Chapter Text
“You know,” Katara said, looking over her sunglasses at the sagging porch and rusting screen door of the house. “When rich kids invite you to their family’s summer cottage, it usually means the smaller mansion.”
Zuko shrugged. “Well, Mom’s side doesn’t come from money,” he told her, taking the steps first to make sure they wouldn’t break under the weight. Reasonably reassured, he fit the key into the sticky lock. “My great-grandfather built this place with his brothers when he got married. It wasn’t a vacation home until my great-grandma died and my grandparents started coming back here with my mom.” He holds the door open for her, and when they step inside, she hesitates in the entryway, taking in the cobwebs swaying in corners and the dusty film over all the glass windows and picture frames.
“And the last time you guys came here was…?”
“Um,” Zuko hesitated, thinking backwards. The last time his family had come to Ember Island together… “I guess it was a long time ago. Lu Ten was with us.”
Her face falls, and he opens his mouth to apologize for not being more upfront about the lack of luxury planned for this getaway. The words are halted by her fingers tucking into the crease of his elbow, a cool pressure as she squeezes. “Then I’m glad you didn’t choose to come back here alone.” When she lets go, she reaches for an elastic around her wrist, starting to pile her hair up on her head. “There better be a mop here somewhere though - we’ve got our work cut out.”
“Maybe you should let me-”
“I know how to start a grill, Zuko,” Katara grumbled, jabbing irritably at the ignition once more with no success. The grill had been scraped clean of the ancient char left on it, and a new gas tank hooked up, but she’d been swearing at it long enough for Zuko to finish marinating the meat and skewering vegetables, and there still wasn’t so much as a spark. “I think it’s dead.”
“Probably on its way out, but can you just let me try something?”
“Oh right, because man make fire, ugg,” she grunted.
Zuko rolled his eyes. “Maybe because if we’re gonna fuck around with a busted grill, the test dummy should be the one who only has one eyebrow to lose in the first place?”
Katara snapped her tongs at him and said, “I’m only agreeing because I just got mine threaded - got it?”
“Understood,” he said and stepped up. After a moment’s contemplation, he shut the lid and cranked a few knobs as far as they would go.
“That’s not how you-”
“You said the right way wasn’t working,” he reminded her.
“It’s dangerous to-”
“Are you hungry or not?”
Katara crossed her arms, but said nothing more and took a large step further away from the grill. Zuko pulled the lid open, shut his eyes, and pressed the ignition down.
FWOOOM! A flash of heat washed over his forearm and face, Katara screamed, and Zuko’s heartbeat rushed in his ears as he braced for pain that didn’t come. A shaky but relieved, “Oh,” made him open his eyes, only to find the grill alight, Katara still looking at him wide-eyed. A faint odor of singed hair reached his nose, and he quickly patted his head, confirming that his hair and remaining eyebrow were unscathed. The same couldn’t be said for his forearm, which had a small stripe of singed hairs. He rubbed at it, brushing away the remaining ash, and Katara came unstuck from her spot, reaching for his hand and inspecting his arm carefully. “Did you burn yourself?” she asked.
“I think just my arm hair.”
After a moment’s further inspection, she nodded her agreement. “Good,” she said, but kept hold of him for another minute before her eyes lost their hint of panic and she sent him back inside to get the food he’d prepared.
Zuko wasn’t technically on vacation, despite the location change. His first day on Ember Island was spent fussing with the wifi router he’d brought along and calling the cable company in between replying to endless work emails on his phone. While some of the pressure of his life in Caldera was off without his father and sister’s watchful eyes following his every move, he did still have plenty to get done. Things were somewhat slowed by the rotating door of people taking their actual vacations and the volume of upper management that were working from their second homes on the other side of the island. Still, he wished he had the freedom Katara did, the summer fully spread out before her with no obligations in between her degree programs.
“Are you already working?” she asked, emerging from the hallway to the bedrooms. Zuko looked up from his laptop where he was reading over a revised contract, a bowl of cereal half forgotten at his elbow. She was standing in a bathing suit and cover-up (that wasn’t covering up much of anything at all), a pair of sandals and sunglasses dangling from her fingers.
“Um,” he replied, guilt twisting his stomach and heating his face. “I guess so?”
“It’s seven in the morning,” she pointed out.
“Yeah, I’m surprised you’re up,” he said, a weak joke. As she approached the table, his palms started to sweat where they rested on the laptop.
“I wanted to go surfing before the beach gets too busy.”
“I didn’t know you surf.”
She shrugs, moving around him to get at the tea kettle and start water for herself. “Suki taught me when we visited her on Kyoshi. I’m not very good, but I saw there were some boards out back, and the water’s way warmer here than it was there.”
