Inspiration: "Antissa" by E. S. Posthumus

If there was one thing that Zuko hated even worse than ice and snow, it was trying to sleep during the day.

Zuko was a firebender. He rose with the Sun. Unless he was exhausted to the point of collapse (a fair number of Blue Spirit escapades came to mind), if the Sun was in the sky, that was when his body and mind were going to feel the most awake. Though he'd heard that it was possible (and something told him that the people who'd succeeded at this had never been firebenders), through keeping regular hours and the brutal reinforcement of routine, to change one's sleeping schedule, no matter how long he had been making the attempt, he simply could not get used to it. The end result was that he slept badly every single day until sheer exhaustion caught up with him, at which point he'd manage a good nine hours or more of blissful, uninterrupted sleep… only for the cycle to start all over again the next day, when he felt too refreshed to rest when he should. It was driving him crazy.

Of course, he also didn't have a choice—not when the only safe way for him to travel was by night.

He wore a hooded cloak pulled low over his face, even as he traveled on the remotest, shabbiest back roads when he was lucky and through the wilderness when he wasn't. His Blue Spirit disguise had been compromised when they'd been captured by Hide and his soldiers, and if anyone were to see the mask, it would be no less dangerous than showing his real face. So Zuko made sure that no strangers saw either one of his faces, by avoiding the chance for other people to see him at all. It was one of the loneliest, most frustrating journeys he'd ever undertaken, and not for the first time, he wished that Katara were here.

"Zuko, talk to me."

He blinked. "About what?"

"I don't care," she snarled—or tried to, though the last word came out as more of a sob. "Something. Anything."

It was the one thing she'd asked of him for herself, after eight years, journeys that had spanned continents, and a trust he didn't deserve—yet, he groped for words. Zuko's strength had always lain in acting, and though he'd been trained to speak before crowds during his time as a prince, it wasn't a prince that Katara needed now. She was frightened, and in pain, and Zuko could make only the barest of gestures to give her comfort…

He swallowed, opened his mouth, stopped… swallowed again.

He never had been sure exactly how to comfort her, and it was far worse now, when she was so badly hurt and more vulnerable than he'd ever seen her before. The last time he'd been this close to death…

Midway through his first week at sea, freshly burned, he'd gotten an infection that had led to a fever. Everyone, even the ship's doctor—even Zuko himself—had thought that he was going to die. Uncle had never left his side during that time, pressing cool cloths to his head and neck, tipping broth or medicine into his mouth, holding his hand whenever he wasn't lucid enough to protest, thumb running gently back and forth across his knuckles. It was the one thing he could remember clearly from within the fevered haze: an unobtrusive, light touch that should have been all but invisible amid the searing fever, the delirium, and the white-hot brand eating into his face, yet stood out all the more for being so soothing and gentle and the one thing that didn't hurt.

Uncle had talked to him, then: long, rambling stories that he could barely remember now, the scattered pieces that would come to mind making no sense whatsoever. Fire Nation mythology, he thought—tales from the ancient times, before nations, possibly even before bending. He certainly couldn't have made a coherent story out of it now. Zuko did not know any good stories, had not bothered to learn them since his mother had left.

His mother…

"Have… have you ever heard the story of Love Amongst the Dragons?"

"Is that the one the Ember Island Players butchered ever year?"

"Yeah." In spite of himself, he smiled. "My mother loved that play. She always told it better, though. It starts when the Dragon Emperor is cursed by a dark water spirit to be trapped in mortal form…"

It took time for the healer to arrive, time enough for him to finish the story. Though they reached a point where he couldn't even be sure Katara could hear him anymore, he made sure to tell it all the way through to the end:

"Though I was trapped in the body of a mortal, you willingly gave me your heart! I cannot help but give you mine in return!"

Whenever he had a quiet moment, after he'd pitched camp, hunted dinner, curried the ostrich-horse, and tied it to a nearby tree (though always making sure it had enough of a lead to graze), he would take a brief moment to sit down while his meal was cooking, take out the necklace, and run his fingers over the carved stone.

This time, Zuko was the only one who was potentially going into danger. Normally, only he would have left his dagger behind… but he also thought that he knew why Katara had pressed the necklace into his hand.

"Lien!" He was so exhausted his arms were shaking, the hard floor dug into his knees, and he could only grunt out words in uneven bursts in between the thrusts of his hands. "What—happened?"

Even as he paused to breathe air into Katara's lungs again (he tasted vomit when his lips met hers), Lien was pulling liquid from Katara's waterskin; the eclipse, it seemed, was ending. "I found her," she whispered as she pressed the water to Katara's side. "But she didn't want to come back."

