Archive of Our Own

The Healer has the Bloodiest Hands

He had learned to understand it. That was the thing about consistent pain; it became a language, familiar enough that you stopped noticing how strange it was to speak it fluently. A tightening behind the sternum, good morning. A slow-building pressure in the left lung, like gathering breath before a long speech, pay attention. A flutter deep in the chest cavity, erratic and strange, a bird trying to exit a room it had wandered into, you have three hours before this gets worse.

Zuko had been having this particular conversation with his body for six years.

The Agni Kai was public record. The healers who attended him afterwards had been discrete, as palace healers always were, they wrote everything down in and then sealed those documents with a wax stamp no one was ever to break. The damage to the cardiac muscle had been significant. The lightning had entered at the left shoulder, they told him, and exited somewhere along the lower right rib. In between, it had taken the most direct path, which happened to be straight through the chambers of his heart.

It had stopped and they restarted it, he had been seventeen.

Now he was twenty-three, and sitting in the Grand Council chamber in the red and gold of the Fire Lord's formal robes, and the flutter in his chest was something new. It was not its usual irregular tapping, It was slower. Long pauses between beats, so long that his vision at the edges went briefly grey before the next knock came; hard and compensatory, as though his heart was trying to make up for the years of lost beats.

General Shen was speaking. He had been speaking for eleven minutes about the proposed grain surplus agreement with the Earth Kingdom's southern provinces, which was a matter Zuko had spent three weeks preparing to address with the nuance it deserved. He could not, presently, locate any of that nuance.

"The Fire Lord will recall," Shen said, turning to him with formality stretched over condescension, "that the Earth King's ministers proposed a tiered rate—"

"Yes," Zuko said. His voice came out halted; he could feel the expenditure. "Continue."

The pressure in his left lung had changed quality. It was no longer the familiar accumulation, that slow filling he had come to think of as tide-water against a sea wall, but something more acute. He breathed through it. He had become expert at breathing through it; adviser Ina had once complimented him on his composure in council and he had wanted, briefly, to laugh until he cried.

He thought about Katara sometimes in moments like this, his mind simply offered her. He thought of the healing pool at the North Pole, the way the water had moved through her hands. He thought of the colour of her bending at night, the deepest ocean dark and the pale surface shimmering at once.

He had not seen her in two years. She was in the South Pole. It was not a secret, her retreat to the place she was from was reported in every diplomatic circular as an act of cultural restoration, the Southern Water Tribe's master healer choosing to commit her skills to the rebuilding of her people's infrastructure. Sokka and Hakoda negotiated, Katara stayed home.

He understood it. He had never doubted, for a moment, that he understood it. The war had taken things from her that no peace treaty could itemise, had left wounds in her that had nothing to do with the body and everything to do with the self, and what she was doing in the South was healing those wounds the only way wounds like that can be healed, through proximity to origin. Through being somewhere that knew you before the war did.

He understood it, and he had not told her his heart was failing.

He had not told anyone, a decision he had made at twenty-one with the cold clarity that came to him when he was most afraid. The palace healers knew the history but they did not know the present. He had stopped going to them two years ago, when the chest pains became regular enough that an examination would have forced an honest accounting of what was happening. He had a list of reasons he could present, if pressed: the political instability of a Fire Lord known to be ill; the precedent of his grandfather's decline and what it had done to the court; the complete absence of any treatment that might actually reverse the scar tissue calcifying around his heart's left chamber.

He had those reasons. Underneath them was something else entirely, he had not wanted anyone to look at him with grief. He had grown up surrounded by people who looked at him as a problem to be solved or a threat to be managed, and after the war something had finally shifted and people simply looked at him, and he was not ready to have that change back into something more frightened and helpless.

He was especially not ready for Katara to look at him that way.

This thought was in his mind when the crack in the sea wall became something else. A sudden, terrible loosening, the pressure that had been building for six years found somewhere to go, and Zuko's vision went not grey at the edges but entirely white, and the last thing he was aware of was General Shen's voice cutting off mid-sentence, as the floor came up to meet him.