“Oh, yeah,” Zuko says, remembering spending his mornings as a child down on the beach, watching the surfers in the water. “Those are probably Uncle and Lu Ten’s old boards. I always wanted to learn, but I never really got past Lu Ten letting me ride along with him.”
“I didn’t know they were theirs. Should I not-”
“No,” he cut her off. “You should. Uncle would be happy to know they were getting some use again.” She smiled at him, and they shared the rest of their breakfast in companionable silence, Katara sipping her tea and Zuko pretending to still be reading until she left.
After two weeks on Ember Island with Katara, Zuko contracted the worst food poisoning of his life.
“At least, that’s what I told my project manager,” he said as he met Katara down on the beach, Lu Ten’s surfboard tucked under his arm.
“Zuko!” she cried in mock indignation. “Playing hooky from work? You?”
He shrugged off her surprise, but he was honestly a little shocked himself that he’d really followed through on it. Usually, just the thought of shirking responsibility like this would make him sweaty and a little nauseous, but the moment he’d gotten a bland acceptance from his supervisor, he had felt a knot of tension release deep in his chest. “It’s summer - nobody else is working hard either. Why should I be missing out?”
“That’s the spirit,” she said, grinning. He started for the water, only to be held back by her hand gripping his wrist. “Whoa, where do you think you’re going?”
“To learn how to surf?”
With a laugh, she said, “If you’re gonna learn, we have some basics to cover before you get anywhere near the water.”
He felt childish as she encouraged him to kneel down in the sand with her and build a platform to rest his board on, and more so when she coached him through a pantomime of paddling himself out and getting to his feet, her hands hovering to balance him or correct his form. When his movements were smooth enough for her standards, they walked down to the water and put their boards in. It felt a little strange to be a grown man on Lu Ten’s board, setting his feet where his cousin had stood years before, picturing his smaller self where he used to crouch just in front of his legs. It was nice though, being out there on the water again, and with Katara’s enthusiastic cheers of, “There you go!” and “Okay, now!” he couldn’t fall too deep into memories, just wading shallowly through the happy ones.
Neither of them was good enough to ride big waves, just catching small ones in the shallow water close to shore and riding them in (or slipping and falling). Still, by late morning they were both exhausted dragging their boards back up to the house.
Zuko spared half a thought that the office really hadn’t been open for more than a couple of hours, and he could easily say his stomach righted itself and put in almost his full normal day. It only stayed half a thought though, because Katara had quickly shoved him towards the bathroom with instructions to “hurry up and shower so we can go find lunch,” and he was helpless to do anything but obey. He’d ended up being “sick” the following day too and joining Katara on her overnight trip to go ziplining in the mountains.
In the grand scheme of things, it was hardly the blink of an eye before Zuko’s life on Ember Island was so far from his reality that he usually forgot it had ever happened. A handful of years had seen Katara and their shared friends falling away into scattered texts in the group chat around birthdays and holidays. He hadn’t seen any of them since his wedding, and then he had been promoted, bought a place with Mai in a shiny high-rise, and they decided to have a baby. And then she died, and he was alone with said baby in a coldly modern condo above a glittering city. And today was the day he was supposed to return to work for the father who hated him, to do a job that made him feel slimy and angry, that would take him away from his daughter for sixty hours a week.
He sat in the rocking chair in the corner of the nursery, dressed in a pressed suit that hung a little looser on his frame than the last time he’d worn it. He was supposed to be buckling Izumi into the car seat waiting on the changing table, but instead he found himself cradling her in his arms, staring at her. She stared back, chewing on her hand and drooling on a dry-clean only relic of a past life. Minutes slipped away as he pushed off the floor and started rocking them both back and forth, but he didn’t look away to check his watch. Part of him thought that he really had to get going or he’d be later than traffic and extra daycare paperwork could excuse, and he’d just about resolved himself to stand when he looked up from Izumi and leveled his gaze at the wall. His eyes caught on the framed photograph on the shelf across the room.
His mother had ended up finishing the nursery herself, and given that he and Mai hadn’t settled on a theme for decorations beyond the furniture they had ordered, Ursa had chosen an underwater theme. The photo in the ceramic frame had migrated from a box to the knickknack shelf as one of the few things already in the apartment with a suitable color scheme for an infant’s room. Ember Island, Discover Your True Self, the frame read. Inside, was a parting gift from a summer that felt a lifetime away, showing him laughing as Katara shoved an ice cream cone towards his face.