It couldn't have been more than a few minutes between those awful words and Katara taking in her first gasp of air… but those minutes had seemed like years. The dragging time had been made all the worse by the question still stabbing incessantly through his mind: how could he have missed the fact that something was wrong?

"Katara, I… I could wait. Until you're a little better, that is. If you… I mean, if you want me to…"

"Tui and La, Zuko, don't be stupid." She was still having trouble breathing, and it was difficult for her to speak above a whisper. "You need to do this, before things get even more out of hand. We'll be fine."

A large and aching part of him wanted to argue—but he also knew that Katara was right. Whoever had given them away was still out there, he still didn't know what they wanted, and until someone found out, everyone—including Katara—was still in danger. Best to take care of things now, before anyone had a chance to strike at her again, while she was still vulnerable.

Letting out a breath of resignation, he reached into his boot and pulled out the dagger. Katara's fingers curled around it when he placed it in her hand.

"We'll be fine," she repeated. His feelings must have shown on his face, though, for she closed her eyes for a second before drawing her free arm out from under the blankets and placing her hand in his. Zuko felt the weight of a small, carved stone in his palm. "I'll be fine." Her gaze was intense—this was the old Katara, the one who'd frozen him to the side of a glacier and threatened to kill him if he hurt Aang. With a nod, he closed his fingers around the necklace in acceptance of her vow.

At least, he thought after "waking up" (and he used that term loosely, since he could hardly be sure he'd been sleeping to begin with), stiff and irritable, after yet another day's worth of tossing and turning, it could be worse. At least it was the rainy season.

Normally, he would have considered that a bad thing. Rain as a rule made him feel sluggish and sapped of energy—but right now, the clouds covering the Sun made it a bit easier for him to drift off for a few hours. He might not feel rested in any real sense of the word, but at least he wouldn't topple over from exhaustion while he was on the road.

There were still several hours left until sunset, so Zuko occupied himself with chores. There certainly wasn't a lack of things to do: breakfast needed to be cooked (and more often than not, it needed to be caught and skinned first), tent and blankets needed to be packed, and the ostrich-horse needed to be groomed and checked for injury. As boring and repetitive as the activities were, Zuko threw himself into each and every one. It helped keep him occupied.

Once the essentials were taken care of, he spread a blanket over a log and sat down, pants in hand, and took out a needle and thread Katara had lent him to continue some patching there hadn't been time to finish before he left.

When she finally arrived, Song started by ordering everyone out of the room. When Zuko tried to stand up after that interminable amount of time spent kneeling on the floor trying to keep Katara's heart going long enough for Lien to heal her, however, he immediately toppled over.

Looking down, he was shocked to find that his pant legs were completely shredded—as was most of the skin on his knees. After a few more tries and with the aid of Piandao's crutches, he eventually managed to get up and into the next room—where he promptly collapsed into the nearest available chair.

"How long were you at it?" Looking up, he saw that Piandao was holding out a damp cloth.

"I don't know." Zuko accepted the cloth, and gingerly began to clean the damaged skin; the stinging sensation made him hiss in pain. "Until Lien could waterbend again." He glanced at the girl, who sat with her back against the wall and her arms wrapped around her knees, and was watching them intently.

"At least an hour, then." Piandao took back the now-bloody cloth, and handed him another. "I'm afraid this isn't surprising, given the hardness of the floor."

"I'll live."

Slowly, tentatively, Lien lifted her chin from her knees. "I'll—"

"Don't."

She cringed back into position, and Zuko took a deep breath as he willed the tension from his voice. "You're already exhausted, Lien," he added more gently. "I'll be fine. You've already done more than enough," he continued when her eyes remained downcast. "The only thing you need to do right now is rest."

Lien did not speak again, and stayed in her position by the wall while Zuko rolled up his pant legs and propped first one foot, then the other, up on a stool while Piandao sat next to him and helped him bandage his knees.

"Did you leave any of them alive enough to talk?"

"I don't know." He thought back to the battle. He'd been so terrified and so furious, intent on protecting Lien and Katara; everything else was a blur of fire and flying steel, blood on his hands. "There was one woman I sent over a cliff," Zuko said at last. "I don't know whether she made it or not."

"Well, it's a start." With a grunt Piandao pushed himself to his feet, leaning heavily on his cane. "I'm going to go see what I can find. You stay here. You're in no shape to be running around the woods."