She had been sitting at the edge of the water, watching it, when the messenger hawk arrived.

This was itself a recent development. For the first year and a half of her return, she had not been able to be near open water without feeling the old pull; the body's reflex to reach for it, the way water called to water in her blood and that pull had arrived attached to everything she had spent it on, every moment in the war when she had poured herself outward until she was pouring from empty. She had not been ill, exactly. The Eastern masters she had quietly consulted in the final months of the peace negotiations had told her that her chakras showed the signature of someone who had, over years of extreme use, reversed the natural direction of the body's energetic current. That the correction might be slow, might be confusing, might feel like grief for something she could not name.

It had felt like all of those things. It had also felt like home, which was complicated. The South Pole was the only place she had ever been where her exhaustion was simply that, not a failure of discipline or evidence that she needed to be somewhere more useful. Her grandmother Kanna had held her face in both hands on the first night and said nothing, just looked at her, and that looking had been enough to unlock something Katara had not realised she was still holding shut.

She had stayed.

Two years and change. She had planned for six months, enough time to help establish the healing lodges, to teach what she knew to the apprentices who had grown up during the war with access to none of the training she had fought and begged her way into. Enough time to remind herself that the South existed, that her people existed, that there was something to come home to.

She had not planned to still be here, watching the water with her hands still in her lap, when the hawk came with a message sealed in Fire Nation red.

The Fire Lord collapsed this morning during council. He is alive. We request, with all urgency, the presence of a healer.

She had not planned any of the hours that followed, nor the conversation with herself that happened on the ship, in the narrow bunk in the small cabin they had given her, for the three days of the crossing.

That conversation had been the most honest she had had in years. Because it forced her to account for what she actually felt about Zuko, and the accounting was uncomfortable in its clarity.

She loved him. She loved his particular brand of moral stubbornness, the way he held himself to a standard so high it was sometimes painful to watch him fall short of it and get back up. She loved the wry unhappiness of his humour, the way he sometimes looked at her with an expression she could not fully read but which felt, in her body, like being stood in sunlight. She loved that he had never, not once, treated her gifts as something to be managed or used instrumentally.

Katara had not told him any of this. She had, in fact, organised the last two years partly around not telling him, which had been achievable in the South Pole.

The damage, when she saw it, was worse than she expected. The scar tissue around the left chamber had been contracting for years, gradually reducing the chamber's capacity. The pericardium had been compensating, then overcompensating, then beginning to strain under the load. His lungs showed the secondary effects; fluid, not yet critical but building, the body's response to a heart that could no longer move blood at the rate it needed to.

The lightning had done this, six years ago, and no one had been watching it.

Katara called water into her hands and set to work, she did not allow herself to look at his face for the first hour.

She had also not meant to start talking. It had been a habit she had picked up years ago, a technique primarily developed with children, the steady stream of reassurance, I am here and you are not alone. Along the way it had become a background she only noticed when it was already happening.  

He was unconscious. His breathing had steadied in the second hour; the fluid was slowly responding to her bending, the water answering her impossible questions with each bend of the wrist. She wasn’t overly optimistic as his heart rate settled but she had been working for four hours. Her own exhaustion was a low hum behind her eyes, as she pushed her hair from her face once again.

She was watching the rise and fall of his chest when she started talking.

"It's strange," she spoke out to the room, to him. "Coming back to a place that isn't home and having it feel more familiar than it has any right to, I've been in this wing before, different circumstances, you were the patient then, too."

She adjusted the pull of the water, following a thread of contraction in the muscle. "We had a betrothal necklace meeting in this corridor once. Do you remember that? You'd just finished court and you were still in the formal robes and you stopped to ask me something, I can't even remember what now, and you were so formal about it, so careful, and I remember thinking that you were trying very hard to speak around what you really wanted to say."

She hummed as the arrhythmia had not shown itself in the last twenty minutes.

