Pre-Chapter A/N: Please do check out the first chapter of the novel I'm working on up on pa-treon- it's completely free to access. What can I say except you're welcome? Here we go. Lovely to have you all here, and I hope you enjoy this one. If you do, feel free to head over to pa-treon and read the next two chapters- I update there on a daily basis so there's always something for you to read.

TOJI- xx

Was that a slight baby bump he saw beneath the swell of her robes, he wondered with a light smile as he accepted Zhufu's hug.

"I was worried once Natsu told me" She said, and he nodded against her shoulder. Good. So he had been to see her. Toji had the feeling he had from the way his shoulders seemed freer, and he had less weight on his shoulders, but it was good to have his hunches confirmed. He did so enjoy being right. Not as much as he enjoyed being able to stand on his own two feet though, and days without that power had put him in a bad state.

"Thank you. I'm fine now. Better than ever now that you're back with us, even".

"Lee is the only one missing now" She said.

"I have it on good authority that he has been reassigned to the Imperial Guard as of last week, so we should be seeing him sometime soon"

"We're all going to be together again?" Zhufu sounded so hopeful that it made his heart ached. She probably had thoughts of it being just like it had been when they summered in Natsu's home and spent their days swimming, relaxing, and reading. Those days were gone, though, and wouldn't be coming back, but that didn't matter— they'd do the best with what they had.

"We will. But for now, we need to work on the role given to us" He said, turning his head to Toph, the other person in the room. She looked bored, but he also noticed that her head hadn't snapped away from his direction since he walked in. He walked over and ruffled her hair, accepting the hug she enclosed him in.

"Don't go blocking explosions with your face again, Uncle" She said.

"Noted. Once is more than enough. So what do we have to go on?" He asked.

"The Baki man owned a bar in the Capital here, and the guards were able to arrest the man running it. We haven't interrogated him yet, but I was able to find a hidden room in their bar that had far too much gold for that kind of business".

"You're certain? I wouldn't take you for the best at counting because of the obvious, you know?"

"I am a Beifong" She said, like that was the end of it.

"For someone who left her family so easily, you've got no small amount of familial pride," He commented. Zhufu gasped, like she was shocked at his words, or maybe their rudeness. Oh, he had forgotten what it was like to be around Fire Nation nobility all the time. Toph was blunt like Earth Kingdom folk tended to be, Maki had peasant blood, and Natsu… Well, Natsu was Natsu. He cared about few things, and manners were not lucky enough to make that list.

"I am proud of my family's history. We go back just as long as the Wus. Even longer than you guys" She said, pointing to her.

"Fair. My family is fairly new. We were mere merchants only five generations ago, after all. Natsu has been teaching you well" He conceded with a smile while Zhufu gaped.

"So when are we going to interrogate our prisoner"

"I thought you'd never ask" She said, and walked straight through the wall, the stone folding out of her way as she did so.

"Is she really?"

"Really what?"

"You know" Zhufu whispered in his ears, gesturing to her eyes. He just laughed and followed after the little demon, making sure to use the door. She'd locked him in a wall before when he'd tried following her, and it had taken Natsu looking for him for him to make his way out of the tight confines. He still needed to pay her back for that one, he thought to himself.

XXXXXX— NATSU

Riding in a blimp was nothing like what it would have been in the world I came from. Yes, I was excited to see the vehicles, the cosmetic backgrounds for my favourite fight scene in the whole show. But riding in them quickly became a whole different experience. We hadn't figured out air conditioning in this world and while that was quickly running up my list of priorities for our clearly ingenious research and development unit, it wouldn't happen in time to save me from this hot mess.

The blimps were tight, hot behemoths. Keeping them in the air required that they not let a lot of air in, so apart from the bare minimum necessary to precent all of us from passing out from oxygen deprivation, there was little in the way of airflow. That did give me the time and space to work on another skill of mine, though. Cold isn't real. It's just the absence of heat, I remembered from my physics lessons. At least I thought I did. I'd never paid much attention in classes. I was destined to be good at one thing, so why should I have cared about anything else.

I tried to force my heat to go deeper, to push the heat out of the room itself so it would become a pleasant cold as I meditated. When Maki eventually came to rouse me because it was time for the first resupplying, I wasn't sure I'd achieved anything, but at least I'd been able to get my mind doing something other than bemoaning the situation.

I watched everything with sharp eyes as some soldiers on a hot air balloon rose from the ships with supplies. Looking at the ships made me return my mind to what exactly we were planning on achieving here. The North Pole was one hell of a target. The only nation to remain outside Fire Nation dominance. It would fall tomorrow, I had decried it, and so it would be. I wasn't like Ozai. I wasn't a failure.

