jubilant (adj) - feeling or expressing great happiness and triumph
The smell of incense reeks thick in the air and flames waver all around, filling the nighttime streets with unnatural light.
Festival week is full of long days and longer nights as the Fire Nation celebrates its past and looks forward to its future.
In the capital, the Fire Lord and his wife walk among the people who hold colored lanterns and clear a path once they recognize the couple. With Zuko's scar that Katara won't let him hide with a hood and her insistence that they wear their finest Fire Nation robes, they're hard to miss. This is a time to celebrate your people, she says, and her magnanimity astounds him. Wear your hairpiece and topknot and be proud.
What he has to take pride in, she specified weeks ago in a carefully crafted missive bearing his seal that was sent to all the regions and colonies detailing the aspects of Fire Nation history that will be celebrated this week: their firebending skills, their inventions, their honor and culture.
This is not a week to remember the war, but rather to remember what is left besides the war and its remnants that seem to lurk around every corner.
(Katara is wearing only red and gold this week, and in exchange has made Zuko promise to spend several winter solstice festivals with her at the South Pole, and to travel there to dedicate their future children to Tui and La as well as to Agni. He promises, because it would take more than a few trips to her homeland to make up for what she does here in his country, what she does for him by choosing to walk beside him in life.)
The guards are out with them tonight, but have made themselves inconspicuous as they walk the crowded streets. There haven't been any assassination attempts made in the past few months.
For small, sharp instants, Zuko remembers hints of times when he was happy—when he was young, before he knew about the war, when his family was whole, all wrapped up in the smells of incense and fire flakes and roasted meat.
But then Katara reaches out and wraps her hand around his, and the soft touch of her fingers on this hot night makes him remember that he is happy now, too, although in a different way.
Now, his happiness is birthed in sorrow and fought for every day.
Katara smiles at him around the mouthful of fire flakes she's just eaten (and it had taken him what seemed like months of betting on their sparring matches—if she loses, she has to try fire flakes again—to get her to acquire any sort of taste for them), then blinks back tears as the spice sears into her tongue.
Zuko reminds himself not to feed her the spicier versions of fire flakes ever again and hides his laughter as best he can, but she still scowls at him as he leads her to a tea stand—included in the festival at Iroh's insistence, because "the fine brewing of tea is also a part of Fire Nation history"—and buys her a drink.
She sips the tea primly, her stiff manner a contrast to the fact that she's just bent tea at his cheek in what would be the beginning of a childish bending battle if they were alone and not in public with a new-forged reputation to uphold.
Still, the smile she gives him when he pulls a packet of dried seaweed, imported from the South Pole, out of his pocket and hands it to her, makes him forget for a moment about teabending and assassins and rewriting skewed history.
For an instant, he is not the Fire Lord with his Lady on a mission to rebuild the world.
He is just Zuko, with Katara.
So he stops to kiss her amidst the incense and the lanterns, and then she laughs and takes her snack in one hand and his hand in the other before she leads him further into the crowd.