"Gran-Gran asked me about you, the first month I was home. Not directly, she never does things directly, she just said, 'that young Fire Lord must have his hands full,' and said nothing else… I told her you were fine. I told her the reconstruction was going well and that you'd been attending the Peace Council meetings and that you'd resolved the Caldera Bay fishing dispute without anyone going to war, all of which was technically true." She smoothed water along the outer surface of the pericardium, feeling for resistance. "I did not tell her that I couldn't decide if staying home was courage or cowardice… I still haven't decided."

"The water is different there. I know that sounds simple, but I mean it in a way that's hard to explain. It's… heavier. Not in volume, just in the way it responds to me. Almost like it knows me, there's something in it that recognises me." Her voice had dropped without her noticing. "I used to think the only thing I wanted was to leave. I wanted it so badly as a girl that it was physical, this need to go further, to be somewhere that the horizon was not ice, and now I've been everywhere I wanted to go, and the ice is the only place where I feel like I can breathe."

"I haven't bent much. Not in months, really. I've been teaching, which is different, watching and demonstrating in small ways. But the big bending... The Eastern masters I saw said it would come back in its own time and that I had to let it. They said the war had reversed something fundamental in the way I move energy, and I believe them, but there's also something else." She paused. The water moved in slow, even circles. "I think I'm afraid that if I use it again the way I used to use it back then, I'll become whatever that person was again. I'm not sure I'm strong enough to survive being her."

"I told Sokka to go. I asked him to be there for me, which is not something I do easily, and he went without complaint, which is one of the things I love most about my brother. He would tell you differently, he'd say he went for the glory of the negotiating table, that diplomatic immunity is the peak of his ambitions, but he went because I asked." A small sound, not quite a laugh. "Dad went because he goes where we go, I don't think he minds, I think the ocean is home enough for him that any ocean will do."

"I stayed because I was frightened," she said, very quietly. "I stayed because I knew that if I left I might not be able to go back. Not just to the South, but to myself. And I couldn't face that. I was selfish. I know I was selfish. I know there were places I was needed and I was not there and I have to—" She stopped, taking a breath. "I have to live with that."

She was not sure when she began crying, only that at some point her hands were wet from more than bending.

"I wanted to come back to myself before I came back to anyone else." She wiped her face with her forearm, awkwardly, without breaking the water's motion. "I wanted to be someone I recognised. I wanted to be able to look at someone I—" She stopped again. "At someone who matters to me, and not feel like I was made of holes."

"I'm not sure I'm there yet, but I came anyway. You're here and I came, and I think that probably tells me something about whether I actually had a choice."

She realised she had been speaking for a long time. She pressed the back of her hand briefly to his forehead and became aware that the stillness in him was different from an unconscious stillness. 

The gold of his eyes, when they opened, was not the clouded half-focus of a man newly woken. He was looking directly at her.

"You're awake," she breathed out, softly.

"For a while," he said, his voice was rough.

She sat back and removed her hands from his chest, a small frown pulling at the sides of her mouth.

Then she asked, "How long?"

"Since the Agni Kai," he said.

She made a sound, it pulled from her chest and hit the back of her throat, a mist settling over her eyes once again.

"Six years," she said.

"The healers at the time—"

"Six years, Zuko!"

He looked at her. He was still flat on his back, which was not a position of power, but then again she had never needed a position of power to make him feel the presence of her attention. She had always been capable of looking at him as though she could see every room of him, including the ones he kept locked.

"They told me the damage was significant," he said. "They didn't know—"

"Stop." She stood up. She paced two steps, but the room felt entirely inadequate to contain what she was feeling. "Stop explaining what they told you. I want to know what you did."

"I was managing it."

"You hid it."

"I— yes,” he frowned. “I hid it."

"From everyone? From the palace healers? From—" She cut herself off, tears pooling in her eyes, a heavy weight settled behind her sternum. "From me," she whispered.

He met her eyes and did not look away, he would take a blow full on the face rather than deflect it if he felt the blow was fair. 

"Yes," he said. "From you."

"Why?" Her voice cracked.

He was quiet for a moment. She watched the muscles of his throat work; he had always given her the unedited version and she was furious with him, even if underneath that she was also enormously grateful.