I took a deep breath and turned around to return to my quarters. I still had some meditations to do ahead of the comet. Strangely enough, the closer the comet got, the more I could feel it just at the edge of my awareness. Already, my flames seemed to burn just a bit hotter, whiteout even trying. That was the purpose of my second meditation. Trying to air condition a room was just a bit of housekeeping and some procrastination from the more important question in front of me.

Lao Ge, Kyoshi, the both of them had been able to use earthbending to allow them live far beyond their natural lifespans. It was said that Kyoshi did not die in so much as she chose to stop living and passed away from there. Now, I was a strong believer in the equality of the elements so if Earthbending had something like that, then there had to be some sot of firebending equivalent. I just had to figure it out.

When I sat to meditate, I took a breath and then felt for the comet. It was still steadily coming closer. I could feel more and more of its power seeping into me. I settled into a trance first. When I woke, I decided to try again. This time, when I pushed all the heat out of the room, the temperature instantly dropped to freezing. I watched as the metal walls that separated my quarters turned red-hot and the curtains that passed for a door here actually caught on fire, while frost built along the floor around me, creeping up on all the surfaces. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Too much, I thought, and pulled the heat into my body. The redness abandoned the metal in no time, and the fire from the curtains shot out and speared into my body, causing me no pain. Fuck.

That had been easier than it should have. Far easier. How long had I been meditating for? The comet was only a few hours away. That meant we were a few hours away from the North Pole. I had no doubts that both those events would coincide perfectly, having the utmost faith in the Fire Nation's astronomers and mathematicians. We had the best knowledge workers in the world, and not just because we'd spent a century burning, raping, looting, and pillaging everywhere else so no one really had a chance to compete with their academics. They were too busy dying and running, I thought with a chuckle before returning to meditation.

The very nature of fire was anathema to the method Kyoshi had used. Fire could never be stagnant. There is no force for change greater than a flame, and that was the nature of firebending. Ours was the element of passionate change, of evolution. Fire turned man from beast, and with fire we conquered the world, as my lessons as a child reminded me. That meant I couldn't copy what they'd done. But there had to be something for me to attempt. What if I could constantly evolve in a way that kept me at the peak of my powers? Only growing stronger and never weaker? Using fire to enhance cell reproduction? No, that wouldn't work.

Why was I even bothering with this? I wondered after two more hours of fruitless thinking. The why was just as important as the how, I knew. And in this case, the why wasn't challenging to find. I would rather not feel it again. That darkness of death. I'd managed to forget it for some time, so focused on living and making the most of it, but Grandfather's death and Toji's injury brought it all back to me again.

XXXX- TOJI

"We know someone paid you to kill the Fire Lord. We just need to know who," He said while staring at the fool.

The man had been beaten quite savagely already. His face was swollen, and he had a few teeth missing. They hadn't bothered to keep the assassination attempts secret, and apparently the Royal Guardsmen who had been sent to bring this one in had been excellent friends with the people that had lost their lives in the attempt on Natsu's life. Of course, this was something that Natsu had to have both known and calculated. His friend could be brutal when he wanted to be, Toji knew.

The man spat in his direction, the spit flying a few meters through the air before landing right in front of his boot. Toji stared down at it. The prisoner's eyes followed his.

"Your name is Mako" He said, taking a step forward, stepping over the spit smoothly.

"You came into the capital twelve years ago after your family perished" He said next, taking another step. The man had backed himself against the wall now. His hands and feet were chained, his clothes were ratty, and he had more than a few teeth missing, but there was a fire in his eyes that could not be mistaken for anything else. Today, Toji would put out that fire.

"You worked for Baki as not just a barman, but an intermediary. You helped him find the jobs he needed, and you got to keep a cut of the profits. Of course, that fact surprised me because present situation aside, you don't look like someone who has been enjoying vast amounts of gold. Baki was expensive to hire, and that's coming from me, a Zenin." He noted the way the man's eyes did not react as he said his last name. Good. It meant he probably wouldn't have to kill his father.

"We already know what Baki did with his gold. He must have stockpiled it trying to deceive himself that he had some retirement in his future. But you, on the other hand? You're not that kind of stupid. You're a different breed. So where did you store all that gold?" He wondered out loud.

The man shook, almost quivering under Toji's sharp gaze.

"You spent it, of course. Not on yourself, though. No, you're too stupid to be that simple. You probably thought you were helping her, didn't you? The baker's apprentice that you've been gifting gold to take care of her sick father" Toji dropped a bombshell that sent the man reeling.

