Zuko studied the map until the lines blurred, then studied it again until the world stopped being able to hide how small he was beneath the ocean’s weight.

The advisors spoke in careful tones—currents, pressure, conditions. They used words like unfortunate and likely and we will do what we can, but the truth sat in his chest like a stone that refused to soften.

His team hadn’t come back.

You hadn’t come back.

He goes to the harbor anyway.

The cloak he wears is too thin for the hour, and the salt air scrapes at him like a reminder. The pylons are bearded with ice. Lanterns knock against each other—bright, brittle sounds that make his teeth ache.

He watches the horizon until his eyes burn.

He tries to picture you out there—your posture when you were angry at a storm, your hands when you decided the ocean would obey. He tries to imagine you laughing as the cold bit through your sleeves, tries to place you so solidly in his mind that you could step out of it and into his life.

Somewhere between the third and fourth lantern, he catches himself thinking the wrong thought.

If I’d been braver. If I’d gone with you.

He remembers the way the door between you and him had always felt—too easy to open, too safe to rely on. He remembers, too late, how often he treated that safety like it was permanent.

When he finally speaks to the sea, his voice is hoarse.

“Come back.”

He hates that it sounds like begging.

He hates worse that some part of him believes the ocean might listen if he says it clearly enough.

Back in the palace, he is Fire Lord on paper and a boy with shaking hands in practice. He sits with grieving families, nods at the words people expect from him, and performs strength like a costume that doesn’t fit.

“We will search until—” he begins, and then the sentence breaks in his mouth.

Until what? Until the ocean decides? Until the ice decides you’re gone? Until the next courier arrives with rope burns and a bundle under oilcloth?

He can’t make never into something he says out loud.

So he doesn’t.

He starts searching instead.

Not officially—no one has the heart to commission another mission when the last one failed—but he slips out with crews who pretend not to notice him. He watches the water as if it might change its mind. He combs the shoreline until his knees are numb and his hands smell like brine.

Rain follows him back to the palace.

At first, it comes like a blessing—soft at the edges, a silver hush against the tiled roofs. But by midnight it grows relentless, as though the sky is trying to cleanse the world and can’t.

It hits the empty entryway in clean sheets and slides down the stone where you once stood.

Zuko stops one night beneath the archway and stares at the doorway like it’s a wound he keeps checking to see if it’s still bleeding.

He expects—

Nothing comes.

He starts holding onto smaller things instead.

Not the relics of heroism. Not the proud treasures the palace would want him to display. He holds onto the ordinary, the tender, the proof that you existed in a world that went on without you.

A folded letter you never sent—paper damp at the corners where you’d sealed it, then hesitated. A ribbon tied in the back of a drawer for no reason other than habit. A cup you left half-washed, as if you planned to come back and finish it later.

His grief has become a hoarding instinct.

He doesn’t even realize how far it’s gone until Katara finds him with his hands pressed to a bundle of cloth in the corner of the hall. His palms are cold. The cloth is colder.

She says your name carefully, like it might shatter if she speaks too loudly.

Zuko looks at her and wants to explain—wants to say that he is doing everything he can, that there are limits to what flesh can survive and that the sea isn’t human and doesn’t bargain.

But his throat is full of ash.

Instead, he just lets the quiet sit between them.

Katara’s jaw tightens. She doesn’t yell. She doesn’t collapse. She just steps closer and touches the space beside him, not quite on him—like she’s afraid contact will break something that can’t be fixed.

Sokka finds him at dawn, dragging a hand through his hair like he can scrub the nightmares out of himself.

“You think you can pull them back with staring,” he says—not cruelly. Like he’s trying to shove Zuko back into the world where other people live. “You keep doing this, and you’ll tear yourself to pieces.”

Zuko opens his mouth.

No words come.

Because Sokka is right, and because the truth is worse: if tearing himself apart might make the universe feel guilty, he would gladly do it.

The second courier arrives at dusk.

The harbor has the kind of silence that hurts. Rope creaks. Workers lower their eyes. Someone says Zuko’s name too softly, as if volume could make the news less real.

A skiff comes in slow, already exhausted by what it carries. Oilcloth bundles shift under careful hands. Water beads along the edges of the wood like tears that didn’t get permission to fall.

Zuko walks toward the boat and doesn’t feel his feet touch the ground.

He waits until the bundle is placed into his arms before he lets himself breathe.

Then he kneels.

His breath fogs the oilcloth—witnessing heat where there should be nothing.

He keeps his hands steady. He keeps his face still. He keeps his mind from sprinting ahead into the certainty he can’t bear.

