Humans were built to be able to handle only too much, and Zuko is only human. It is too much, all top much. The heat of battle, the cold, and the sting of failure.
Zuko is tired, bone-tired. He is tired of searching, and fighting and failing, and searching all over again. Wash, rinse, and repeat.
He shifts, and he feels the ache of his bones, feels the protest of his muscles and still-raw injuries as he lies down on the raft.
"I'm tired," he whispers to his uncle.
"You should rest, Prince Zuko," Iroh says. Zuko wonders why his uncle keeps using the honorific. He is a prince by birth, but he is a prince with nothing; no throne, no Avatar, no future. The title is a reminder of his failures, but he can't feel a taunting edge to his uncle's words. Only warmth, and concern. Like how his uncle has always been.
"A man needs his rest," Iroh adds soothingly.
But words, no matter how kind, how well meaning, can't change his fate. Eventually, he has to get up, and he has to continue his search for the Avatar.
Zuko shuts his eyes and wishes it was all over.
XXXXX
The stillness before a battle may be awful, but it is nothing, nothing compared to the aftermath.
The aftermath of a battle is when the losses are carefully counted and tabulated. How many homes were destroyed. How many people were injured. How many men are never coming home.
Katara remembers the last Fire Nation raid. Remembers the relief when she sees nobody has been hurt, and then coming home to see that the greatest loss has happened in her home.
This time, she helps the best she can, aiding the women as they heal and knit and mend the men whole.
At night, she lies in her bed, exhausted, but her mind won't let her rest. Again and again, she sees raw burnt flesh, sees split skin and sinew, limbs broken and bent at nightmarish angles, and if she breathes, she can almost, almost, smell the rust-iron traces of blood.
As she closes her eyes, she sees scarred skin, livid against pale flesh. Zuko.
During their fight though, he had been different. Katara knows, that as he has tracked them from one end of the earth to the other, he has changed, too. He isn't cocky and sure anymore. Like everyone else, he has grown tired. His movements had been stiffer than usual, and his eyes had been ringed by shadows. There had been bruises mottling his skin, and other wounds, angry and red and painful to see.
Like the healer she is, she thinks of those injuries and her hands itch instinctively to undo the damaged. But she is a warrior at the same time, and while it is her second nature to soothe, she would like to put a few more injuries on Prince Zuko's face.
He has destroyed her village, taken her mother's necklace, and snatched Aang from right under her nose. She won't let him take away anything from them ever again.