Important update: It looks like I have finished the time-consuming medical school application process with fabulous results (a merit tuition scholarship to a top 20 medical school!). Thank you so much for everyone's support during this long process. However, my profile page still contains the update section regarding progress through upcoming chapters that I originally started because of the unpredictability of updates during these past few months. Reviews are love, inspiration, and motivation.

What you have read ten thousand times in the past: fabulous Zutara fanfictions that snag moments from the canon show and expound on them, small breaths of hope for a shipping that sank as deeply as Zuko's ship in the first season. I am a long time stalker, first time writer, and have enjoyed most fanfictions it's been my pleasure to read—and I will continue to read all of the talented, insightful work to be found on the site. But what I have noticed in my three years here is that rarely does a fanfiction do more than pick at the bones of the onscreen canon for the little Zutara meat there is, or else it will simply begin at the conclusion of the show and essentially disregard the absolute Kataang implications that were clear at the end of Sozin's Comet.

This fanfiction will not disregard Kataang, or Jinko, or Maiko, or any of the other shippings that, however briefly, marked the lives of key characters in the show. Nor will this story focus on a brief exchange of snark, a night sitting outside a tent, or an embrace as the springboard for a Zutara shipping.

This journey into the Avatar world will attempt to do something else entirely.

Here we begin with a moment, too, but not just any moment. The moment. The moment that, had it gone a little differently, would have happened early enough in the show to still have enough time, over the course of the events that followed, to direct Zuko and Katara's affections toward one another. I refer to the conclusion of "The Chase," wherein Team Avatar offers Zuko help and is rejected by a brutal "leave." Erase that one word (or else have the team insist on caring for Iroh), allow Zuko to join the team then and not wait until "The Western Air Temple," and we have another story entirely.

This is that story.

Rest assured, this will be an epic like few others. It will certainly be a long-haul journey for all of us, writer and readers and characters, but a journey well worth the effort. This will be a fanfiction told in nine overarching parts subdivided into ten chapters each for a total of ninety chapters (plus this introduction and a conclusion). The first six parts are set during the war and the final three in its aftermath. These nine parts follow a lovely poem by Robert Frost called "Fire and Ice." Each stanza will correlate with a key moment, image, theme, or idea that prevails across the span of the chapters the given stanza represents. Together we will journey across a desert and into Ba Sing Se, be captured by the Fire Nation and befriend an unforeseen ally, be betrayed by the family we fought to protect and saved by an enemy we once despised. There will be sinking ships (real and love-wise) and Fire Lord tears—and not the young future Fire Lord you think I mean.

With luck, this story will change your perspective on Zutara because it will do something very interesting: create a Zutara story from scratch, a Zutara that doesn't ignore but embraces Kataang, one that struggles and comes very close to not making it. And in the end, it will be a death that determines the fate of this shipping. Not the death you expect. Not a death that, were I to tell you now just who is going to die, you would ever think you would mourn. But this story is going to change all that. You'll cry for people you thought you hated. You will hate people you thought you loved.

At least, I hope so. As you read the story and enjoy it (or don't), please leave whatever feedback is on your mind. My goal is simple: to weave a good tale and take you on a fun trip. It'll be nice to know how close I'm coming to meeting it.

May the spirits guide us all,

~LadyAvatar