When he peels it back, the motion is reverent in a way that makes him sick with rage at the world. Like the careful handling will undo what careful handling can’t undo.

There are things he recognizes, and the parts he doesn’t recognize feel even crueler.

He doesn’t let himself cry—not at first.

Instead, he presses a palm to the place where warmth should have been. His hand trembles anyway. His body betrays him with microshocks of grief.

He whispers your name once.

Then again.

Then he stops whispering, because it doesn’t matter how quietly he speaks. The door won’t open. The ocean won’t return what it took.

He thinks about the last time he saw you at the palace threshold—how you stepped inside laughing, hair damp, cheeks flushed from the cold you pretended was nothing.

He remembers saying something stupid. Something small. Something that now feels like a crime.

I should’ve gone with you.

The words aren’t a thought anymore.

They’re a blade that keeps being re-sharpened.

After the funeral rites, after the official grieving is finished and everyone has done what they can to be seen doing it, Zuko returns to the empty rooms.

The rain has stopped. The world feels rinsed clean in a way that makes him want to scream.

He finds a place for everything you left behind, and in doing so he becomes the kind of man who builds altars out of furniture.

He smooths your last letter flat until the paper lies still. He ties your ribbon where it belongs. He sets your cup in the position you always used.

Then he does something he cannot justify: he sits by the entryway with the vigil of someone watching a battlefield.

He doesn’t lock the door.

He keeps it unlocked as if you might come back furious at the storm, as if you might call out from the hall, as if you might step in dripping and furious at how late you are.

Night deepens. The moon shifts behind clouds. The rain doesn’t return, but the memory of it does—like the sky never learned to move on.

At midnight, he lights candles.

Not because it changes anything.

Because it makes the house look less empty.

The palace glow is too gentle for what it contains. Firelight flickers along doorframes and polished stone, dancing across walls that no longer hold your reflection.

Zuko speaks into the quiet. He speaks like you can still hear him if he’s careful enough.

“I should’ve gone with you.”

His voice doesn’t echo.

But the house listens anyway.

He falls asleep in your chair—his head bent where yours would rest, your space filled by the shape of his grief. Exhaustion drags him down, but even in dreams he can’t escape the ocean.

He dreams of breakers lifting him with palms of water. He dreams of the sea opening like a path, inviting him to step in.

He dreams of your laugh.

He dreams of you at the threshold, barefoot and stubborn, parka open—no longer cold, no longer gone—turning your head like you’re about to scold him for waiting too long.

The door swings in the dream. The lantern sways. His body surges upright with hope so sharp it feels like pain.

He reaches for you.

And his hands close on nothing.

Morning comes without mercy.

The door stays shut.

The chair stays empty.

Rain doesn’t fall, but puddles remain along the stone like evidence. Like the world is insisting on continuity: yesterday happened, tonight happened, you didn’t get to come home.

Zuko stands slowly, as if moving too quickly might break whatever fragile boundary separates hope from madness.

He looks at the entryway again, the place where you should have been.

Then he makes himself do the one thing grief refuses to accept:

He doesn’t wait for the door to open.

He just lets the truth exist.

And when he’s finally able to move, he only moves because the house needs it—because if he stays still, he’ll turn into the kind of man who lives inside a vigil until even his bones forget the purpose of walking.

He sets the candles out one by one.

Light becomes smoke.

Smoke becomes memory.

The door remains closed.

And Zuko, Fire Lord and survivor, learns what the ocean teaches best:

Some things are taken, and the world keeps going anyway.

Sokka x waterbender!Reader

TW: argument, harsh words, implied death at sea, storm imagery, survivor’s guilt, unresolved conflict, last words left unsaid, blame-yourself spiral

Sokka’s doing his triple-check thing—lines, rigging, spare sails—and you’re listening to the sea like it’s choosing a language. He says the black shelf on the horizon is nothing yet, that you know storms, that you’re the best person for this scouting run. “It’s not about best,” you say, gentling the rope through your palms. “It’s about right.” “So it’s not right unless you say so?” He doesn’t mean it cruelly, but the wind stuffs the words full of grit. You flinch. He sees and hates himself for it. “I just—this is the plan.” “The plan doesn’t care if you come home,” you say, and it’s a truth with teeth. “I do.” He swallows. He’s been captain since he was a boy because nobody else would. Plans keep people alive. Plans do not leave room for the way you’re looking at him, for the boil of the sky, for the bone-deep tug that says wait. “Then trust me,” he says, too sharp because he’s scared. “Or don’t.” You say, “Don’t make me choose.” He says, “I already did,” and that is the first cut. You don’t kiss him before you go. You touch his shoulder like sailors do—a quick press. You tuck your braid under your hood, your knife at your hip, your faith in the ocean’s mood tucked into the place behind your teeth. He watches until the skiff is a bead on the waterline. He pretends the horizon is polite. When the rain comes it is not polite. Hours fold. He paces a rut in the dock. Plans unravel in his hands and slither away. He ties and unties the same knot until it burns his skin. Every thunderclap sounds like a door slamming. When the lookouts call, he runs. The skiff returns cracked and coughing, with two sailors and a coil of rope that belongs to you. He doesn’t ask which wave took you. He doesn’t ask if you called his name. He doesn’t ask, because there are only two answers: yes or no, and both carve him open.

