i.
The first package arrived when The Order of the White Lotus found the next Avatar. One of the guards found it lying on her doorstep, half-hidden in the snow. The water had washed away most of the words (written in crude ink), but Katara managed to decipher three fleeting characters: 卡塔拉. Katara.
Unwrapping the first layer, she found dampened leaves wrapped in cheap newsprint stamped with names of cities and towns. Omashu. Gaoling. Shu Jing. Jang Hui. Places she had visited at fourteen, but now at forty they were nothing but scars and old waterskins. The leaves smelled faintly of fire, but perhaps that was just the gaslamp outside.
Aang saw her clutching the soaked leaves from the small window and promised to write Zuko another letter. He poured a third cup of tea for the spirits, and entered the room.
ii.
Each time Zuko decided to visit Ember Island, it became more surreal and more deteriorated. A horizon where he was free to be lost in his dichotomy. Driftwood washed up along the store. Clutter and useless things. Posters of the Ember Island Players, seashells, seaweed. Once, he found a broken tsungi horn, and maybe it had been his imagination, but beside it was Katara's necklace, cracked and faded. (Or was that an old coin?)
It had been the summer all the turtle crabs died of dinoflagellate blood.
He thought he found one floating on the ocean, but it was only sea foam. Still, he dove in, hoping to preserve some mental image or waxing poetic. And maybe, maybe if he thought hard enough, his memories would project a real turtle crab, just one.
He blinked once, and suddenly saltwater was everywhere. It kissed his eyes and danced in his lungs and he thought he saw his mother (or was it Katara?) floating away in the ocean, but he was drowning and the turtle crabs were dead and the storm clouds began to remind him of Azula.
Thunder and lightning and his lungs bursting with saltwater.
Then, it started to rain. If he looked hard enough, each rain droplet started to look more and more like Katara. If he thought hard enough, maybe, just maybe, each droplet would become her.
Zuko wondered if it was possible to drown in a storm.
iii.
"They're all gone."
"Not us."
"Not yet."
"Sit down, Katara, and let's have some tea."
iv.
In another life, another samsara, Katara would have used the spirit water to heal Zuko's scar. But she wouldn't be healing it, not truly. Cutting off the nerves, but leaving the dead skin. The husk. The shell. The molting. Some forgotten dead spring moon.
He would tell her: "I can't feel the left side of my face."
And she would place her hand on it, just to be sure, an action that would have made him flinch, but Zuko would just close his eyes and walk away.
(Maybe, if there really would be nothing, he'd stay still and wait until the feeling came back.)