"When everyone is moving toward depravity, no one seems to be moving, but if someone stops he shows up the others who are rushing on, by acting as a fixed point." – Blaise Pascal

Katara doesn't stop when she knocks him back; crashing the water over him again, again, again, until he's sputtering and gasping for breath; she is relentless. Another jet of water rushes into Zuko, pressing him against the clammy stone of the temple and filling his nose. His brain screams for oxygen, but he is buffeted around like a canoe in river rapids and can scarcely tell where the sun is. "Katara, stop!" the Avatar shouts, frantically trying to wrest the water from her control. The sound is muddy in Zuko's ears, but the onslaught ends.

"You died because of him!" She shrieks, but although her breath comes fast and heavy, and her arms quiver in front of her, she doesn't strike again.

Zuko coughs up water as they argue, and the liquid burns his throat as it bubbles out.

Finally, Sokka crosses his arms and looks down at the firebender. "I think you should go," he says quietly, a low contrast to Katara's rage.

Staggering to his feet, Zuko remembers to breathe. Water drips from his hair into his eyes, and he can feel bruising on his lower back where he landed, but he looks directly at Katara before he turns away. "I'll make it up to you someday. I promise."

"I'll never forgive you," she snaps. "Leave. Now!"

He bows, wishing he knew the Water Tribe style and kicking himself for never listening to Uncle's lectures. He retreats, struggling back up the rope he'd left dangling over the edge of the cliff face. His throat and nose still burn.

If he's honest with himself, Zuko hadn't really considered the possibility of rejection. He berates himself as he trudges back to the war balloon-stupid, stupid-for not anticipating it (what was he expecting? Was he really expecting that they'd look past everything he'd done to them?). Azula would have predicted an outcome like this, and she would have prepared for it! She wouldn't be walking away from the Avatar looking like a drowned skunksquirrel. Stupid.

The little makeshift camp he'd left an hour ago is well-hidden, tucked away behind rocks and trees above a tulip field. Flowers blow in the cool breeze north of the temple, rippling red and yellow against shining grass. The wind whips his wet hair stinging his skin. Zuko clenches his fists as he trudges up the hill; if they won't have him, fine. He should have been prepared for that; expected it, even. He's no stranger to failure. Just the same, their rejection hangs over him like a black cloud, dragging his shoulders down and slowing his walk back to camp. Water drips from his hair and clothes and, the squelching in his shoes chills him to the bone.

His tunic sticks to him like guilt as he approaches the balloon. He could stay here for the night; he could steam himself dry and curl up under a blanket, falling asleep under the stars. Uncle would insist on it. A man needs his rest, Prince Zuko. But then, Zuko has never been very good at resting. Or listening to Uncle, and that fact burns him, even as the sun begins to sink in the afternoon sky.

He's never been very good at doing things right, either, so he packs up his things, and he tucks them away neatly into the basket of the war balloon. The camp dissolves into the night, and Zuko lights the coal in the balloon with a flick of his fingers. The fire comes fainter than usual, but he decides not to think anything of it as the balloon rises. The rope tethering it to the ground straightens and snaps, and Zuko surveys the landscape one last time.

Tulips dot the landscape around him, thriving in the temperate mountain air. This far north and this high in the mountains, the blossoms are only just opening. Further south, the temperatures soar and the stickiness of Fire Nation summer sets in. The blooms in his mother's garden would be nearly finished by now.

Uncle had been with him at this time three years ago, he remembers. They'd turned the temple upside down, searching every nook, every cranny, every cave in these mountains. By the time Zuko had turned away from the Western Air Temple and set his sights on the Northern Temple, the flowers had carpeted the valleys and plateaus, the green of their leaves nearly invisible under the red petals.

Uncle would insist they come here on the eve of the comet if he were here. For the scenery, he'd say, fixing umber eyes on Zuko severely. In six weeks, the flowers will be out like that again, and Uncle would probably have some proverb prepared about life and plants. Or tea.

He blinks at the blue mountains jutting into the darkening clouds. The sun will set in a few hours, and he knows he needs to move on. It suddenly occurrs to Zuko that hunting down Nensho would probably be a good idea, before that assassin kills the Avatar. There's no more time to mull over the landscape.

As the balloon swells above him, heated by the coal in the box beneath it, he plucks a single red blossom stained black in the middle, then pulls himself up into the basket of the balloon. Turning the tulip over in his hand, he gently fingers the scarlet petals.

