Aang and Katara descend to his kingdom like deities out of the sky. Air and water and light. They seem to emanate hope.

Aang speaks of the Fire nation's past and its future as if he could stitch the two together into a seam that would cover up the present. For a hundred and sixteen year old boy, for the Avatar, a hundred years is as real as yesterday or tomorrow.

Katara strides through his blood red halls in a swath of blue silk and speaks of factory pollution and water supplies. She waves her hand over maps of his kingdom and tendrils of water stain the areas of greatest need.

The factories there, he tries to tell them, were the only source of work for those people.

Send them back to their farmland, Katara replies. The Fire Nation needs food.

The nobles snatched up the farmland generations ago. To just send them back would mean starvation or worse.

Aang wants everything to get better, now that the war has ended, but he furrows his brow in what is becoming a habitual expression of both frustration and patience.

Work on it, he tells Zuko.

That's what I do every day.

For all that Aang still retains the innocence and joy of a child, he matured over the course of the war and he matures even more doing the work of peace. He has begun to grow into the identity of Avatar. He is beginning to walk with the wisdom of his countless former lives.

Katara, on the other hand, is impatient for progress. She can't rely on words and she can't glimpse a problem without wading in to help.

While Aang and Zuko lock themselves in with papers and visions and histories, Katara flies off with Appa into the night. She returns a week later exhausted, trailing soiled robes and villagers' accolades. She didn't blow up any factories this time, she tells them.

The peasants see her almost as a goddess, while the nobles see her as Water Tribe infiltrator, a subversive foreign threat.

The river may be clean now, but a small city's worth of workers still can't survive on fish.

That was only the worst town that was hurt by the peace, Katara explains. Their water was poisoned but it's healed now, she offers with a shrug. It's a start.

Zuko grumbles at her to stop meddling.

Either way, he has to work to change the whole structure of the economy and he has to work to fight or mollify the nobles and he has to work to win over the citizenry and he has to work and work and work.

You can handle it, Zuko. We believe in you.

She stares into his eyes like that should mean something, like the trust of a girl in a boy who had once betrayed her means anything to the whisperers just waiting for their chance to curtail the radical and traitorous actions of this false Fire Lord.

Stay with me, he wants to beg her.

He wants to cling to the Avatar's feet. Take me with you. Please.

Aang and Katara take their leave as softly and completely as smoke, as water vapor.