He goes back to the dock when it storms, stands in the rain until he’s shaking, practicing apologies too late. He says them anyway, into wind that throws his words back at him like spray: You were right. I was scared. I should have stopped you. I should have gone with you. I should have kissed you. I should have— There’s a logic to weather he doesn’t understand. It breaks, always. It breaks and the sun returns and people say relief like a prayer. He wants a storm that never ends, something that can hold his mistake in its mouth and not let go. He keeps your knife in his boot. He starts checking knots softer. He stops using the word plan like a shield. When he hears thunder, he speaks to the water the way you did—gentle, listening. “Bring them home,” he says. “Or take care of them where I can’t.” The sea says nothing. He waits anyway.

Toph x firebender!Reader

TW: battlefield aftermath, implied fatal injury, sensory loss, inability to help, helpless rage, found family quiet, hand-holding at the end

After the ambush, the ground is too loud. Metal clatters where it shouldn’t. The earth complains under scorched footprints. Someone is sobbing into their sleeve; someone is lying very still and thinking very hard about nothing. “Hey,” you call, smoky and hoarse. “Twinkletoes okay?” “Aang’s breathing,” Toph says, kneeling, palms down, listening. “He’s fine. Where are you?” “By the… by the rock with the split like a smile.” You laugh, and it hurts. “Funny.” She grins reflexively and digs her fingers in, reading. There you are: a warm-blooded punctuation against the cooled earth. She walks without stumbling because she has you to aim for. When she finds you, it smells like the world cracked open too fast. Your fire has always been careful with her, a hearth in a house that remembers snow. Now the heat around you is wrong; it radiates and then pulls back, like a breath caught and held. She sits in the ash and takes your hand. “No napping on the job,” she says, bravado pitched high. “I haven’t insulted you in at least five minutes.” “You’re slipping,” you murmur. “What a tragedy.” “That’s my line,” Toph says. She listens. Your heartbeat is a metronome that’s learned a new song. It skips. It argues. It apologizes. She hates it. She leans closer, ear almost on your chest like a child, not because she needs to but because skin against skin is a language older than mountains. “I can fix it,” she says, hands shaking now. “I can—there’s pressure. I can move it. I can—” “No,” you breathe. Your fingers flex around hers, brave. “You’ll hurt yourself. And… you can’t.” She could peel a city like fruit. She could fold a palace into a suitcase. She could do every impossible thing except the one in front of her. “Don’t tell me what I can’t do,” she says. It comes out small. “Okay,” you say, gentle. “Then do this. Stay.”

She feels the last heat leave the rock under your back like a lamp turning down. Your heartbeat used to be a door she could put her ear to, eavesdropping on joy. The quiet it leaves is a wound with edges. When the others find them, no one says her name. They put hands on her shoulders that she shrugs off like rain. She reaches for the ground because it has never lied to her. It tells her what she already knows: you are weight without pulse. Toph clears a place in the earth that’s soft as a bed. She lays you down with all the ceremony she pretends to hate. She presses her palm to your sternum, where she used to feel the kick of laughter between your ribs, and makes a vow the dirt hears. “If the world ever tries to take you from me again, it’s going to have to take me too.” Later, when she sleeps, she dreams in quiet. It’s awful. She wakes and hammers her fist into the ground until it sings. Somewhere in the vibration she almost hears you laughing.

Katara x firebender!Reader

TW: healer’s failure, implied fatal wound, mercy, grief, guilt, sunrise death, lover’s forehead touch, promise breaking

She gets you onto the flat rock you like, the one that soaks the morning sun first. Your fire always spilled out of you at dawn like greeting an old friend. Even now, your fingers twitch when light touches them, reflexive, like you’re reaching for a spark. Katara pulls water from the river until it rises around them like a slow curtain. Her hands glow. She talks because sound is a balm. “Remember when we stole Sokka’s jerky and he pretended to arrest us? Remember the market in Shu Jing and the scarf you haggled down from three copper to one? Remember—” “Remember when you promised,” you say, and blink an apology. “I know. It’s not fair.”

