opponent. Where Azula had knelt, bound tightly in chains and surrounded by steaming water, only the smoldering remains of her bindings remained. Panic tightened her chest as the princess's manic laughter once again filled the air, echoing around them and drawing closer, closer.

"Was that the best you could do, little waterbender?" A hand found its way to Katara's, but she found no comfort in Zuko's wide eyes. He was afraid, just as she was. "You have nowhere to hide now… Nowhere at all…"

Katara jerked awake, ragged breathing not enough to stop her from automatically bending the cold sweat off of her skin as she started to regain herself. It was just a dream. Just a dream.

Only it wasn't, whispered a tiny voice of reason from the recesses of her mind. Eyes closing tiredly, Katara only opened them again when that mad laughter began echoing in her ears.

Four days. Four days had passed since what normalcy her life had left had vanished. She and Zuko had travelled to face Azula together, but they were picked apart and played with, defeated. It was nothing short of a miracle that Azula enjoyed playing with her food—she hadn't immediately gone in for the kill, and the emptiness of the palace had kept their path clear as Katara half-dragged Zuko through the halls, leaving a trail of ice in her wake in her need to get away. There was an eel hound in the royal stables. Azula had taken care to be thorough in her victory. Appa—beautiful and rare and gentle as he was—was made another victim of Ozai's war. But he wasn't the last.

It hurt. She expected that hurt to never go away. Just a week ago, she had invited Aang to have some watermelon juice instead of training. Now…

Her mind recalled something Zuko had told her on their way to the palace: I'm not worried about her. I'm worried about Aang. What if he doesn't have the guts to take out my father? What if he loses? Katara had dismissed the words far too casually. She believed in Aang, just as she always had. He had grown so much from the little kid she'd found in the iceberg. She had seen him do incredible things, from feats of bending to selfless acts of kindness. She had forgotten, in her confidence of his strength and goodness, that this war couldn't be ended by goodness. Rumors of the Avatar's final battle raged like wildfire. The Fire Nation's common people whispered of the foolish child who had spoken to the Phoenix King, aimed to convince him away from the final victory that was so close he could taste it in the ash in the air. They spoke of how the king had laughed when they cut him down.

They spoke of the airships. How even one of the massive creations, derivatives of an invention that had once saved her ragtag family so long ago, could be used by firebenders to burn huge swaths of land—Earth Kingdom land. Some of the airships had been lost, the whispers claimed. Rebels from the lower nations had climbed aboard one of the vessels, slamming one into another in a domino effect. Enough had survived the assault for Sozin's comet to be utilized properly though, and the commandeered airship had been burned. The surrounding ships hadn't even waited for their own countrymen to be evacuated from the captured vessel and had blasted it from the sky before it could do any more damage. The whispers spoke of noble sacrifices, of no survivors.

The hole in Katara's battered heart ripped wider with each loss. Katara was nearly catatonic in the wake of the loss, but Zuko was healed enough and wise enough to keep them moving, kept them hidden despite his injuries and his own pain. There hadn't been a rendezvous point for their family in the case that things had failed. It had been a simple fact of this final assault that if it didn't work, it was going to be a march to oblivion for anyone who was left. They'd fight, but they'd die fighting eventually. Despite that, Zuko needed to know. He needed to see. Ships leaving the Fire Nation's docks would be carefully combed for stowaways, but an eel hound could cross long stretches of water without tiring. Zuko guided their stolen steed towards the landing point of the airships, ignoring the sinking feeling in his stomach that grew as Katara shrunk in on herself in front of him.

Four days of travel should have been more than enough time to get to their destination, but they were wary to travel by the light of day. Wary to travel too close to villages, to civilization. Fear of being recognized was a sharper and more demanding burden than hunger, and sleep fell behind a desperate desire for awareness—for control—and the two benders swiftly found that they could handle less and less travel each day. Still, when they finally arrived, Zuko found some certainty in his stride even in the chaos of… of what was left.

Sokka, Suki, and Toph's assault of the airship must have been beautifully executed. Carcasses of the fallen vessels were strewn over the burned and ruined landscape—metal twisted into sharp and cruel shapes still framed with red curved out of the earth like half-buried skeletons. It was clear where the captured airship had fit into the formation; most of the airships had fallen and crumbled, being destroyed mostly to create paths of escape for the survivors of the crash. Near the end of the field, however, there was almost nothing remaining aside from an exceptional mound of ash and metal slag. Zuko's breath caught and he was glad that Katara, who had stayed with the eel hound near the shore, was nowhere near this site. He had lost his friends here—the first friends he'd had who had welcomed him as an equal, friends who had freely and devotedly given him the affirmation and the hope he'd never known before—but Katara had lost as much and more. He had pondered the relationship between Katara and Sokka before with wonder; a friendly, close relationship with a sibling was such an alien concept to Zuko that it was almost startling to see one so closely. The brother and sister were unlike in a lot of ways, but each—despite any differences and petty arguments—was unequivocally supportive of the other. That support had never existed for Zuko, but Katara had just had it wrenched away from her. She didn't need to see this.

He was numb. The realization came slowly but with a startling clarity. For the first time in months, his mind went back to the failed strike on the North Pole. He'd nearly frozen to death on that glacier, and the impersonal creep of the ice was inevitable and uncaring. That same cold was seeping into his bones, and he didn't know what to do to stop or slow its spread. His breath of flame was a stopgap measure at best at the North Pole, and he would have succumbed to the ice if it hadn't been for Aang and his kindness. Zuko's eyes travelled away, following the path of destruction that the airships had wrought. Further away, down that terrible trail, Aang had fallen because of his kindness. He was barely thirteen, a child despite all his strength.

