A/N: I'm sure this has already been done at some point, but I'm only a few years deep into the fandom and haven't come across any fics for it yet myself.
I do not own Avatar the Last Airbender…yet.
"Zuko!"
Katara couldn't remember the last time she'd run this fast. Couldn't remember being this out of breath, this desperate.
And not the comfortable kind of desperate. The feeling she'd been living inside of for the last year, for the last fourteen years. The one that she hated but somehow needed, just a little, to remind her that this was it, she was alive and had to deal with what the world threw at her, even when she hated it.
But now she understood. Because this desperation… It ached in her lungs, her legs, her arms, her curled fingers, until she felt like she was going to go shattering in every direction.
Was this how Toph felt when she was launching herself at a solid piece of rock? Was this how the rock felt?
"Zuko!"
It was still dark outside, so dark that when they'd approached her, grave and silent, she'd been half a second away from dumping the entirety of a nearby fountain down over their heads. A knee jerk reaction. She knew they would have understood.
Instead, she waited silently as they bowed low in the early morning gloom in a way that seemed to convey something too profound for words, and Katara knew that all three of them were thinking the same thing as they straightened to address her. Even if she had absolutely no idea what that was. Then they'd said something polite and formal, and handed her a scrap of a piece of parchment, and the entire world had snapped like that moment when the iceberg was finally thawed enough to split in half.
And then…and then she'd turned and sprinted back through the heavy, carved doors with the entirety of the world crumpled in one hand.
Around the corner and down another darkened corridor, the smooth tile that the Fire Nation in some distant, undisturbed past had peacefully traded for with the Earth Kingdom burning cold under her feet.
For a country that was essentially one giant sprawl of volcanic debris, the palace was cooler than she'd imagined it, standing with her father on the Day of Black Sun, staying behind where she was needed most, as her friends had come here. To the seat of all the evil in the world.
"Zuko!"
And here she was, sprinting past door after door in a blind race to the far reaches of the building. And this was so, so different than she'd imagined it too. It felt like everything she'd ever run from, every threat, thought, and adversary were turning to smoke in her mind. All she could feel was…this.
The exhaustion that had kept a tight hold of her for the last few days hadn't cleared, exactly. And it felt like she was feeling every possible feeling at once. They roared like a bonfire.
"Zu…Zuko!"
"…Katara?"
"Zu…Zu…"
"Kat-ugh!"
He'd stepped around the corner in plenty of time for her to see, but she was going too fast to make it worth slowing down, and in the next moment they were both on the ground.
Before he could say or do anything more than groan in pain, Katara was pushing herself up and reaching out, crushing the letter in one palm as she found and gripped his arms so tightly he was wincing from that too instead of just the slowly healing wound on his chest.
"We did it." She finally gasped, and she realized that she'd been wrong, a few minutes ago. Because the world wasn't breaking apart. For the first time, it was solid.
"Did…what?" He shifted a little but didn't make her let go of his arms.
"Everything!" They were face to face, so close she could see the pure yellow of his eyes. Close enough she knew that their entire lives had just changed.
Zuko raised his normal eyebrow and glanced down once at his chest before looking back up at her. "If you're talking about the Agni Kai, yeah, I know." He paused as Katara did let go of one of his arms and smacked it. "I told you, it's binding. The throne is mine, Azula has no legal claim to it."
But Katara just shook her head at him, pushing herself up farther on her knees and shoving the parchment at him, the one the Fire Sages said had just arrived by messenger hawk from the direction of the Earth Kingdom.
"No, Zuko. We did it. It's over. It's all over."
"What's over?"
"The war…everything…it's over. We won."
Zuko's expression didn't even have time to catch up with him as he snatched the parchment from her outstretched hand, blinking his eyes to try and get them to focus. She watched him read silently, wide eyes slowly following the characters across the scroll, which was clearly written in Sokka's disastrous scrawl.
She knew she should be thinking something right about now, but as Zuko's expression changed in a way that told her he'd reached the end of the note, she slumped back, scooching over to the wall next to him and putting her head back in an attempt to get rid of the last of the manic energy.
It was exhilarating. And she hoped she never had cause to feel it again.
"My father is still alive." Zuko said a few seconds later, and Katara tilted her head to look at him. His face was composed, but she knew him well enough to notice that his usual tense posture had gone lax with indecision.
She could only imagine how this all felt to him.
"I'm glad. Or I'm sorry." Truth be told, Katara didn't know how she felt. And she knew Zuko knew that as their eyes met. But most of all, she wanted to be here for him right now. She didn't doubt they'd sort out her feelings together later.
"He didn't have to." Zuko finally said, looking down again, deliberately not looking at the parchment still in his hand. A second later, he set it down next to him on the floor.
Katara knew there was something more to this, something deeper. Zuko hadn't told them everything yet. And over the last few days, she'd started realizing that what she'd been labelling as anger, aggression, a million different negative emotions, was really the whatever-it-was that he still hadn't spilled. Probably had been all along.
"I guess that actually makes me Firelord now." His thumb worried at one edge of his tunic.
There was a silence that stretched chasms.
"I think it's going to take me a lifetime to figure this out." Zuko finally added quietly.
"Good," Katara sighed. "Maybe we'll actually get to pitch in before you do it all yourself."
An eye roll. But he didn't try to argue with her. Probably the best decision he'd made in the last twenty-four hours. If not his whole life. Although, helping Aang came in a close second, she supposed.
"I'm sorry I kept double checking that the Agni Kai really settled it," she added after a moment.
"More like sorry for triple checking," he corrected absentmindedly under his breath, quailing a little at Katara's look.
He glanced once at the paper, limp on the floor next to his hand as if it didn't mean the end of everything they'd ever known. He picked it up one more time, squinting at the words. "I'm a little surprised that they let Toph write something this important."
Katara burst out laughing at that, and Zuko looked his usual amount of pleased-but-mostly-just-uncomfortable at successfully landing a joke.
"Come on. Bed," Katara coaxed and pushed herself up, regaining her feet before snatching the parchment back and sticking it under one arm, hauling Zuko to his feet and slinging an arm over her shoulder.
He wouldn't ask for help on his own. But he did lean a little on her once the choice to stumble along on his own had been removed from the list of options.
They staggered back down the hallway together.
Logically, Katara knew that this wasn't over yet—the struggle or the celebration. And that the crumpled parchment she'd jammed between an arm and her body was probably the most important document in the entire world at the moment.
But Zuko was paling when she glanced at him a few steps later, and she was feeling worn out herself. And despite it all, including getting the news she'd waited her whole life to hear, it felt nice to know that, first, they had time to rest.
000
Hi Katara and Zuko,
Aang's fine. We're fine. Also, we destroyed the air fleet, and Aang used his magic Avatar powers to take away Ozai's bending. See you soon!
~ Team Avatar
I have a few more oneshots planned, so I think I'm just going to dump them all into this fic as a collection.
Thanks so much for reading!
(Edited: I forgot to add a vague mention to a Parks and Rec reference if you spotted it!)