It reminds him of home, and bitterness buries itself in his stomach like a burning coal.

Later, as he flies across the small channel between the Air island and Fire territory to the west, Zuko glares at the horizon. The setting sun glows golden in his eyes, and the fire behind him heats his back. He has to regain his honor. He has to earn the Avatar's forgiveness, and he has to redeem himself for Uncle. He has to redeem himself for his mistakes in Ba Sing Se. For Katara, who trusted him before he threw everything back in her face.

Before he'd thrown fire at her while the Avatar fell.

So they won't accept him as a teacher and they won't accept him as a prisoner. But then, if they won't accept him as a prisoner, maybe they'll accept his father's battle plans.

—-

In a little town to the south, when Zuko sees the mask in the shop, his heart flutters. You promised Uncle. Maybe he did promise Uncle, but it's a different time now with different priorities, and, Zuko decides, he's not doing this for himself. He's doing it for the Avatar, just like the last thing he did with this mask, and maybe it's time the Blue Spirit was someone Zuko could be proud of.

There's also the small problem with his bending, the problem that's been getting worse since he left the Avatar's group. He's within reach of the assassin just as he's barely able to throw sparks. If anyone (Azula) were around to see it, he'd be humiliated. As it is, if he relies on his bending, he's as good as dead.

Zuko knows he can't be spotted this close to the messenger hawks, not with the scar that matches him to the wanted posters with a glance. The Blue Spirit is wanted too, of course, but at least he's wanted alive.

And so the Blue Spirit returns.

He'd felt a little pang the first time he'd seen the new wanted posters, and a little burn had stung at the back of his eyes when he'd seen that his father wasn't picky about how Zuko was returned to him. Pushing the bitterness down, he moves.

Slipping in and out of the shadows, mask secured to his face, Zuko takes advantage of the deepening dusk. His pulse hammers in his ears, echoing inside the wooden shell of his mask. There's no shortage of unattended boats, but he hadn't counted on all of the sailors still milling around after curfew.

As the crowd begins to thin, Zuko waits. He knows the boat he wants, one moored near the end of the docks that's large enough to take out to sea and small enough to sail alone. It's unremarkable, lacking much more than its wooden hull and oars clipped to the sides.

He steps out of his cover. The moon has risen, and there are still enough sailors milling around that it's possible he'll be spotted. Still, discipline is lax here, and the sailors are off-duty.

In two steps, he knows he's made a mistake. In six, he abandons the boats and retreats, but no matter how many sharp corners and switchbacks he takes, he can't shake the feeling of eyes burning into his back.

So, Zuko isn't surprised when a ray of heat whistles toward him, narrowly missing his chest and setting the building behind him aflame. He ducks into a corner, listening intently for footsteps through the noise of a crumbling shop, and then there's a metallic clanking that turns his hands to ice, and a cold sweat breaks out on his forehead.

There's no reason the assassin he hired should be firing at him. Is there?

Unless Nensho heard that the Blue Spirit had a history of helping the Avatar. Unless he was also being paid to take out the Blue Spirit, which is possible, but Zuko isn't sure – it's been months since the Blue Spirit was last spotted, and months longer since he'd been any particular problem for the Fire Nation, and he was last seen in the Ba Sing Se.

Another blast shakes him out of his reeling thoughts, and he can hear people closing in on them, shouting. Probably soldiers. Maybe people whose homes are about to go up in smoke. Zuko pulls his swords from his scabbard slowly, gently, praying the assassin can't hear the slide of metal.

The universe has never been kind to Zuko. As the swords slip out, Nensho's head snaps in Zuko's direction. The man breathes, so deeply Zuko can see his nostrils flaring, and then he's about to bring this whole town down on Zuko's head.

"Stop!" Zuko shouts. "Why are you here?"

The metal man never speaks, and he doesn't speak now. Zuko should have known better. Energy rushes toward him, and he dives to get out of the way.

Pushing up his mask as he scrambles to his feet, Zuko reveals his face. "The deal's off. If you don't stop searching for the Avatar, I won't pay you."

Ignored again, Zuko is forced to dive away again. He tugs his mask back down and blocks flaming wood from falling on his head with a swish of one sword.

"I'll pay you double to stop!"