He couldn’t remember anymore if she had been trying to share it or smear it all over him, couldn’t really remember what the laughter had felt like either, but he knew it had felt good. The salty breeze, quaint houses, bright festivals had given him a sense of being home that he hadn’t felt since he’d been a teenager in Uncle Iroh’s house. Izumi made a noise, and Zuko looked back to her. “What do you think about a trip to the beach?”
She blinked at him in the uncanny way she had that made him swear she understood him.
“You wanna go, turtleduck?”
She gave him a gummy smile, slapped at his best tie with her spitty hand, and it was decided.
Zuko and Izumi moved to Ember Island and never looked back. And years later found him reunited with Katara, standing in a renovated and neatly kept version of the same kitchen they had shared so many quiet mornings and rowdy evenings. Their lives were more tightly intertwined than ever before, and Zuko realized, as years worth of memories flitted through his slow, sleepy mind, that he finally felt that peace he had come here searching for so long ago.
Katara stood at his side, hands submerged in the sink full of dinner dishes, unaware of his wandering thoughts as she scrubbed a pan. Zuko realized he’d been rubbing at an already-dry plate for a while and turned to put it away in the cabinet like he was supposed to. He reached for his nearly empty wine glass from dinner and swallowed down the last mouthful, the sharp fruity tartness of it bringing him back to the present. As he placed the glass carefully beside the sink basin, Katara shot him a look of exaggerated irritation. Satisfied with her current task, she pulled the pan from the water and held it with one hand to rinse it under the faucet, reaching for her own unfinished drink with the other. Suds from her fingers slipped down the glass stem and dripped onto the countertop.
She offered him the clean pan and he took it, running the towel over it while she slowly sipped. Tossing the towel over his shoulder when he was done, he stepped behind her to hang the pan back on the rack with the others. When he turned back, she wasn’t watching him anymore, her eyes fixed somewhere in the darkness past the window. The gentle silence that had stretched between them felt too precious to end it simply to warn as he stepped behind her again to reach the drying rack. As he did though, she started to turn to say something. His hands moved without thought to steady her before she shoulder checked him, but he had underestimated how quickly she was moving, and so he found himself holding her by the hips just as she had finished turning to face him.
Her back was against the sink, their faces too close. Her hands settled on his chest, possibly to keep their heads from colliding, and she could surely feel his pulse going a million miles an hour as their proximity sent a rush through his veins. Under his palms, she was warm from the hot water and their meal. The knowledge that he should step aside and return to his chores was distant, his brain utterly drowned out by the pounding of his heart in his ears. Lemongrass dish soap and sweet perfume mixed in the air between them and it weakened his knees, drawing him a stumbling step closer to her.
Instead of her hands nudging him away, they wound around his waist, holding him there by the small of his back as their faces tipped towards one another. Zuko’s nose brushed against hers, their foreheads pressed together, and with just an inch between their lips, they stopped just like that and breathed together. He wanted her so badly he could feel his hands starting to tremble against her hipbones and tried to hold on more firmly to force the fear away. They were at a crossroads, and a multitude of futures played behind his eyelids in the brief moment he allowed himself to close his eyes and breathe in her arms. In any number of these futures they were alternately loved, rejected, cherished, scorned, and in each of them there were their children, dragged along for the ride.
It was the same stumbling block Zuko had tripped over at each charged moment in the recent months of their friendship. Whatever he might’ve been willing to risk in personal humiliation and loneliness for a chance with her, it was very different from gambling with his daughter’s happiness. He could feel Katara’s hands gripping his shirt tighter even as she pushed her hips back against the sink behind her, and imagined her own thoughts were a similar tumult of anxiety. They couldn’t undo this moment, couldn’t back away from it for good, but neither could they charge through it recklessly.
When Zuko opened his eyes, Katara was looking right at him, her eyes wide and searching. As he spoke, his voice was quiet but firm as he told her, “I love you.”
She didn’t startle or flinch or blush. Just met his gaze steadily and replied, “I love you too.”
His heartbeat skipped giddily for an instant, before starting to slow, settling as the surety of her words pressed down on him like a thick blanket. Zuko said, “We shouldn’t do this right now.”
“No.” They breathed together for another long moment, not wanting to pull away, especially knowing this was the closest they’d get tonight.
“I’ll still love you tomorrow,” he whispered hopefully, praying that she would understand that he wasn’t asking her to ignore this, that he would never turn a blind eye to such a gift as her heart.
“Me too,” she promised, the start of a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.
“So we’ll go to bed now,” he said. “Separately,” he clarified further, and she breathed a soft laugh. They were so close that he could taste the wine on her breath, and he shivered and hated himself, just for a second.
“And tomorrow, we’ll talk,” she agreed.