"Because you were rebuilding," he said. "I knew you. I knew that if you found out you would come, and I didn't want you to come because you felt you had to. Because you owed me something, the balance sheet of the war had an entry in my column that needed settling."

She stared at him.

"Zuko."

"It wasn't— I know how that sounds—"

"It sounds," she said, carefully, "like you decided for me, what I would feel. What- What I was and wasn't capable of carrying." She came back to the bedside, sitting down and angling herself directly at him. "You decided all of that on my behalf. And I want you to think, right now, about what that implies about what you think of me."

"I didn't want to be a burden," he said. The words came out smaller than he had intended; she could see that in the slight tightening around his eyes, the involuntary admission that was the foundation beneath the political reasoning and the nobility of it. "You'd given so much to everyone, to the war. I knew what you were doing there was necessary, and I didn't want to be the thing that called you away from yourself again."

She was silent for a long moment.

"Look at me," she said.

He was already looking at her, she meant something else by it. 

"I know what it is to give the past empty," she said. "I know what it is to come back to yourself and find less than you left. I've been living in the aftermath of that for two years, and I am not—" Her voice broke, only slightly. "I am not so fragile that the knowledge of your pain would have unmade me. I am not that easily broken and I need you to know that. I need you to have known that."

"Katara—"

"It isn't about owing," she said, desperately. "It was never about owing. I have been in the South Pole for two years thinking about what it would mean to come back and be somewhere near you and not feel like I was about to fracture, and I have been waiting until I felt solid enough, and you could have told me anything! Anything at all! And I would have found a way to hold it, because I wanted to, not because I owe you a debt from a lightning bolt you took when you were seventeen."

She stopped, having already said more than she had planned to say, the speech became something more personal than the argument she had been making, as she waited for the regret to come, the instinct to walk it back.

It didn't come.

He was very still, she watched the flickering behind his eyes.

"You said you wanted to be near me," he replied.

"That's what you're taking from that?"

"I'm taking everything from that," he said, waving his hand. "I'm just— starting there."

The anger was not gone; it was still there, built from years of worry, but underneath it was something else, and she was done pretending it wasn't there.

"You almost died," she said, her voice soft once again. "You were dying for six years and you didn't tell me. And I am angry at you for that, I need you to know I'm angry."

"I know," he said.

"But I'm also—" She pressed her hand against her sternum, mirroring without knowing it the gesture he made in his worst moments. "I'm here. That's what I'm saying, I'm here because when I read that message I couldn't— there was never a version of that moment where I didn't come."

He reached for her hand and she turned her hand over and took his.

"I want you here," he said. "I want you alive and here and I have wanted that for longer than I am willing to admit to right now while I'm still horizontal."

Despite herself, despite all of it, she laughed. A short, helpless sound. He was watching her with an expression she’d only caught in fleeting glimpses, a look that belonged to the man caught between his public persona and his private self.

"Rest," she said, not letting go of his hand. "We'll talk more when you've rested."

"Katara."

"What?"

"I'm sorry," he said. "For deciding what you could carry, I was wrong."

She held his hand a moment longer. Then she brought it to her forehead, pressing it hard against her temple, a gesture that in the Water Tribe meant I receive this, and set it back carefully at his side.

"I know," she said, smiling softly. "Sleep now."

Zuko slept as Katara continued to heal him.

She sat beside him in the dim light of the healers' wing, the palace had given her a room, but she had not left his side, and no one had asked her to and she worked the scar tissue around his left ventricle in increments so small they were almost theoretical.

Scar tissue did not simply dissolve. This was something novice healers always wanted to believe and had to be disabused of; the romance of the cure, the body returning to its prior state as though the wound had never been. Scar tissue was the body's way to close around a wound that threatened to be fatal. The work of a healer was not to remove it but to soften it, restoring the flow that the rigidity was obstructing. 

She had not done work this complex in two years. She could feel the slight shakiness at the edges of her extended bending, the energy moving in channels that had been quieter since the war. She watched herself for the signs the Eastern masters had warned her about, the point at which she tipped from giving toward consuming. But the water here was clean, and she felt herself giving without depleting, the ancient corrective reciprocity of water and living flesh, the body's language she had been born speaking even when she had forgotten how to use it.