Nensho only looks at him, his third eye glowing red in the dimness, and Zuko knows the man's mission has changed. The Avatar is a secondary target, if he's still a target at all. Sweat trickles down his back as he takes a ready stance, and then the red ray is coming for him again. He leaps out of the way, curling into a tight ball in the air before dropping to his feet and breaking into a run.

Despite the heavy armor plating his leg and arm, Nensho has a long stride, and Zuko has lost some of his old stamina between the months starving in the Earth Kingdom and relishing the comforts of home. He kicks himself. Uncle never would have let him neglect his training like this.

Wheeling around a corner and doubling back, Zuko ducks behind a laundry line. He can see the assassin now, looking for him. His bald head gleams in the cool moonlight, and the muscles in his back remind Zuko of his failures (again). Nensho is too strong to take hand to hand. Too large. Zuko could outrun him, at the cost of every house or shop he puts between them.

Not for the first time, Zuko wishes he'd been born lucky. Or, if nothing else, that his firebending had deserted him when he still had Uncle to count on for advice, even if the advice didn't make any sense. Why couldn't he have lost his bending in Ba Sing Se? Why couldn't he have tried to break Katara's water stream that held Azula and failed then?

Narrowly dodging another ray, Zuko forces his mind quiet. He can berate himself another time. He ducks behind a market stall, then throws himself up to a nearby roof and immediately flattens himself against the slope. Nensho clanks down in the street, scanning the ground, his third eye eerily unfocused.

Think, Zuko orders himself. The houses stretch almost as far as his eye can see, ordered in wobbly rows. Their patched roofs look unstable, and Zuko doubts that running across the tops will get him very far. Nensho clanks closer, and Zuko's heart leaps into his mouth, constricting his breathing and drumming in his ears.

Then he spots it.

The Fire Nation has been almost completely given over to war after a hundred years, and this town is no exception. There's a tar distillery that looms on the coast, casting deeper shadows over the town and belching white smoke into the air. It's a small facility, relative to other factories littered around the archipelago, but Zuko knows its importance to the war effort.

No tar, no flinging flaming rocks at Avatars or enemy fleets.

Creeping across the roof and hauling himself to the next one, Zuko slinks across the city. Clanking metal follows closely. The sound goes around in circles, telling him that Nensho knows he's here, but the metal man clearly hasn't quite pinned down exactly where Zuko is hiding. He adjusts the mask, letting a quick gust of air in to cool his sweating forehead.

It takes him nearly two hours, but he finally makes it to the edge of the city. Then he's breaking into a run and sprinting for the tar factory and climbing up a drain pipe with the assassin nearly on his heels. That red ray is coming for him and he twists himself out of the way, and then the second his feet touch the ground he's off running again, sprinting for low ground. The ray hits the factory. Zuko crouches to protect his head.

The factory goes up in flames with thick booms, and the earth shakes around him as the building comes down.

When he pulls himself out of the rubble a few hours later, Zuko has a splitting headache and a growing sense of doom. The town behind him has caught fire, but the people have created a long line from the water to the center, handing buckets of water down to put out the flames. Firebenders work to extinguish the larger blazes, and when Zuko looks down, a metal hand glints up at him.

He has a splitting headache and a split in his side, but Zuko makes it to the hawks' perch. He tucks the scrawled notes into a hawk's tube, and then he watches as the bird flies east, into the warming dawn.

When he looks back on this moment years later, Zuko is deeply grateful that he made it to the messenger hawks. His father's battle plans, hastily scrawled on whatever paper he could find, would have been useless if they hadn't reached the Avatar and whatever forces he hoped to assemble before the comet.

When he looks back, Zuko is grateful, because they would have been less than useless if the Avatar had gone through with his plan to wait to fight the Fire Lord until after the comet.

Sending the hawk had been one of the best things he'd ever done in his lifetime of mistakes, but he'd gained a critical advantage from the poorly guarded tower. That he had found a roster of prisoners on their way to the Boiling Rock had been nothing short of life changing.

Approaching the prison in the war balloon would be out of the question, he knows, but as Zuko paddles across interminable ocean in a small rowboat, he can't help but think he's made a mistake. He's done a lot of stupid things, but this might be the worst decision he's made since Ba Sing Se. Clouds, dark and heavy, have begun to crowd the horizon, and the warm breeze has shifted to a cool wind against his cheeks.

His bruised arms ache, and the muscles in his legs scream, and Zuko can hear Uncle shouting in his head. You never think these things through! Just the same, Azula's airship had been on the horizon as he'd pushed off shore, the smoke and ash rising from the ruined town a beacon of destruction.