Under any other circumstances, Zuko would have protested. Right now, however, he could barely stand, and even if he were physically capable, he could not have left Lien alone, or Katara either, when she was so badly hurt. Instead, he simply nodded, and stayed where he was while Piandao went out into the night.

Looking back to Lien, Zuko was glad that he had refused her offer of aid: while Piandao had tended his injuries, she'd fallen asleep, slumped against the wall with her mouth open though her limbs still twitched fitfully. This whole night had been exhausting for her—aside from the trauma of the attack itself and watching the only mother she'd ever known nearly die before her eyes, she'd used up so much of her own energy in healing Katara, and the night was now more than halfway over…

Several more minutes passed before Zuko could find the strength to push himself to his feet. While he eventually managed to stand up, he could only move at a shuffling crawl—but he nonetheless staggered to the room where Piandao kept the spare blankets, leaning heavily against the wall all the while.

When he came back out with a blanket over his arm, he'd merely intended it tuck it around Lien before sitting back down in the chair and keeping watch until he knew Katara's prognosis. When he heard Lien whimpering in her sleep, however, Zuko shook his head sadly, lowered himself carefully to the floor, and draped the blanket over them both. Lien leaned into his side as he settled, and Zuko wrapped an arm around her, taking what comfort they could from each other's presence as he drifted off to sleep beside her.

When he started to feel genuinely sleepy, Zuko knew that it was time to get moving. With a sigh, he pulled his pants back on—the patch on the right knee was almost done, but there was a substantial flap of it that was still unattached, and he knew that more than half the stitches he had sewn tonight would end up getting torn loose again while he was on the road—and mounted the ostrich-horse.

The cloudy skies might have been a boon as far as letting him sleep was concerned—but the constant rain also meant that he did not make good time.

The roads that he took (when he stayed on the road at all) were shabby, and more often than not ran with water. Worse was traveling through the forest, where the slightest misstep could land on a patch of mud hidden under fallen leaves, causing an uncontrollable slide, and he had to move slowly to avoid injuring his mount.

This is ridiculous, he thought to himself more than once. In decent weather, I could have been there and back twice over!

Yes: in decent weather, with a decent road, a sturdy komodo rhino, and no need for secrecy. Those were a lot of ifs. Of course, life had never been kind to Zuko and he didn't see why it should start now, but he still felt a frustrated, impotent rage well inside of him at the thought that this time, others had been dragged into his bad luck. It was times like this that he desperately wanted to grab Destiny by the shoulders, give it a few hard shakes, and demand to know why it thought that Katara and Lien deserved a piece of the mess that was rightfully his.

You know why, a voice whispered in his head. This time, it's not you they're after.

In the morning, when he was getting ready to bed down for the day, Zuko would take out Katara's necklace, and his mind strayed to what he had left behind. In the evening, however, when he was preparing to move out, his full attention was on the scroll.

Zuko jerked awake when a hand touched his shoulder. Looking frantically around him, he saw that it was now early morning and that a mud-splattered Piandao was standing over him with a grim expression on his face.

"I know you're exhausted," he said, "and that you are anxious to know about Katara. But this cannot wait."

Whatever he had managed to find, it couldn't be good. Zuko pushed himself to his feet with a groan—every muscle in his body had gone stiff—and left the blanket tucked around Lien before he hobbled over to join Piandao in the main part of the house, where his former master was already brewing a pot of very strong tea.

"None of them were alive by the time I got there," he said without preamble as Zuko pulled up a chair. "But I found this," he handed over a rolled piece of parchment, liberally splattered with blood, "on the body of one of the men."

Zuko took it. He read it. Then, he read it again, and again just to be sure he'd gotten it right the first two times.

Piandao was polite enough to pretend not to hear when Zuko threw it back down on the table and proceeded to go through every word of the not-inconsiderable vocabulary he'd picked up over the three years he'd spent at sea.

Now, every evening, before the light had faded too much for him to read, he took it out and read it again, trying to figure out who had written it, what they wanted, and what would happen when Zuko confronted them.

To the man with the scar:

I know who you are, and I know what the girl is. Meet me in the place where the lotus grows and the ice is eternal. Bring one of the waterbenders.

After the way the war had ended, the writer could not have come from either one of the poles. That left only one option: Zuko and Katara had only been able to come up with one place where the ice never melted, and that was the Misty Palms Oasis.

"Whoever it was who sent this was careless. Though it was obviously meant to find you, it somehow fell into the wrong hands along the way, and led the attackers straight to us."