She thought, while her hands moved, about what he had said. The logic of protection masquerading as consideration. She knew it well, that logic; she had deployed it herself more than once, had shielded her father and brother from the weight of her own inner state across the worst years of the war, had presented a face of competence so complete that for a long time none of them had known she was drowning. She had done it out of love, and the effect of it had been a profound loneliness she had not fully identified until she was home and no longer doing it, when the loneliness was suddenly audible.

He had done the same thing. He had looked at her situation, at the distance she had put between herself and the demands of the world, and decided that his need did not qualify as something she should know about. Her healing took precedence over his, in a calculation that was selfless and had come very close to leaving her to find out about his death the same way she found out about his grandfather's; in a diplomatic dispatch, formal and too late.

She was not done being angry about it, but she also understood it.

Around the third hour he stirred without waking. 

Without thinking she said, quietly, "I'm here."

His breathing settled. She thought about the years of his life in which no one had said that to him at the right moment, the years in which the wrong people had been in the room and the right people had been kept out, and she thought about her own years of waking alone in the war's aftermath, how parallel it had run in how many ways, how close and how long averted.

"I'm here," she said again, to make sure. 

Zuko slept through until morning.

On the third day he was sitting up. He had not been given official permission to be sitting up, but he was stubborn and the healer had been awake for thirty-six hours out of the last forty-eight and was asleep in the chair six feet away, and so he had exercised his judgement.

He was watching her sleep.

He had been watching her since she arrived, she was not different in the ways he had worried she might be different. She was not diminished. If anything, what the last two years had done to her was a kind of deepening,there was now something underneath it that he could only describe as rooted-ness.

He thought about what she had said. All of it, but also the things she had said before she knew he was awake, what she had offered to the room. 

Over the years, he had become cautious about the things he wanted. Caution was not his native mode; it had been a learned behaviour, acquired at significant cost, the direct result of a youth spent wanting the wrong things and being shaped by the consequences. He had learned to examine desire before he moved toward it, to ask whether it was love or projection, if it was his or something he had absorbed from the people around him.

What he felt for Katara had survived every examination. Had been present so long and in so many forms that he had stopped asking whether it was real because the question had become unanswerable by its own absurdity. Of course it was real, It was the most real thing he had.

He had simply also believed she deserved better than to have it directed at her when she was trying to put herself back together in peace.

Now he was re-examining that belief, looking at her sleeping in a palace chair on the third day after she had crossed the ocean to arrive at his bedside, and something that had been carefully maintained within him for years was pressing at the seams.

She opened her eyes.

The morning light was a pale gold of the Fire Nations spring time, not hot yet but warm enough to feel it, as it moved across her face and the water she had left in the healing bowl beside him.

"You're sitting up," she said.

"I made an executive decision."

"You're the Fire Lord. You shouldn't have to make executive decisions about your own recovery protocols."

"And yet."

She stood, stretched and came to check his pulse with the automatic competence of someone who has done it a thousand times. Her fingers on the inside of his wrist were warm, he held still.

"Better," she said, meaning the pulse. She was not quite looking at him, having retreated into the clinical mode that let her touch him without either of them having to acknowledge it. He let her have it for a moment. 

"I meant what I said."

Her fingers did not move. "Which part?"

"That I've wanted you here. That I've wanted to tell you for longer than I have…" He felt the familiar pressure of self-editing, to frame the declaration with enough diplomatic language that it became only approximately itself. "I've been in love with you since the comet, possibly before. I haven't done anything with it because I thought you needed space to be yourself without me adding to the weight of what you were carrying, and I still think that was partly true. But I also know now that I was using it as an excuse to not risk anything."

She was looking at him now; fully present, no protective frame between her and what he was saying.

"You're recovering from a cardiac event," she said.

"I know."

"This is genuinely terrible timing."

"I know that too."