Nensho is dead, and Zuko lives.

He isn't entirely reassured by that fact, but as the dawn breaks, he decides there are worse ways to spend a seventeenth birthday.

—-

He's been watching the Water Tribe man for a few days now. Despite the warden's best efforts, the man has refused to bow, refused to lower his head, and Zuko is beginning to worry about concussions (whether they are a cause or an effect of the man's obstinance remains to be seen). Ultimately, Zuko decides that Water Tribesmen seem to be allies that a fugitive wants to have, if Katara and Sokka are representative of their people.

Which is how he finds himself clinging to the ceiling of the man's cell as mealtime ends, dressed in a borrowed guard uniform, swords strapped to his back and mask hidden under his chest plate. A set of keys dangles from his belt, and sweat beads on his brow as the sun sinks lower outside. Finally, the prisoner is pushed into the cell, and the door is closed and locked, and Zuko drops to the floor with a gusty sigh of relief.

The relief doesn't last long. The man whirls around, elbowing Zuko in the gut and throwing him down to the straw pallet in the corner. Standing above him, the man presses one foot on Zuko's diaphragm and glares. Zuko shakes his head, trying to clear the sudden vision of Katara's glare from his head. "What do you want, firebender?"

Zuko wheezes, and the foot presses down harder. "I'm here to rescue you," he gasps.

The pressure lifts, just a little, and Zuko stays down, waiting. The man narrows his eyes. "Take off your helmet."

Zuko does, and then the man's eyes widen in recognition. "Prince Zuko?"

"Hi," Zuko mutters.

"What are you doing here?" The man crosses his arms over his chest but releases Zuko from the mat, though his blue eyes watch Zuko like a hawk.

"I told you I was here to rescue you," Zuko says, suddenly beginning to feel more than a little annoyed. "Do you want to escape or not?"

"Why?" The Water Tribe man asks, suspicion keeping his voice at a low growl. "Last I heard, you helped your sister kill the Avatar. Now you want to help me?"

"I made a mistake," Zuko says. "The worst thing I've ever done was betray the Avatar and the waterbender under Ba Sing Se, and I'll regret that the rest of my life. Now I have to help the Avatar however I can. I know that's my destiny. You're the leader of the Southern Water Tribe, aren't you?"

The Water Tribe man is nonplussed by Zuko's speech. "In my home, we're taught to beware firebenders bearing gifts. Or offers of escape."

Zuko shrugs, doubting that the Water Tribes have ever considered firebenders offering to break them out of a high security prison, but he keeps that to himself. "You won't last in here. The warden won't tolerate disrespect for long. And the Avatar will need you and your men when the comet comes."

The man considers him a moment, then nods his head. "My name is Hakoda. Chief of the Southern Water Tribe."

Feeling a smile threaten to show on his face, Zuko bows. "My name is Zuko, son of Ursa, and thorn in the Fire Lord's side."

Hakoda laughs, and Zuko allows himself to smile.

—-

Their half-baked escape plan is pretty good by Zuko's standards, but Hakoda seems uneasy about it. And then there's the small matter of the other prisoners. Hakoda insists that they bring along Suki, the leader of the Kyoshi Warriors and Sokka's girlfriend. Then there's Chit Sang, a large man with an unusual talent for unflattering poems about the Fire Lord and for inviting himself to escape plans, a spindly best friend with a much longer list of crimes, and a bedraggled girlfriend.

Not that it takes much these days, as every moment that passes feels like a moment closer to his identity or his boat or his plan being discovered, but Zuko is ready to explode as their planned riot looms closer.

Suki watches the other prisoners mill around the yard with those perceptive violet eyes that always leave Zuko feeling unnerved (and maybe a little guilty about her village) when she looks in his direction. Chit Sang waits off the side, waiting for her signal to stir up his riot (Zuko is not clear on the details of that plan, but he had decided at the beginning that he was better off not knowing).

He is surprised when all there is to it is shouting, "Riot!"

Then they're running for the gondola, and Suki is behind them with the warden, whom she has spirited down from the balcony like it was the easiest thing in the world. Zuko spares her a puzzled glance, but then there's a gondola control lever to jam and a ride to catch out of the boiling lake.

