"Here is my formal letter of resignation," Katara slid the letter across Zuko's office desk towards him.

"W-what?" She ignored the betrayed look in Zuko's eyes. She had to get this done so she could get out of here.

"Thank you for your time. I… I really enjoyed working with you."

"Katara, if this is about last night, you do not—"

"I wish you all the best moving forward," she interrupted before he could say anymore. "You're a great leader. I know the Fire Nation is in capable hands."

Zuko looked like his mind was moving a mile a minute. As soon as he looked like he had formed something he wanted to say, he stopped himself.

"Goodbye, Fire Lord Zuko."

Zuko blinked at her, surprise and pain etched into his face. "Good-goodbye."

She paused to look him over one last time before she turned and left his office.

It was hard to believe how much had happened over the past twenty-four hours.

The morning after the party, despite waking up from a nightmarish hangover, Katara was able to relish in a blissful moment of ignorance, the events of the night prior forgotten. She sat up in her bed, and checked her phone to see what time it was. She was greeted by dozens of texts and missed calls. Cheng, Sokka, Suki, her father… everyone had tried to reach her. Hoping everything was okay, she clicked the phone open and checked on Cheng's messages first. He kept it simple with just two texts. The first was a text consisting of only question marks. The second was a picture of the front cover of the Ba Sing Se Post, which featured a picture of Zuko and Katara. At Toph's party. In front of the pool.

She scrambled to her feet. She had kissed Zuko. Worse, someone got a picture of it.

No. No, no, no. no, no.

That was when everything started moving quickly. She wrote her letter of resignation in her bed, got dressed, and made her way to Zuko's office. Then she resigned.

Why would she put herself through all of this, you ask? Well, that was easy. Katara could longer ignore her feelings, not anymore. She kissed Zuko. And now she had to deal with not only her unignorable feelings, but also the photo evidence of it that had been blasted across all of the major Earth Kingdom news outlets. Now Zuko knew, and so did the rest of the world. She couldn't lie to herself anymore. She developed feelings for Zuko. Game over.

The worst part was that she didn't even understand how she got here. Her job was to get Zuko to open up. To do that, of course they had to form some sort of relationship! The relationship changing from one of a functional coworker dynamic to something more romantic in nature just sort of happened. It had never been a problem in the past. She had her fair share of clients that she worked with for her podcasts, and nothing like this had ever even crossed her mind. Things were just effortless with Zuko. She couldn't control it. Even worse, she couldn't work around it. How could she write anything unbiased about him now?

It doesn't matter though. Her intentions didn't change the fact that she compromised her journalistic integrity. Katara lost sight of what mattered. She wasn't about to give up her job doing what she loved because of some foolish flight of fancy. No more of that. From this point onward, Katara promised herself that this time, when she went back to the Earth Kingdom, she'd throw herself into her work, kick ass, and then come home. No strings attached, no feelings hurt.

She packed her bags and scheduled the next available flight out of the Fire Nation. She made calls to everyone who had messaged her that morning. She apologized to her family. They told her that she had nothing to apologize for. They were obligated to say that. She asked Sokka to pick her up and he hesitantly agreed. He asked her if she was okay. She told him that of course she was. Why wouldn't she be?

She called Cheng last and told him that she would be coming home. He gave her the most resistance of the lot.

"Katara, are you sure you want to do this? The Burning Questions is your baby… This doesn't have to change anything. We can do damage control," He pleaded with her.

"No. I don't want to be able to jeopardize my job like that and get away with it. I refuse to be the journalist with a reputation for getting too close to her coworkers. What's done is done."

Cheng remained silent for several beats. "Alright…" He cautiously replied, "Well what are your plans now?"

"I want to come home. I'll take another position at EKPR," she concluded.

"Right, well when you get here we can talk about that. I have to see what position we might be able to give you..." he drifted off.

"Sure, I can meet whenever. Send me an email with a time and place and I'll be there."