Soot prickled in Zuko's eyes before he had even realized that he'd fallen to his knees. Tears burned in his eyes, but they didn't fall and a bitter noise escaped him. He couldn't even mourn properly. The world—everything he'd hoped and dreamed in those bright fleeting moments—was gone. Ash filled his nose, acrid and biting against his palate, but he forced his breath to stay steady. In the ashes were his friends. If he stayed here long enough, he might join them.

Katara.

The thought of the waterbender stilled his breath, the ash suddenly so oppressive and cloying and wrong that he choked. Katara was waiting for him. He couldn't fall apart now. His hurts could wait, if only for a little while. He had dragged her into this mess in so many ways—he needed to keep her safe for now, for as long as he could.

If it wasn't for me, she might still be at the South Pole… The thought was bitter to think, but not for the reason he expected. The Katara he'd met there had looked at him with such contempt in her ocean eyes, but what tugged at his heart was how young she had been. He had hated her in those early moments—or, at least, he had hated her whenever he had deigned to think about her—but mostly he'd hated her assumptions of him, that he was some horrible villain existing only to destroy lives. They were mostly true, but Zuko was far too much of a boy to be confronted with those truths then. Zuko might have convinced himself that he'd become a man when he had been thrown from the palace he'd believed was his home, but he'd been handily proven wrong when he stumbled into Katara's path. If Katara had stayed at the South Pole, with all her contempt and caring hidden away in the far reaches of the world, Zuko might never have found his real family. Even sitting in their ashes, the thought of having never met them ached more fiercely than their loss.

An urgency overtook his senses as he sat, frozen in the ruined country. Fear clenched his heart as Zuko scrambled to his feet, and it tightened further even as clumsy steps took him away from the wreckage and towards the girl he'd carelessly left behind. He couldn't lose her, not now.

"Katara." Saying her name made her felt more real, less like the ghost he might have left. He always made the wrong decisions. He prayed that he hadn't made another mistake when he'd walked away from her, leaving her alone at the oceanside with her grief. "Katara!"

He'd walked further than he'd realized. The journey to the burned airship had gone by in a dark haze, but now time and distance tugged at his limbs, slowing him as he moved to return to his companion's side. The distance couldn't be crossed quickly enough, and Zuko's strides melted into a run, then a scramble as he cleared over the twisted bodies of the airships. He cleared the ridge of one of the fallen hulks, and the ocean opened up before him all at once. Katara's name died on his lips as he looked to where he had left her. The eel hound remained, but Katara was nowhere in sight.

The rhythmic crashing of the waves was lost as Zuko's ears rung with the terrified pounding of his heart. The eel hound nudged his hand before he realized that he had even made it to the beach, but his eyes were locked on the ocean, desperately looking for any sign of the girl he'd faced so many dangers with. The sea yielded none of its secrets, though, and Zuko fell to his knees. Despair laced with hot anger burned through him, scorching away the last of the lingering numbness, and he screamed into the air, a gout of fire ripping its way from his throat. He was left breathless and vulnerable beneath the afternoon sun. The flames left his throat raw and eyes half-blind from the light of it and he sank lower, resting against his knees. And Zuko, kneeling in the sand and staring blankly into the sea, wondered how much more he would have to lose before he could cry again.

At first Zuko believed that the wind had picked up, sand flicking up and into his face, into his eyes, burying itself in his clothes and tangling into his hair. The sand clung to him, though, and a moment of panic rose up until he really studied it—jaw slack and thoughts ground to a halt as the sand slowly began to creep up his legs, his hands, his arms. He dug into the sand with his hands, mouth dry and chest heaving, and the sand didn't fall away. It clumped around his limbs, surrounding him and bringing him down. Zuko sunk into the earth suddenly, surrounding by darkness and choking for the briefest of moments before he could breathe again. Opening his eyes was a useless endeavor; there was no light beneath the earth, and he wasn't aware enough of his surroundings to risk even the smallest flame.

"Is—Is it really—" His voice was unsteady, and the words were painful against his abused vocal chords, but it didn't matter. He'd hardly said a word before something small and warm launched at him and he recognized arms clinging to his midsection, a face burying itself near his chest.

"Zuko." Her voice wasn't exactly as he remembered—rougher and shakier, without any mirth or sarcasm—but he recognized her all the same. His arms moved to encircle the tiny girl, wincing at the freshness of his newest scar but unwilling to move so much as an inch away from Toph.

"You're alive." It was obvious, but Zuko needed to say it to convince himself. A new hope crept into his chest—if Toph had survived, maybe— "The others?"

Toph didn't release him, and he felt the shake of her head against his chest. The new hope twisted into something ugly and rose up higher, treacherous and traitorous, and he swallowed down the bile that came with it. He couldn't give in to that, not when—

"Katara." He breathed her name, cursing himself for his distraction. Toph was here, Toph was alive, but Katara was still missing! She could be anywhere, she could've have been captured, she could—

A hand groped blindly along his shoulder, then shifted down to trace his arm and eventually come to hold his hand.

"I'm here." Katara's voice crackled in the dark with misuse and shed tears but it didn't matter. She was here, with him and Toph, and they were safe. As safe as they could get, at least. Zuko let that thought fill him for a moment and shifted Toph slightly to include Katara in the embrace. It was dark and damp beneath the sand, but the three benders still stood together, hidden away if only for a moment.

Zuko took a deep, shuddering breath, pressing his cheek to the crown of Katara's head. Her hair still smelled of the ocean spray they'd been covered with as their eel hound crossed the sea, but it suited her. It was so unlike the palace he'd known, but it reminded him of the ship he'd grown up on, and the uncle who'd raised him with the patience of a sage. It reminded him of home and he tightened the hug around the remains of his broken family.

And Zuko began to cry.

Published 5:17, 7.24.20