Things go remarkably well, all things considered. The gondola ride is slow, and the steam makes sweat break out on Zuko's brow, but Suki has the warden half-dangling out the window, squirming in the heat, and Hakoda and Chit Sang are keeping watch for aerial attacks on the roof. Zuko (and his useless bending, and his swords that he left back on the boat) sits uselessly on the floor, not sulking.

As he studies the decidedly overloaded rowboat once they've disembarked and picked their way down the volcanic ring around the prison, Zuko wonders whether they'll drown or meet some other, hairier fate.

They don't have much time to worry about it. The warden, back on the gondola, has wriggled out of his binds and has begun screaming bloody murder. Zuko leaps into the boat as he pushes it from the shore, handing one oar to Hakoda and thrusting the other into the water.

"Head a course northeast," he snaps. "We need to get out of here before he gets back to the prison and sends the navy out looking for us."

Hakoda, probably used to narrow escapes on wooden boats by now, nods once and quickly matches Zuko's pace with the oar. Chit Sang's friend unfurls the sails. They find a current heading north more quickly than Zuko had hoped, and then the Boiling rock is fading behind them.

Chit Sang mumbles something about wanting to steer, and Zuko snorts at the girlfriend's reminder that the man is a writer, not a sailor, and anyway, he doesn't know which way is north and which way is south.

Their bickering aside, it's almost peaceful in the open ocean. The sun shines above them, and the only clouds for miles are white and wispy. Zuko lets out a breath he didn't know he was holding when an airship headed for the prison passes them by, their tiny boat just a speck against the glimmering waves. They don't see any other airships, and by some miracle, their boat is not capsized in the time it takes to reach land.

The beach they land on is isolated and rocky, covered in water-worn igneous pebbles, and the group doesn't stay together long. Chit Sang and his girlfriend have plans to marry and settle down in the safety of the colonies or a nowhere village in Earth Kingdom, and Zuko, hoping for the best, offers them the rowboat to get them back to the island it came from (so long as they promise to return it to the dock he stole it from). Chit Sang promises, but Zuko has a prickling doubt that the man is going to follow through. This is partly because Chit Sang is more focused on the distasteful way Zuko tends to end his sentences with prepositions.

Zuko also has a prickling doubt that the writer (not a sailor) is going to make it to the Earth Kingdom without insulting someone over proper sentence structure and getting himself thrown back into the Boiling Rock, but Zuko's moral responsibility is definitely still developing, and he's having a difficult enough time managing himself. The best friend, whose name Zuko never does learn, slips into the boat with them.

And then it's just a once-banished, once-defector prince, a Kyoshi Warrior, and the chief of a tiny tribe at the icy end of the world.

Suki looks between them. "I need to find my girls."

Zuko nods. "You're the leader?" She jerks her chin up sharply. Zuko rubs the skin between his eyes, feeling the beginnings of a nasty headache. "Azula wouldn't have put them all in the same place. You should go straight to the capital. At least some of them will be there, but it's the most heavily guarded."

She eyes him skeptically. "Thanks."

Zuko has learned by now not to be surprised when she takes off in the correct direction.

"So," Hakoda says when their little group is down to the two of them. "About this waterbender you betrayed under Ba Sing Se."

Zuko immediately does not like where this conversation is headed. "What about her?"

Hakoda shrugs, far too casually for Zuko's comfort. "What happened?"

Zuko frowns. The man is fishing for something, but Zuko couldn't say what if his life depended on it. It feels eerily like being back in the palace with Azula and her probing questions about whether the Avatar could be alive. He chooses his words carefully, or as carefully as he ever does, anyway. "She was fighting my sister at the Avatar's side. We had been imprisoned together before, and she offered to heal my scar. I helped my sister win the battle, and I let my uncle be taken prisoner."

Frowning, Hakoda looks down his nose at Zuko, who wishes desperately to be taller in the moment. His eyes are cold and calculating, intimidating on this bear of a man. "And killed the Avatar."

"Azula killed the Avatar."

"That isn't what all of the guards at the Boiling Rock thought."

Unsurprising. Azula would make sure everyone thought he had done it. "Azula always lies," he says, though it's clear from Hakoda's face that this is no explanation. "She thought the Avatar might have lived. I guess she wanted me to take the fall if he came back, and he did, so."

"Is that why you left the Fire Nation?"

Holding back a sharp, despairing laugh, Zuko snorts. "No. I was the perfect prince. I became the son my father wanted, but it was all a lie. I wasn't me. I didn't speak up when they decided to burn the whole Earth Kingdom–" he breaks off, the laugh wriggling free of his throat, –"I gave them the idea!"