"I want you to really think about this, Katara. No one is calling you an ineffective journalist. People actually seem to be taking the news of your relationship quite well."

"It wasn't a relationship," Katara snapped, "And what people are saying about it isn't why I have to do this. I know it was wrong and that is all that matters."

"Alright, alright," she could hear the exhaustion in his voice, "Then I'll see you when you're in town. In the meantime, don't be too hard on yourself."

"Thanks Cheng. See you."

The plane ride home was quicker than she wanted. She stared out the window of the plane, earphones in, and watched as the Caldera, and everything that it represented, slipped out of view. Given the privacy of a mostly empty plane, she succumbed to the storm brewing in her gut, and for the first time in a long time, she cried.

xxxxxxxxx

Katara watched Sokka wrestle her luggage into the back of his car. He brought the car that he normally used for Ubering so that he could pass through the normal pick-up area and wait for Katara in the zone for rideshare vehicles only. He truly thought of everything.

After he loaded everything into the car and closed the trunk with a heavy thud, he reached over to Katara and gave her a firm hug. "Welcome home, sis."

"It's nice to be back," she lied. Kind of.

They got into the car and Sokka fought his way back from the airport and into the city. She was quiet throughout most of the ride. It was like seeing the Earth Kingdom with new eyes all over again. Although in the grand scheme of things, her time in the Fire Nation was short, she still felt the whole experience had shifted her perspective in a way that made the ground under her feel unstable. Would things ever return to normal?

She didn't know what she was going to do. She didn't have a place to stay or a car or even a stable job yet. She hated how dependent on other people she would have to be. There wasn't anything she could do about it, either. She did this to herself.

She swallowed her pride and spoke up finally, "Do you mind if I crash at your place for a little while? Until I get back on my feet?"

"Sure! Of course. What's mine is yours!" Sokka replied automatically, "Plus, Suki would love that. She's always complaining about how hard it is living with all of us boys."

"Okay. Yeah. Thank you…"

They arrived at the house and got Katara's things sorted into the bedroom. It didn't take too long. She only had a couple of suitcases. There were a couple times in the process that Katara looked up and saw Suki nudging Sokka conspiratorially. After she caught a glimpse of it the third time, she spoke up, "Is everything alright?"

Sokka cleared his throat, "Yeah! Yes," he scratched his head, "We just wanted you to know that it's okay if you want to talk about what happened." She looked from Sokka to Suki who was nodding along encouragingly.

She felt herself getting defensive. They were treating her like she was a child. She was a grown-ass woman. She could handle a little bit of heartbreak. More than anything, she just wanted to be left alone.

Still, they were just trying to help and she couldn't isolate herself from everyone. Lashing out like a wild animal wouldn't do her any good. It certainly wouldn't convince them that she was okay.

"Okay. Thank you. I don't think I want to talk about it right now, but I'll let you know," she responded diplomatically.

They nodded and, after they confirmed that she had everything she needed, they left her alone with her thoughts.

xxxxxxxxx

The next day, she made her way to EKPR. She arrived early so as to avoid running into the rest of the staff. And she knew Cheng would be there. He always was. So when she knocked on his office door and he responded with a cheerful "come in!" she was not surprised.

He got up and hugged her when he saw her, "Katara! Hi. Welcome home!"

"Thanks Cheng. It's good to be back," she responded.

"How are you hanging in there? Are you okay?"

Spirits, she wished people would stop asking her that. "I'm good, yeah! Ready to get back to work."

"Right.. About that…"

"What have you got for me?" She sat across from him.

"Well, I'm sure you know that we had to shut down International Hour? We weren't getting enough listeners to justify the full staff."

"Right, I did hear about that. I'm sorry that got cut. But I don't have to go back to international politics. I'll honestly take whatever you have."

Cheng grimaced. "We might have an open position in the basement?"