It was because of that urgency that Zuko's journey could not wait. Though he did not know the motivation of the writer, there was one thing he was sure of: whoever it was wanted something from him, and from Katara or Lien. If he did not respond, there would be another attempt—and the next time, they might not be so lucky.

Lucky. Katara was lucky to be alive. He reminded himself of that, whenever despair or doubt started to get the better of him. She had survived. She had a healer. Even if that healer had every right to be angry at him…

She looked older than Zuko remembered, her face more lined and her mouth turned downward into a permanent weary frown, her eyes both duller and much, much harder than they had been before. It was, however, unmistakably her: the girl who'd spoken to him of hope and hurt, who'd fed them and helped Uncle without asking anything in return, and whom he'd repaid by stealing away in the night with her ostrich-horse because he'd thought he was entitled to it—and there was no way she could have failed to recognize him as well.

"I—"

His mouth was suddenly dry; he couldn't speak. At the time, his immature, entitled mind had been telling him that he had a right to it, that no peasant's need could possibly be more important than his, but for all he knew that animal could have been her livelihood, and he'd taken it without a second thought. Zuko had wronged her, but right now Katara needed her help, and if she refused because of him…

"Zuko?" Katara was still woozy and weak, her eyes out of focus, but she had sensed the tension in the air and was now frowning in his direction. "Do you two know each other?"

He froze. No. No no no, this was not happening—but it was. Katara had never before forgotten to call him Lee, those few times they were in company and needed to use names, but then again, Katara had never before been this out of it from blood loss and painkillers, and Song's eyes were widening as she connected the dots.

"Please…"

He was begging. It was the first time he'd begged since he'd fallen to his knees in the arena before the man he'd still thought was his father, yet the shame and despair of that thirteen-year-old on his hands and knees was thoroughly crushed beneath what he felt now. He did not know whether she would forgive him, and he wouldn't have blamed her if she'd stayed angry at him for the rest of eternity, but Katara needed her and he felt bile rising at the back of his throat at the thought of what his own selfishness might have cost…

"We met once." The healer's eyes flicked to him with a low, steely "Later" before she walked right past him and knelt beside Katara, with only a single backward glance. "I'm going to need everybody to leave the room."

That had been one of the worst moments of his life, and he'd never been so relieved as he'd been when she'd disregarded his crimes against her in favor of helping someone who needed it. It wasn't until the next day that she'd cornered him for real.

"Do you know why I kept that ostrich-horse?"

"I—"

Her grip on his wrists was loose, her fingers resting over his pulse points with a feather-light touch, but it bound him as thoroughly as any steel manacles ever had. Wordlessly, he shook his head.

"It was so that if there was ever an emergency, I could get there faster. It was because sometimes, a few minutes can mean the difference between life and death." She paused, shook her head, and for a split second her face took on the same innocent vulnerability he'd seen in her when they'd first met, before promptly hardening again. "So tell me, Prince Zuko." She rolled his real name around on her tongue like an unfamiliar sweet. "What was your need?"

Instead of answering, he shook his head, and asked a question he'd asked once before. "What can I do to make it up to you?"

Briefly, her fingers spasmed around his wrists before relaxing once more. "Look at me." Unwillingly, he raised his eyes to meet hers. For a few seconds, she searched his face, though there was no longer any anger in her own. "There's nothing you can do," she said at last, softly. "I'm not the one who was hurt, and those who were are beyond the point where any apology will help them."

Later, however, she'd come to him again, after he had finished putting Lien to bed. He'd sat with the girl for nearly an hour before she'd calmed down enough to sleep, and come out of the room with a heavy heart only to find Song waiting for him outside the door, arms crossed.

"That girl," she said without preamble. "She isn't yours, is she?"

"Not by blood." After Song's adamant insistence that they not tell her any details she didn't need to know, he couldn't help but wonder where this was going.

"She's a waterbender. A former slave, would be my guess."

Wordlessly, Zuko nodded.

"You taking care of her… it might ease your conscience, but she's only one child. Do you honestly think that if you take her in, it will make the world better?"

At that, Zuko stood upright, and faced her with no trace of doubt. "I know it will."

For a moment, she seemed startled, and gave him a searching look. "You already know that there's nothing you can do to change the past," she said at last. "But I think you might understand now. It's the future that really matters."

A/N: Song: tend patient first, take it out of Zuko's hide later.

Well, it looks like the chapters are coming out shorter in this round, but the good news is that that means they'll be posted a lot faster. I might even be able to manage weekly updates if I keep up this pace.