I hummed a lullaby on my way to her house. It was one of the many Ursa's mother used to sing.

My feet were practically skipping, and my heart was too. I knew I shouldn't be this exuberant when she was mourning her friend, but I believed she would be happy to see me.

Instead, she could barely look at me.

"Did Iroh talk to you?" she asked with a sniff.

"No, I haven't seen him since yesterday morning. Ursa, what's…?"

She looked up at me with empty eyes. Her amber flames seemed to be flickering out as she held out a scroll for me to read. I wanted to hug her, to do everything in my power to put life back in those pools, but I took the letter first.

"Ursa, I'm so sorry," I said, feeling for her grief but unable to empathize. "What do you want to do?"

"I have to go back for the funeral in a couple days, obviously, but I don't even know what to do today or how to feel or…"

She sat down on the sofa, and I sat next to her and confessed, "The man you loved died a long time ago. The man he became is someone I wish I could set on fire. What he did to you, the kind of man he almost trapped you with—"

"Ozai, he's still my dad," she said with a cracking voice. "He still was my dad, and it… hurts."

"More than you thought it would?" he guessed.

"I don't think I put that much thought into it," I retorted a bit snappishly. If I was looking at his face, I would've caught a well-he-WAS-pretty-old-you-should-have-entertained-the-idea-by-now expression. "Sorry, I just… I have to get out of here. It feels wrong to be so void on an island of hope and peace."

"I'll go home with you. We can leave on a ship tomor—"

He reached for me, but I avoided his touch. It was too hot. I felt like I could hardly breathe. I could barely handle my own skin, much less someone else's.

"I think I should go alone."

"Why?"

"You should go back to the training camp."

"I can't. I left without my father's permission, rejected the little opportunity he gave me to prove myself… I'll be lucky if he ever lets me leave the Capital again."

I didn't reply. I just stared off into space as he stared at me. His gaze only added to the stifling heat, reminding me of that horrible dream rather than the boy I loved. I'd hurt him, and his heart was bleeding, but I was too busy drowning to notice.

"Do you ever worry… What if we aren't a comet? What if we're a meteorite that burns too bright and too fast until it leaves behind nothing but scorched earth and ash?"

And replaces both of our hearts with charred, smoking hunks of stone?

He leapt to his feet as if I had scorched him.

"How can you say that? I will always love you, and I always have." Even when I emotionally couldn't."Since the day we met. For more than a decade!"

"That's not what I'm saying!" I sighed as Ozai froze over with golden ice in those eyes.

"Are you afraid of me?"

It was my turn to glower.

"I have never been afraid of you, Ozai. When will you believe that? The fact you don't, AFTER more than a decade, is so much more frightening than—I don't want to talk about this anymore."

"Well, I certainly didn't," he grumbled.

"But… I wanted to ask you something. For Zhen."

I held out my hand for him to take, and Ozai calmed in an instant. Nodding, he listened to all I had to say because he always listened.

In a way no one else ever did.

"Do you think it's possible," I asked at the end of my explanation, "that the accident… wasn't an accident? But punishment?"

"It's possible," he replied honestly but seemed puzzled by something.

"Can't you… ask someone? Find out what really happened? This can't go unpunished if it's true!"

"This isn't something you should look into. You won't like what you find, and there eare some things you just shouldn't know."

"But, Ozai—"

"Ask. me. not."
"Why shouldn't I?"

"Because then I'd have to lie. Don't make me do that to you."

Tears stung her eyes.

"I hate this blasted war!" she let out with a sob, holding her head in her hands while I paced.

"It doesn't make sense. If he refused a direct order, then his superior would have every right to have him executed. He'd have to share what the order was, and there aren't… any I can think of that wouldn't be upheld. Save perhaps treason. Perhaps it was a peer rather than a superior, but that sounds like something he'd have told Lee."

Her tears dried up in her bemusement and concern.

"'Every right?' Surely there are some orders that wouldn't be upheld!"

"Treason perhaps," he shrugged, alarmingly nonchalant about it.

"Execution for nothing other than disobeying an order? Mutiny is one thing, but—"

"It's the Fire Nation military," he said as if that was all that needed to be said.

"That's cruel!"

His fury and pain flared up again.

"That's LIFE!" he practically roared before that far worse anger—the cold anger devoid of heart and soul, the anger that came from a void of distance and separation—took over my prince to transform him into a stranger. "You can afford to live on your high horse, can't you, Ursa?"

"What are you talking about?"

Ozai didn't look at me as he fumed with an eerie calm made all the worse by the coolness in his tone.

I wasn't even angry at her. I was angry at the world. At the war. At these people. At myself. And I ranted and raved without thinking about the consequences, the devastation such wrath could wreak.

On her.

"You can scorn and condescend all you want. You can judge and criticize. You have that freedom to be so morally perfect, so gloriously superior because you have an army dying to protect that freedom. To slaughter for you. They do all the dirty work, commit all the atrocities you don't like to think about, while your conscience is clear and your hands are pure as snow."

"Shut up, Ozai. Just shut up. Why do you have to—What is wrong with you?"

There were new tears choking her. There was a fresh wound worse than all the others because it came from a far closer, far deeper betrayal.

She was the only person to forgive me, and I, being me, had to test that. I had to twist and abuse and take for granted the most precious...

His eyes widened and his jaw dropped as though, in stabbing me, he'd stabbed himself as well. He'd ripped out a part of his own soul to pierce mine.

"Ursa, I... I didn't mean..."

"You think I don't know that? You think that doesn't haunt me every—"

"I'm sorry—"

"Don't touch me."

I thought she wanted to be held, but Ursa recoiled at my attempt with more disdain and disgust in her eyes than I'd seen in years.

She softened for a moment, as though she were about to crumble.

"This isn't how you love someone, Ozai. When the person you love hurts you, you don't strike back. You forgive."

Before I knew what had happened, I was on her porch again with a door closed in my face.

She was right, of course. I wasn't ready. I never believed that I could be, but that didn't mean I shouldn't attempt it. If it meant making her life better, I should never stopped working and striving and trying to do the impossible for the world's best impossibility.

I tried to catch her again the next day, but she had already left.

The island had never seemed so cold.

Lu Ten was sleeping, and I was pacing.

Iroh seemed reluctant to move. For once, I was pouring out to him, and he didn't want to break whatever spell had possessed me do so.

"I don't understand! I keep replaying it in my mind, and I just… want to hold her."

"It's not always that easy," he advised with caution.

"I'm going after her. I'm chasing after her and fixing this. I'm telling Azulon exactly what—"

"At what cost? Ozai, you never realize how high the price is until you pay it."

He never realized how happy I was to redirect my self-loathing on to him.

Or how easy it was for me to explode.

"Do not PATRONIZE me, brother!" I screamed, trying to regain control after every vein in my body bulged and muscle tensed. Through gritted teeth, I warned, "I am not a little boy any more."

The Dragon of the West remained unshaken. Unperturbed. Infuriatingly stoic.

"No, you are not," he agreed. "But I find it difficult not to condescend after witnessing such juvenile behavior day in and day out."

I couldn't hide my desperation in the next whisper.

"I. am. losing. her."

Iroh didn't say anything for a while. Not until I sat down and drank some tea.

"Ursa has loved you for more than enough time to prove the opposite. If she can make it through almost twelve years of stupidity and selfishness, there's nothing you can do to lose her."

It worked. I almost laughed.

"Now it's just her to turn to figure it out. I promise that's the last advice I have to give on the matter," he said before pouring himself another cup.

"Well, I don't believe that for a second, but I bet it's the last you have to say today."

My brother chuckled and invited me to a game of Pai Sho.