"Ho-how? How did you know?"

"About dear Nobara? Boy, I see your heart like I see your face. When I ask you a question, you better not lie because I will know. And you better answer, well, I know where she lives." He said, leaving the threat unsaid. He'd found that threats spoken lost some of their power for that luxury, and that was not a trade he was willing to make.

"What do you want to know?" Good, Toji thought to himself. Finally, he'd broken.

"Who hired your man? Baki, was it?"

"We didn't get a name. Just a face. He paid the gold through a drop-off at the pier."

"One million gold pieces dropped off at the pier? That feels unlikely".

"It's the truth, Sir. The whole truth" He turned his eyes to Toph, and she nodded, almost imperceptibly. The truth then.

"Then you will be following us. We'll see if we can find your client in the palace, shall we?"

XXXXXX- NATSU

"Is it time, my lord?" The man by my side asked.

"Yes, Ishida. Move in" I gave the order. I watched hum shoot an arrow straight into the ice wall that the Northerners used as their principal mode of defence. He grabbed a hold of the line connected to the arrow and then attached the end of it to the blimp. My initial plan had been full blitzkrieg and sort the ashes out afterward, but we had a single complication— tui and la. The moon and ocean spirits. It was for the best if they didn't die, and while I would take that risk to secure my rule, it was best to avoid it entirely.

And so when Ishida, with his unique set of skills, had come to me to report being approached for my assassination, I hadn't just seen a source of information, but a tool to be used to solve another problem. Even better, it was an expendable tool. His only requested payment was that I officially release him from the oaths he'd taken to join the Yuyan archers in the first place. I wasn't losing anything in the process, and I had a lot to gain if it went well.

He slid down the line, and even in the glint of the post-dawn sun he was almost impossible to make out if one wasn't explicitly looking out for him. There were only a few minutes until the comet flew overhead and once that happened, the attack would begin in earnest.

"Are you ready?" I asked, turning to the only other occupant of this ledge.

"Was born ready. Finally, we're at the last one" She said with a sigh. I smiled at Maki. While not a pacifist like Zhufu, I had begun to notice that she didn't revel in war the way Toji and I did.

The comet began to shoot through the sky, setting the entire world in an orange glow, just as the Northerners finally caught sight of us. We had been approaching with the sun at our back, making it painful to look up and see the blimps approaching, so none but the most keen eyed would have noticed our approach, and that required them to be specifically on the lookout. No one had had to worry about aerial threats for a century— not since the air nomads were culled during the last comet. And even before then, it wasn't like anyone had much cause to worry of an attack from that angle. Of course, the fire nation did have air defence drills, but our knowledge workers were the best in the world, and had a tendency to overthink and go off on tangents.

That was beside the point, though. The attack began with Maki. She took a breath. Took two steps forward on the ledge and pointed her head straight at the royal palace. The roof exploded outwards in a much bigger blast than I'd ever seen her generate. In one shot, the palace had begun to collapse in on itself. Her next shot was aimed right at the Northern Water Tribe's giant wall. About two meters away from the partition that serve as a gate, she sent the entire section of the wall falling to the ground from one explosion.

She was breathing heavily while staring at her work with what I suspected was a fair amount of awe.

"You tired?" I asked.

"No. It feels like I could do this all day" She said, turning to me with a smile on her face. She tightened her fist before turning back around.

"Good." Someone had spotted us and I took a breath in before breathing out a torrent of green flames that consumed the series of icicles he had sent our way.

"Proceed with the plan, I'll go do my bit," I said with a smile her way before walking right to the ledge along with her.

"Don't get yourself killed" She said. I just smiled before taking the final step, so I was right at the edge and then turned back to her. I blew her a kiss and then finally took a step backwards, falling off the blimp and towards the waiting Water tribesmen. The goal here was not complete eradication like initially planned. It was conquest, not destruction, and that meant many things. For one, instead of just raining fire down from the heavens, we rained men instead.

As I fell, I watched the Imperial Firebenders, the Nation's most powerful force, fall along my side, heading to do war for the first time since the first Battle of Omashu. The comet's power flowed through my veins, making me smile with the thrill as I shot down even faster, sending fire from all my limbs.

A/N: Team Toji-Zhufu-Toph investigates the assassination attempts while Natsu does what he does best. As always, the next two chapters are up on pa-treon. If you just want to read complete chapters and not my work in real-time, then feel free to purchase this story as a collection on my pa-treon page so you get to read each chapter after I finish it and not neecessarily the daily updates available with a regular pa-treon membership- nice way to support this story and me while you're at it. Enjoy!