"Change is the constant, the signal for rebirth, the egg of the phoenix"

-Christina Baldwin

The Last Dragon

Chapter 1: Things Change

The Fire Lord was bored.

It wasn't anyone's fault really. The palace was operating as normal, a few messenger birds zipping past the windows and servants scurrying this way and that. The day was bright and beautiful, lighting every bit of the newly restored palace until it shone like a ruby under the sun. Zuko had ordered in the beginning that the towns would be repaired before his own palace, a gesture that assured his people he would care for them as his predecessors had not.

It had been almost two year since the conclusion of the war, the war people were now calling 'Sozin's Madness'. Zuko had his own thoughts on the matter, referring to it as 'That damned stupid war' if he talked about it at all. He wanted so badly to just let the war sink into the oblivion of history, to have everyone forget that it was the Fire Nation who had thrown the world into chaos. Even when he's rotting in prison, Father can still screw with my life, Zukowas heard to mutter under his breath more than a few times.

But the trust of the Avatar, the savior who had restored balanced and defeated armies and the Phoenix King himself, went a long way towards helping the rest of the world trust Zuko. His family had a reputation for madness and war, something he worked desperately hard to get past in the first few months. He hated to admit it, but the scar seemed to help. It reminded people that Ozai and Zuko had been enemies, not partners. There were still the radicals who saw all people remotely connected to Fire Nation royalty as evil and more than one attempt had been made on his life, but even those had started to subside in the wake of the good he was doing.

Peace talks were going well, there was open communication between the Nations, even Earth Rumble Seven no longer had to be held under ground. Or were they on eight now?

But it all lead back to the same thing: the Fire Lord was bored.

It wasn't that he missed the war. Never that. He had nightmares about the world ending in flames or dancing blue and red, but he did miss seeing the world. It had been months since he'd seen anyone that wasn't in the palace. The Fire Lord's duties seemed to mainly consist of reading paperwork and then signing it, over and over again. Orders to rebuild the damn with less pollution, gaming regulations in the hills, complaints that all seemed to begin with my-neighbor's-eel-hound-never-shuts-up. Every little problem was the end of the world in someone's eyes and all of them wanted Zuko to deal with it personally.

Once he'd even tried to sneak away, just to get a breath of the air outside of his capital city but he hadn't gone even a block before one of his advisors had tracked him down and all but dragged the reluctant fire bender to another council meeting. He hadn't tried again.

Zuko stretched at his desk, massaging the cramps out of his hand and glancing over the letter he'd been composing to the leader of the Earth Nation's swamp villages. He'd been struggling with the wording for over an hour now. How did you outline a treaty with a man who thought everything from death to pants was an illusion?

"Finished? They're sending the messenger hawks out for the day," Mai's voice drifted through the air to Zuko. He smiled and looked up at her. Her hair was drawn up in two perfect buns, the strands falling from it dark enough to capture even moonlight. He'd asked her once to try wearing it down, loving the way it looked when it was free and wild, something he only glimpsed as she was getting ready for bed at night. She'd only shaken her head and reminded him that they were trying to put up a dignified face and there were always ambassadors around.

"You can't have them thinking you're just a kid." She'd said. "The Fire Lord's reputation has is the reputation of the entire nation." They hadn't discussed it after that.

"Mai," he said with a smile, putting an arm up to draw her down for a brief kiss. Their lips brushed and then she turned to look at the paper in front of him. She gave a sigh and Zuko winced at the disappointment in her voice.

"You didn't finish," she said.

Zuko frowned and pushed himself away from the desk, standing and trying to shake his limbs to life. "I'm not just goofing off in here you know," he grumbled. "But messenger hawks sent all the way to that swamp have a tendency not to come back. If I only get one letter through, it has to be perfect."

He glanced at her, part of him wishing she would laugh and assure him that he didn't have to be perfect. That it was alright to screw up once in a while, make little mistakes, spill something at dinner. That he was still allowed to be Zuko.

Instead she pulled him in for another brief kiss, the half smile on her lips vanishing into the mask she'd been trained from childhood to wear. His heart seemed to break every time she brought it out around him. "I know you can do it, Zuko. Don't worry."

He smiled as though reassured but couldn't keep the expression once she was gone. He took a deep breath and glanced back down at the half finished letter. "… maybe I should offer to get him a belt?"

"Katara, the training dummy is dead. Stop torturing the corpse."

The water bender paused and drew back the strands of water from the sack of dirt she'd been hammering into the ground for the past half hour. It was sliced four ways to Sunday and only a bit of the original dirt clung valiantly to the coarse material. The crude face they'd drawn on one side had been washed off within the first five minutes of her attack. In truth the most challenging part of the exercise was showing enough restraint to keep the sack together enough to train with it.

"Aang, you're back," Katara smiled, pushing her dark brown hair behind one ear as she looked at the young man who stood in the door way. He wasn't a boy any longer, hadn't been for a long time. It really wasn't fair. Coming out of the block of ice three years ago, Aang had been such a happy kid. The world had demanded he abandon that joy and in the end he had. Dressed in the symbols and colors of a monk, 

it was easy to see the years that had aged his eyes. Aang held every life that had been lost in that war in his heart. She could hear him cry out in his sleep, countless names slipping out of his lips. Monk Gyatso's name was one of the most common.

It wasn't fair that Aang hadn't been allowed a childhood when few had loved life like he had. But then, none of them had really had childhoods, had they? She and Sokka had grown up as almost the sole survivors of their generation, knowing they had to protect both those older and younger than themselves. Toph had been fenced in, breaking out of her shell in the form of an invincible fighter in illegal underground sports. Suki had been groomed to be a warrior from youth, taught to hide her identity under paints to confuse the enemy. And Zuko…

Zuko had his own scars, and not only the one that adorned his face.