"I'm also—" She stopped. The word she had almost used was visible in the air between them. "I'm also in love with you. I've been in love with you for a long time and I'm angry that you didn't tell me you were dying, and I'm angry that I spent two years convincing myself I was staying in the South for the right reasons when half of it was fear, and I don't know what any of this means yet in terms of—"

"It doesn't have to mean anything yet," he said. “Right now, it can just be the truth…”

She looked at him for a long moment, this man who had once been her enemy and had chosen, at seventeen, to catch a lightning bolt he knew would damage him rather than let it reach her, who had spent six years managing that damage alone in the way that seemed to him like the most loving available option, sitting in the grey morning light of his own recovery room telling her the truth, finally, without the management.

She sat down on the edge of the bed.

"Yes," she said. "Right now."

It was the fifth day when it changed between them.

He was out of bed. She had cleared him for light movement, which he was interpreting generously, and she had stopped arguing about it because his colour was better and his pulse was strong, the honest truth was she needed to see him vertical, to see him taking up space in the way living people do, because for four days he had been horizontal and all of her associative instincts were still processing the image of him on the council floor that she had only heard described and not witnessed, her mind had nonetheless rendered in full in the early morning when she woke in the chair.

They had been talking all day. About what he had been doing for six years, what she had been doing. The fishing dispute he had mentioned in passing, which turned out to be genuinely interesting from a resource-allocation perspective, which she had opinions about. The healing lodges, and the gaps in the traditional water bending archives, the names of the apprentices she had taught who had already surpassed what she'd expected of them.

Briefly, about Iroh who had sent three messages since the collapse, who Zuko clearly loved, she had watched him talk about his great-uncle with something warm moving in her chest, this recognition of the tenderness he was capable of and how rarely he let it show in the presence of anyone who might use it against him.

He had let it show with her, from the very beginning, which she had not fully understood was unusual until she had spent years in courts and councils watching him hold himself back from everyone else.

Now it was evening, the light was the deep amber of the Fire Nation late afternoon, pouring through the high windows in long bands across the stone floor, he was standing at the window with his back to her, the thing that had been building between them all day had reached a point of pressure she recognised.

Katara had spent two years learning the difference between action that came from fear and action that came from choice. The Eastern masters had been clear about this, the reversal in her energy flow had happened because she had spent years acting from urgency, from the war's relentless demand for output, and the correction required her to learn to initiate from a place of stillness rather than depletion.

She was still now. 

"Zuko," she said.

He turned. He read her face and what moved through his expression was akin to hers. 

"I'm not supposed to—" he started.

"You're cleared for light activity," she said. "I'm the healer. I'm telling you this qualifies."

He laughed. The laugh opened something in his face, stripped the last of the formal surface from it, left him as she had only ever seen him in a handful of unguarded moments; amused and entirely himself.

"Come here," she said softly, beckoning him towards her with her hand.

Before he had the chance, she crossed the space between them. She had thought that when this happened there would be more ceremony to it but her body had its own accounting, and it had been patient long enough.

She put her hands on his face, his skin was warm. She felt his hands come to her waist, asking permission with the touch, and she answered him by pressing her forehead to his.

The amber light moved across them and the sounds of the courtyard below rose and fell, neither of them moved for a long moment, taking the measure of what it was to simply be here, with nothing between them.

Then she kissed him.

Not gently, she had been gentle for five days. She kissed him the way water moves when it has been held back long enough; with the pressure of its own accumulated depth.

He made a sound against her mouth and his hands at her waist became less careful.

She drew back enough to look at him. His eyes were open, watching her, that gold attention she had felt on her skin since the first day she had come back to this room.

"Sit down," she said.

He sat on the edge of the bed and she came to stand between his knees, she looked at him from this small height as she put her thumb against the scarred cheekbone, very lightly, and watched him embrace it without flinching.

"I kept thinking about you," she said, quietly. "In the South. When I was trying to be still enough to hear myself think, I kept thinking about you. I decided it meant I wasn't still enough" A small, wry curve of her mouth. "Didn't help."

"It didn't go away for me either," he said. His voice had that roughened quality she was coming to associate with honesty. "I told myself you needed space and I gave you space that it was the right thing to do and I—" He stopped, hands squeezing her hips. "I was very well-behaved about it."