“None of this is fair,” she says, and lays her palms over the worst of it, where your shirt is dark and the fabric sticks(your bleeding),and the edges are hot with the kind of heat that means the body is bargaining.

“Katara,” you whisper. “I’ve got you,” she says. “I’ve got you. Stay. Breathe. Stay.” She can feel the water pulling and refusing in the same motion. It wants to knit. It wants to smooth. It slides off a place too deep, too ragged; it cannot get a grip. She pushes anyway, sweat slipping into the river, teeth clenched, every part of her focused down into her hands and the light and the steady will not take them from me. The sun lifts. The light goes from blue to gold. Your breathing dithers like a child deciding whether to misbehave. “Tell me a story,” you say. She tells you how the moon taught her to heal. She tells you of nights she sat on rooftops and listened to people dream. She tells you you’re the bravest person she’s ever met, which is not a story but a truth. She tells you tomorrow’s weather like it’s a fact you’ll share. “Tomorrow,” you repeat, smiling like it fits. “Good.”

. Katara folds your hands at your sternum, a pose she’s given a hundred strangers, and for the first time she hates it. She wants your hands where they belong: in her hair making a mess of braids, on her hips when she scolds you, pressed flat to her back when you slide into the tent late and warm. She rests her forehead to yours. “I promised,” she says into the smallest space left. “I lied.” The river doesn’t argue. It takes what she gives it: your name, a sliver of hair, the heat from her cheeks. She lets the current carry the promise away, out to where the ocean can make it its own.

She will keep your scarf. She will wear it when it’s too hot. She will learn to call the river a friend again, but not today. Today, she sits on the rock until her shadow swallows it whole.

Aang x earthbender!Reader

TW: secret pregnancy reveal, implied fatal injury during mission, grief for two futures, found family fracture, avatar-state grief tremor (controlled), gentle body care.

You come back to him carried, not walking. The others make a place that is shade and quiet and water, and Aang kneels and is suddenly every age he has ever been—twelve and scared, a hundred and tired, seventeen and trying to be steady for everyone.

“Hey,” you say, brave and bright through pain. “Heavy day, huh?” “You’re the earthbender,” he says, and tries to smile. “You’re supposed to like heavy.” You squeeze his wrist. “Do you promise to listen? I need you to listen.” “I’m listening,” he says, and the air turns obediently still, a room with the door shut. “I was going to tell you,” you breathe. Your eyes close for a beat. “I wanted—there wasn’t a good time. And it was so new I didn’t want to name it and make it… breakable.”

He looks at your hands on your stomach, at the way your body has always read the ground like scripture. He feels the old world and the new world tilt. “You—” He swallows too fast. “We—” “Maybe,” you say. “I don’t know for sure. But I felt it. The ground felt it. Like a drum with a softer beat inside the beat. I was going to find a healer after this, when we got back, and tell you with tea and those sesame cakes you like.” His hands hover. He cannot bear to press and cannot bear not to. “Thank you for telling me,” he says, because there are a thousand other words and none of them are big enough. “Thank you.” You laugh and it hurts and he wants to fight the air for letting it. “I didn’t want you to find out like this.” “It’s not like this,” he says, fast, certain in a way that frightens him. “It’s not.” He calls the air colder for your skin. He smooths the stone beneath you so it cups your spine the way his body has a hundred times, a shape made for you. He calls water close without dripping, asks it to be a hush instead of a flood. You touch his cheek. “Aang. Stay with me.” “I always do,” he says, and he means it like a vow that outlives language.

He washes your hair. He braids it the way Katara taught him, clumsy but careful. He smooths your eyebrows because you always made a joke about your unruly face before a council meeting. He arranges you in the way of your people, asks Toph what the earth likes best for comfort, listens to the answer and gives it. That night, he sits by the little cairn they build, hands on the stones as if they are a heartbeat he can coax back. He sings a lullaby Monk Gyatso used when the older boys couldn’t sleep—the one about the sky that doesn’t end and the ground that does, which always made you snort because you insisted the ground is a circle too. He speaks to both futures. He says your name and another that never got chosen. He apologizes to a person who may have been and to the one who was, and he thanks you for both. When he finally stands, he touches the top stone like a forehead, like a kiss. He bends the grass so it grows toward the cairn, an emerald tide that will keep it company. He lifts his staff. He doesn’t fly. He walks. The ground remembers the weight of him, and for once, that’s enough.

Thank you to @st4rjojo for this amazing idea, i hope you all enjoy it