Freedom
"I could give you everything." He whispers hotly in her ear. "When you come back to the Fire Nation, you'll have everything. Anything you want will be yours, I'll command it to happen."
Katara steps carefully away from the prince, and reaches up to gently stroke her hand over his cheek. "I know. But that's not why I love you."
Zuko looks down in confusion, trying to read her. "You don't want to be a princess, to have power?"
"Of course I do, every girl's dream is to fall in love with a prince, but I don't want that to be the reason I love you." She says as she moves back into his embrace. He enfolds her in his arms as he listens to her. "I don't want our life to be based on money or power or ordering people around. I want our love to be based on this," she throws her head back to look at the sky painted with colors. "On sunsets and sunrises and blue skies," Her eyes find his. "On hard work and pain and tears," she traces his lips. "On whispered promises and friendship and love," She kisses him. "On everything we've been through, and everything we will go through,"
He kisses her back, at a loss for words, because everything he's done until know has been for power. The endless striving and searching and the goddamn emptiness, all to gain the golden dishes and crowns and the beautiful songs of his country. And now, now that he's at his lowest, living with a bunch of runaways and peasants in an abandoned and forsaken nation's ruins, whole and happy, having the best time of his life and utterly despised by his country, he realizes that he doesn't want power anymore.
He doesn't want the nervous glances and quick, low bows and the regal silence of the courts that is underlined with tension and deceit. He wants this, the open air, the long days and nights filled with laughter and planning and love, the banter between the children of four nations united for the first time in one hundred years. Children, his head reels at the concept, children who adults always say don't understand war and peace, succeed in areas where adults have no hope. He wants Katara, strong and steady and fire and water all mixed into a dizzying solution that makes him drunk and powerful when he's lost everything, to stay with him always. He wants his freedom, realizes it's what he's wanted all along, and now that he has it, he's going to keep it.