"You were," she agreed. She kissed him again, slower this time, mapping the shape of him. She felt the tension at his jaw and something in her responded to that restraint with its precise opposite.

She stepped back only enough to reach the ties of her outer robe, and she watched him watch her hands as she worked them. She let the robe fall. Beneath was the lighter inner garment, Water Tribe in its cut, blue at the hem and cuffs.

Taking his face in her hands again and this time there was no distance in it, she kissed him in the full, particular way of someone who is done postponing themselves, and she felt his hands move up her back and then into her hair, the carefulness was entirely gone from him now.

She pushed at his shoulders lightly and he lay back, watching her. She worked his robe open with care and pressed her palm flat to his sternum, feeling the heart beneath. Its rhythm, the repaired and still-repairing muscle of it, beating for her with the same persistence it had beaten when she had her hands in his energy fields, when she had been following the scar tissue through his chest like tracing a river back to its source.

"Still there," she said, softly.

"Still here," he said.

She brought her mouth to his collarbone, his shoulder, the ridge of the old lightning scar, feeling him still beneath her.

She kissed him.

Her hand left his shoulder, tracing the mid-line of his abdomen, the muscles tensed and quivered beneath her palm. Her fingers brushed the edge of the sheet still tangled around his hips.

Zuko's breath caught.

"Katara."

"Shh." She pulled back just enough to meet his eyes. "Let me."

The sheet fell away as she looked down. The sight of him sent heat rushing through her belly. Her body understood what her mind couldn't articulate, the ache between her thighs pooling into something that bordered on pain.

She wrapped her fingers around him. As Zuko's head fell back, a sound escaped his throat and his hands clamped down on her thighs with a grip that would leave marks.

"Is this alright?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Tell me if—"

"Katara, if you stop right now, I will—"

She tightened her grip slightly, and the words died in his throat.

She shifted her weight and positioned herself above him, letting the tip of him press against her entrancer. She moved over him slowly. There was no urgency in her, this was the thing she had learned in the South, the thing the stillness had given her back was the capacity to be in a moment without trying to get to the next one, without the war's old urgency pressing at her back. She wanted to feel it.

And she felt the warmth of him, his body against hers, the way he moved with her and not ahead of her, following her lead. 

She braced her hands against his chest and she moved, watching his face as he watched hers with those gold eyes that had never, in all the years she had known him, looked away from her in a moment that mattered.

I should have come sooner, she thought, I came when I could.

She thought nothing after that, because the part of her that thought fell quiet in the way the sea falls quiet in a deep swell, as she moved with him in the amber light that had deepened now toward red, the years between the war and this room were still there, the weight of themselves, were not resolved or erased, but they were behind her.

When she came it was slow and complete, she heard him say her name as she pressed her forehead to his, they were still.

Later she laid alongside him with her ear against his chest and listened to his heart.

It was not a strong heartbeat, still showing the compensatory pattern of a muscle that had been doing too much for too long and would need careful and consistent attention. 

"I'm going to have to go back," she whispered, to his heart. 

"I know," he said.

"The apprentices there are things I need to finish before I can—" She stopped. She had said I can as though there were a sentence attached to it, a next step that had already been decided. She looked at this fact with some curiosity. "I'm not sure of the timeline yet."

"I know," he said again. His hand was moving in her hair slowly. "You'll go when you're ready and you'll come back when you're ready. And I'll— I'll tell you when there's something to tell you. No more managing what you can carry."

"No more managing what I can carry," she agreed.

"I'll need continued treatment," he said, with a dryness that was almost entirely deadpan. "Medically speaking. Ongoing cardiac care. It would be irresponsible for a healer of your standing to simply abandon a patient at this stage."

She laughed. She felt it move through him; his chest under her cheek, the warmth of the laugh before it reached his face.

"That's a very creative interpretation of post-operative protocols," she said.

"I'm the Fire Lord, I'm allowed to be creative."

She lifted her head to look at him.

"Okay," she said, simply. "Okay."

She put her ear back against his chest and his heart beat on.