A/N: Just so you guys know Korra is gone…as in GONE GONE…

Zuko's POV

It was late at night but I was wide awake. My assistant was asleep tossing and turning as she always did. Azula had done quite some damage to her. When I had found her she was practically dead. Her mind was lost and it took months for her to learn how to feel, speak, and learn again. Her body and spirit were broken. Her case was much worse than my previous apprentice, Mako. His story was completely different actually. He was but a boy trying to find his path. But he was the reason I had 'switched sides' I guess.

"Do you still feel responsible for your parent's death?" I asked.

"My anger outweighs my guilt," he simply replied.

I shook my head and took him outside.

"You have learned to bury your guilt with your anger," I told him. "I will teach you to confront it and face the truth."

We sparred outside. He was good, but I was better. Again and again I would drop him on the ice, hearing it crack under the weight of his body. I was once filled with anger and guilt, so I understood him. My mother had disappeared when I was a small child. She had left early in the morning and never came back. My father told me she did something wrong and had to be banished. I never learned what that was until later. With his occasional beatings I learned to let go of guilt and the past and embrace the present, and that's what I was going to do with my apprentice. I wasn't fully there yet, but he would succeed, I would make sure of it.

"Your parent's death was not your fault," I told him. "It was your father's."

He growled and attacked me. I easily threw him onto the ground.

"Amon had a gun pointed at his head!" Mako snapped.

I shook my head.

"When he refused Amon's proposal, he knew they would be consequences," I continued. "Your father was not a man of action. You are."

"I've had training," he said attacking me once again. I blocked his attack and took away his sword.

"Will is everything. Without it you are nothing," I said making him fall to the floor. "With it you are everything."

Mako's POV

I was beyond intoxicated at this point, just like I was many nights before this one. I would drink and then fall into a deep sleep. That was the only way I could sleep. I couldn't even sleep in the bed. It reminded me too much about her. About my Korra. I remembered holding her in my arms and watching her sleep. Even now I can close my eyes and hear her laughter. It's almost as if she was still here with me. I tried to get up from the couch but intoxicated as I was I only got to the floor. I groaned before looking up. I froze.

"Korra," I whispered.

She looked sad; her forehead creased as she looked at me.

"Don't do this to yourself," she whispered to me.

"I don't want to live without you," I choked as I felt tears falling.

"You have to live life, for the both of us."

I shook my head.

"A life without love is no life at all."

She knelt down next to me and placed a hand against my cheek.

"Please," she begged. "Fight this. You are stronger than this…person you have become. If you won't do it for me, do it for Bolin, for Asami, for Toza."

"I'd do anything for you."

"Then save yourself," she whispered before fading away. "Don't let my memory poison your heart."

I held my hand out.

"Korra," was the last thing I said before the darkness took over.

I was outside with Zuko trying to get warm after he pretty much threw me into the cold water. He looked at me and shook his head as he continued the fire. I watched him and saw a flicker of emotion that I hadn't seen before in his eyes.

"I know the rage that drives you," he said suddenly.

I looked at him still shivering against the cold.

"That impossible anger strangling the grief until the memory of your loved one is just…poison in your veins," Zuko continued. "And one day, you catch yourself wishing the person you loved never existed…so you'd be spared your pain."

I nodded.

"I lost my mother too you know," he admitted. "Around the age you lost yours. She said goodbye to me one morning and…never came back. I haven't seen her since."

"Your father?"

"Ozai, or as you know him, Ra's al Ghul."

My eyes widened.

He chuckled.

"I know you can't see the family resemblance can you?"

"You must be like your mother," I whispered.

His face partly hardened.

"So I am told."

Zuko's POV

I touched the side of my face, remembering the day my father gave me that scar. It was shortly after Mako had burned down the previous headquarters. For my failure to kill him while I had the chance, he burned part of my face, as a reminder of what my apprentice had done, and then I was excommunicated from the League of Shadows. A few years after I had found my current apprentice; I hoped things turned out differently this time.