"Tell me a story."
Zuko looked up at the stars and sighed, trying to focus on the sounds of the waves as they rushed toward the beach before he laid back, resting his head on his hands, Katara curled up next to him, laying her head on his chest.
"I've met you before," he whispered. "Back in the days when the spirits roamed the earth. You were a fox spirit. I was a human. By all rights, you should have killed me for trespassing on sacred land, but you didn't. I held out my hand to you, and you licked me."
He paused, waiting to see if Katara would say anything. She didn't.
"The next time we met, we were both children. You had short black hair and green eyes. My father was carrying me on his shoulders. He let me down so that I could win you a toy you wanted at the carnival. We promised to write each other. We never did.
"Ages passed. Sometimes I'd pass a young woman and think I've seen her somewhere before. I'd never say anything. Once, you were a cat. I tied a blue ribbon around your neck. You were a princess."
Some birds called above them ast Katara laughed quietly. She snuggled closer to him, and Zuko wrapped his arm around her shoulder, adjusting his temperature to keep her warm.
"There were lifetimes when we hated, and lifetimes when we loved. There was one time where you killed me. You were a warrior queen. You had me beheaded. In the next, you were captured and presented to me. You were my slave."
Zuko took a deep, shuddering breath, feeling bubbling in his chest. Katara rubbed a soothing circle. There was no way she couldn't hear the sadness and heaviness in his voice. Zuko waited, listening to see if any of the others had come out of the beach house.
"I never had the strength to dominate you," he whispered, aware of his face heating up. "Your eyes were fierce. Daring me to mistreat you. That was the first time I learned of your power. They executed you. I mourned your death. You smiled at me.
"Sometimes, we almost miss each other. Sometimes we completely do. In those lives, I'm always aware of your absence, even if I don't know why I'm sad. The part of me that lives and remembers knows you're out of my reach. I like to think that you felt the same way, but I always knew I wasn't supposed to ask."
"Were we ever happy?"
"Yes. The best are always the ones where we can spend an eternity together. Sometimes eternity lasts for seventy years, where we watched our children grow up and have children of their own. We had grandchildren and great grandchildren. Sometimes eternity lasted the twenty minutes it took us to..."
Zuko cleared his throat, his face as red as his shirt. Katara giggled, propping herself up on her elbow so she could see him. He tried to look away from her. She gently turned his face toward her again, pecking him softly on the lips.
"In every lifetime," he said, pushing forward, "I wonder if this is the last time. If, at the end of it all, we'd never truly be together."
"But we have, right? We've been together all this time."
"We have."
Katara sighed contentedly, snuggling against him, and he wrapped both of his arms around her, crushing her against him.
"That was a beautiful story," she whispered in his ear.
"It's one of my uncle's favorites. My mom loved it, too." He sighed, standing and pulling her to her feet. "Despite what people think, the Fire Nation can create beautiful things."
Katara yawned, stretching her arms skyward, and Zuko looked at her, wondering how they would end up in this lifetime. He wasn't sure when he'd started believing that he saw them in this old Fire Nation tale, but at some point he had. Maybe it was in those moments after taking her to confront Yon Rha and before they'd rejoined the rest of their group on Ember Island. Maybe some part of him had always believed it, the part that lived, the story called it. They'd certainly found each other again and again.
"Are you coming?"
Katara was holding her hand out to him, standing a little ways in front of him, the moon behind her, giving her a slight halo of light. Zuko chuckled to himself, shaking his head as he took long steps to catch up to her. When he touched her hand, he felt a little spark. She gasped, and when their eyes met, some deep part of him stirred. For a moment, they breathed together, then she smiled.
"We should get some sleep," Katara said with a sad smile. "We still have work to do before we can see what this lifetime is all about. And when this is all done, you can come to the South, and I'll tell you the tale, the way we do in the South."
A/N: So, I'm tossing this into the wild with the least amount of editing I've ever done before. Mostly, I just needed to purge this idea. Typed it right into the post box on Tumblr, then posted it, and I figured it wouldn't be fair to post it on one site and not the other. As a slight aside, I'm slightly more active on Tumblr (elledix), though stories will always be posted on both sites. You just get to see more bits of my headcanon when I reblog fantastic art and the like. But this was inspired by something I'd seen quoted on Tumblr about meeting someone through a thousand lifetimes, and it always hits me with Zutara feels. I don't know what else to say. I'm rambling. I hope you like it.