The Water Tribe chief's frown deepens. "You told them to do that?"

"I said the Earth Kingdom people were proud and strong," Zuko says bitterly. "I said they could endure anything as long as they had hope. The Fire Lord decided to crush their hope."

"Hm." The frown eases. "How old are you, Prince Zuko?"

Zuko narrows his eyes. "Seventeen. Last month."

"Hm." The chief strokes his beard. "The waterbender traveling with the Avatar is my daughter."

Zuko is getting tired of old people and their cryptic advice and non sequiturs and knowing everyone he knows and everyone he doesn't and all the other things old people do. "Great," he snaps, "so when you find her, she can tell you all about everything I've ever done to make her hate me."

To Zuko's surprise (and confusion), Hakoda slaps him on the back and begins walking toward the sun. "You said they were at the Western Air Temple?"

"Yes?"

"Is that a question, Prince Zuko?"

"No," he says, entirely out of his depth. "They were at the Western Air Temple when I left them."

"Come on, then."

Never has Zuko ever been so stymied, not even when Uncle got them out of the desert town with a lotus tile. "They don't want to see me."

"I think breaking their dear old dad out of jail might help you out."

"It's kind of far to walk," Zuko says, fighting redness in his face. "We should probably take my war balloon."

"Well, why didn't you say so?" And in that moment, Zuko can see the resemblance between Hakoda and Sokka as the man points in no particular direction. "To the war balloon!"

—-

He lands the war balloon haphazardly, leaving Hakoda to tie it down as he sprints for the smoking ruins. The Western Air Temple groans and crackles beneath them, and Zuko skids to a stop at the cliff above the temple's fountain. The Avatar's group has clearly abandoned it, and the fires have died down from what must have been an inferno earlier in the day. Scrambling to attach his rope, Zuko can feel sweat bloom in his palms.

It's worse when he reaches the fountain. The residual fires are finishing off fur-trimmed, blue sleeping bags and straw mats, and the smoke burns his eyes. Zuko takes some small comfort in the scent of burning cloth; better cloth than skin. Just the same, there's blood on the ground by one of the mats, and a sliver of blue peeks out from behind a chunk of the ceiling.

Zuko knows before he sees it. Katara's necklace, and what looks like shreds of the white collar of her robe, are tangled together on the ground, as if the piece of ceiling had fallen and she'd only just avoided being crushed. Still, he can see from the red edging the fabric that she'd been injured, and he swallows back the tension in his throat as he bends to pick them up.

"They're gone," Hakoda says, appearing at his shoulder.

Zuko flinches. "The attack wasn't long ago. They couldn't have gotten far." Holding up the blue and white scraps, he turns to face Katara's father. "She was injured."

A muscle ticks in Hakoda's jaw and his eyes grow stony. "Where do you think they would have gone?"

Zuko shakes his head. "With Azula after them? Probably toward the Earth Kingdom."

"No," the older man decides. "The Avatar still needs a firebending teacher. He's not going to find one of those in the Earth Kingdom."

Resisting a sudden compulsion to stomp his foot, Zuko blows small wisps of smoke from his nose. "We should split up," he says. The nod of assent from the other man at once makes him swell with something like pride and look away before something like loneliness can flash over his face.

"Prince Zuko," Hakoda begins, lowly. "You're not the best traveling partner, nor are you an inspiring conversationalist."

Zuko's head whips around, and he can't help the irritated glare at the smirk on Hakoda's face.

"But I am indebted to you. You're an honorable man and a valuable ally. Thank you for your help." And then the older man bows to him, and Zuko feels small, like a little child given a cookie for something he hadn't done.

"I'm just trying to do the right thing," Zuko mumbles, crossing his arms over his chest.

The Water Tribe man eyes him speculatively when he straightens back up. "I think you should hang on to this," he says, and then he's dropping Katara's necklace into Zuko's almost involuntarily outstretched hand. "Your reception might be better next time. If you find them before I do."

"What happened to bewaring firebenders bearing gifts?" Zuko mutters.

Hakoda throws his head back, laughing freely. "Good luck, Prince Zuko. May the winds be in your favor."

Zuko bows, then he takes a deep breath and reaches for Hakoda's arm, in the Water Tribe way.

Hakoda reaches back.