The basement. That was where all the entry level researchers worked. They did a lot of fact-checking and proofreading and document summaries. It was a scut job with a high turn-around. Everyone hated it there.

"Oh," Katara deflated. "There isn't anything else…?"

"Not right now, I'm afraid… We weren't really expecting this to happen and I can't really force someone out of their current position for you."

"Of course not, yeah," Katara reeled. "Okay. I'll take the research job. I don't mind."

Cheng sighed. "Okay. I'll let them know. I'm sorry, Katara. If there was anything I could do, you know I would. Things are just hard."

"No, it's fine! I'll make it work. I appreciate you giving me another chance."

What she wouldn't do to go back to how things were a week ago.

xxxxxxxxx

Katara started work the next day. Instead of taking the normal elevator trip up and onto the 8th floor, where her old office used to be, she took it down into the basement. Everyone stared at her while she made her way through the aisles between the desks to find where she would be sitting.

She looked down at her first assignment. She was to read the reports from the Beifong party and generate a summary. Great. She got to reading. She still felt everyone's eyes on her. She gave a few of them nasty looks. It felt good. She looked back down at the paper and took a deep breath. She just had to suck it up, write the summary, and move on. She did just that.

Glad that that was over, she moved onto her next task. A biography of all of the ministers in the fire lord's council. Wonderful.

xxxxxxxxx

After a couple days of work, she came home, worn to the bone, and made her way into her bedroom. Without bothering to change out of her work clothes, she dropped onto her bed, and closed her eyes.

She opened her eyes to a room much darker than it was when she closed them. She checked the clock. 9:30pm. Shit, she had fallen asleep.

She got up and changed into her pajamas. Her stomach growled. It was too late at night to have dinner, but fuck it. What did she have to lose? She left the bedroom and made her way into the kitchen.

Passing by the living room, Katara saw that Suki and Sokka were still awake and sitting on the couch watching TV together. She didn't want to interrupt their family time, and wasn't particularly in a talking mood anyway so she decided to try and sneak by unnoticed.

She paused when she saw what they were watching on the screen. Zuko walked through a crowd of reporters, microphones shoved up to his face. He tried to shield himself with his hands and turn away from the crowd. Through the yells of the reporters, she heard him mumble "no comment" before a guard intervened and started pushing the crowd back.

Fire Lord Zuko has remained alarmingly quiet when asked to comment about the recent string of palace employees' resignations. Here to discuss whether the nature of the fire lord's relationships with his employees borders on inappropriate is our host…

She walked into the kitchen in a huff. From the other room, she heard that someone quickly changed the channel and then Suki, in a hushed voice, asked, "Do you think she heard?"

She closed her eyes and leaned against the counter. Could she just have one day without having to think about how much she screwed up? Not only did it seem like the entirety of the Earth Kingdom had something to say about it, but she also had to go through all of it in front of brother and sister-in-law.

As an added bonus, she was now trapped in the kitchen. She didn't want to face them. But she had to do something or else one of them was going to come in and ask if she was okay. She grabbed an apple from the kitchen and quickly maneuvered from the kitchen to the hallway, and slid back into her bedroom.

She slammed the door shut, and leaned against it. Where did her life go so wrong? One moment she was a successful career woman, living in the city, and working the job of her dreams. The next, she was working a dead-end job, leeching off of her brother, and sleeping in her nephew's bedroom.

It couldn't get worse than this.

…Could it?

xxxxxxxxx

Reporters found out where Katara had been staying. She was able to go a while without a trail of reporters stalking her by avoiding leaving the house whenever she could. Until now, no one in the press knew exactly where her brother lived. She preferred it that way. She kept every precaution to protect her and her family. When she went to work, she carpooled with Suki to avoid public transportation. She never went to restaurants, and if she suspected a reporter was on her tail, she would avoid going home until she felt like she was alone again. That way, she had remained relatively unscathed.

No longer, the jig was up. A full crowd had set up camp on the front lawn of Sokka and Suki's house.