"Katara?"

"Hmmm?" She suddenly realized Aang was in front of her, looking at her with concern. It surprised her sometimes, how tall he'd gotten. Over the last summer his body had seemed determined to make up for lost time. One more like that and she'd be the one looking up when they talked. They were almost eye level now, barely half an inch separating them.

"I was going to ask how the searches were going, but you kind of spaced out on me there." He smiled softly, that gentle smile that radiated peace and serenity. It wasn't his fault but… sometimes that smile annoyed her. It was the same, no matter who he was talking to. Couldn't there be a smile that was only hers? But that was selfish. Aang belonged to the world. Never really to her.

Sometimes Katara wanted to shout 'I was there first! When the rest of the world forgot you, gave up on you, I was there. But now…' Now he had embraced his life as the Avatar. And the Avatar had a duty to the world before anything else. Even her.

"The searches are going as well as can be expected," she said with a light laugh, pushing her worries to the back of her mind. "The ones who've survived this long are the ones that are really, really good at it."

It had been Katara's mission for the past year and a half to sniff out the war criminals that had escaped the long series of trials at the end of the war. Zuko had dealt with most of those in the fire nation, granting pardons when it was clear the generals were only acting under orders and had done no cruelty outside the basics of war and sentencing others to banishment or imprisonment if they had tortured prisoners of their own volition or encouraged their men to do the same. There was so much gray area, nothing had been black and white since the end of the war.

No, even before that her lines of absolute right and wrong had begun to shift and slide. When had that happened? When she'd blood bended the first time? Perhaps in a cave that had glittered with green rock where she'd been held prisoner alongside one of the most confusing human beings she'd ever run across.

"Katara, you're doing it again," Aang said, a touch of soft laughter in his voice. Katara gave a start and then laughed herself. She pressed a kiss to his cheek, fingers sliding over his neck and pulling him into a warm hug.

"Sorry, Aang. I guess I'm just tired." She pulled back and took his hand. "Hungry? I smell roasted whale jerky. We should get some before the rest of these guys gobble it up." She spoke the last part as she led him out of the training hut and into the middle of her camp.

Tents of various nationalities and designs were scattered haphazardly around a central fire. All the nations had leant benders to Katara's mission. In total they were ten: two water benders from the Southern Water Tribe, four earth benders, and three fire benders. And of course Katara herself. And helped when he could. He was probably with her more than he was any other one place, but that still wasn't very often. Sometimes she didn't see him, didn't hear from him for weeks. He had to 'restore balance to the world'; something she had once thought was taken care of with the simple destruction of Ozai. But it turned out to be much more complicated. Old hatreds among the nations were slow to die.

The men and women she now worked with on a day to day basis were all excellent in their bending, precise and well trained. The group had traveled together for so long now that they knew each other inside and out, but for Katara there was something missing.

After the war, she discovered she was a legend. Their small group was almost as revered as the Avatar himself, each nation touting their individual hero or heroes like victory flags. Toph, of course, had loved 

it and Sokka was so wrapped up in Suki that he probably didn't notice but for Katara it had hit hard. Her new traveling companions followed her, respected her, trusted her. But she could hear laughter and jokes fall silent when she approached the campfire at night, making way for a respectful silence.

She looked forward to these times when Aang visited, not only because she loved him but because she knew he understood. He'd been put on a pedestal his entire life after all. With him she was free to joke and tease, act like the child she wished she still was. Even now eating a simple meal of roasted whale with him she could shut her eyes and pretend Toph was teasing Sokka off to one side, making Suki laugh, and Zuko fiddling with the fire on the other side, trying to figure out why the meat seemed to only burn on one side.

Later, when the embers were starting to cool and the rest of the camp had begun to drift in the direction of their various tents, Aang followed Katara back to hers. She knew what it meant when he followed her to say goodnight. "You're not staying."

"I can't," Aang answered with a helpless shrug. He reached out a hand and pulled her to him, lifting her downcast chin for a moment. "Before I go…"

"Aang, we've been over this," she cut him off. "Not yet. Not when I only see you a few times a month for a few days at a time."

"You know you were of marrying age when the war ended," Aang reminded her. "You'll be an old maid before you know it." His teasing was light and free but she knew underneath it was real sorrow and it broke his heart every time she said no, the same way it broke her heart every time he rushed off and disappeared into the sky.

"Be safe, Aang," she said instead of answering, leaning in to kiss him. His lips were soft and sweet, but a tang of bitterness lingered long after she'd watched him vanish into the darkness and had gone back to her own bed to dream.

"Chief!" bare feet slapped against the stone walkways, hurrying away from the temple and towards the edge of the Sun Warrior's civilization where the chief was known to meditate in the sun. Well, he said he was meditating but quite a few of the warriors had heard 'chanting' that sounded a whole lot like snoring.

"Chief!" the messenger called again as the chief of the Sun Warriors stood up, looking around in confusion. "The egg! It's-"

The messenger didn't get any farther than that. For a large man, the chief could move when he wanted to. The leader arrived at the temple minutes later. The doors were opened, allowing him to move directly into the main chamber. There wasn't time to worry about the disregard for security the warriors had been showing lately, opening the door when it wasn't yet the solstice.

"Show me," he demanded as he moved through the small crowd that had gathered around the pedestal in the middle of the room. The statues frozen in the fire bending stances around them looked on, silent witnesses of this historic moment in time. The first and only dragon egg in centuries was in front of them.

And it had a crack.

The Sun Warrior's Chief sucked in a sharp breath, dark skin paling slightly. "Summon the Fire Lord and the Avatar. It is time."

Review please. I'd like to know if this is worth continuing.