Suki peaked out of the kitchen curtains.

Katara sat at the counter and watched Suki peevishly, "I'm so sorry… I can go out and try to get rid of them if it helps?"

"No, that would just give them what they want."

"Maybe I should move out. I shouldn't drag you into the mess that I made."

"Nah, it's not your fault. It's fucked up they're stalking you like this. One of our neighbors must have snitched. The old hag across the way has always had something against us. I blame her," Suki responded decisively.

"I guess…" Katara frowned down at her tea.

Suki watched her. "We'll just run one of them over with our car when we leave. That'll scare them!"

Katara actually smiled. It felt nice.

xxxxxxxxx

Some of the reporters followed her and Suki to work. Ergo, they knew where she was working now too. She knew that would be a story she'd read tomorrow morning. "Heartbroken Katara Returns to Work: Does Nothing of Relevance," she imagined bitterly. Surging past the reporters and pretending like they weren't there, she finally made it to the entrance. Thankfully, they couldn't follow her into the building; security stopped them.

She went downstairs, sat at her desk, and found a pile of papers waiting for her to read through. She sighed heavily, and began to work through them, as she had done in the weeks prior, and would continue to do for weeks coming.

Wake up. Clock-in. Work. Clock-out. Avoid reporters. Eat. Sleep. She wasn't Katara anymore. Just an automated version of her old self. She knew how to get her daily tasks done and then go to bed, only to restart the process once more in the morning.

This was her life now. Oh well, she figured, I deserve this.

xxxxxxxxx

Cheng came to visit Katara one day. She looked over from her computer to find someone standing right next to her. He waved. "Hey, I didn't want to interrupt. Is now a good time?"

Katara rubbed her eyes, "No, yeah! Is everything alright?"

"Of course, yeah. You've been doing some good work. I just wanted to see if you wanted to go get lunch? We can chat."

"I'd really like that. Thanks."

They did just that. They ignored the reporters who followed them the entire walk from EKPR to the ramen house a couple of blocks down. In the back of her mind, Katara worried what they would think. She prayed they wouldn't publish something conspiratorial about how Katara was going out with other men. She cringed to think about it getting back to Zuko. Obviously this was nothing but platonic. She hoped the slimy paparazzi would feel the same.

They sat down at their table and Cheng ordered his salad. He went on to explain how he was trying to be pescatarian. Or maybe it was paleo? She didn't know. It seemed like he didn't either. She ended up asking for the same thing he ordered and they waited for their food to arrive.

"So! How have things been? Is it nice being back home?"

Not really. "Yeah, it's been alright," she responded, "It's nice seeing family again. I felt like everytime I came back from the Fire Nation, my nephews had grown two inches. I'm not missing anything this way."

"That's good. That's really good," he paused for a beat, "How about your new position? I know it isn't the job you were expecting when you came back."

"It's not… awful…" she tried to come off as believable. Cheng didn't buy it.

"You don't have to lie, you know. I know that it's not the same down there."

"Well thanks. It hasn't been easy," She chuckled nervously, "How about you? How are things up on top?"

"Stressful," he rubbed his forehead, "EKPR's budget is pretty tight right now."

"Right… I'm sorry about that. I didn't really think about the hit you would take when I ended The Burning Questions."

"Well, The Burning Questions didn't end, actually…"

She stopped.

"We couldn't just let it die. It was making half of the company's profits. We had to send a replacement."

"I didn't realize…"

"Of course, I assumed you knew…"

She looked down at the table angrily. Tears threatened to spill. She didn't really know why the news made her so upset. It felt like her world had turned so completely upside down, and everyone else's world just kept on going without her. She couldn't just move on. She'd been trying for weeks and it felt like it was killing her. Something had to give.

"I'm sorry," she stuttered. "I don't think I can do this anymore."

"Oh, okay. Uh, we can get lunch somewhere else?"

"No, I can't do this anymore. I quit."