#kurekoii

It is not so easy to tell when a man stops loving you. It is not a sound like a throat tearing, nor a smell like old lilies. It is the absence of small things first: the missing tea cup in the morning, his coat held a second longer by a valet as if to ask, Are you sure? It is the way the birds continue to chirp with obscene faith.

He had a session with the Council that week. He had three.

He missed a night. Then two.

He sent flowers, to apologize, a small half-armful. Then none. Then one morning you found on your step a spray of white gypsophila so meager it could have been a bridal crown for a mouse, and your stomach tightened with the sort of dread that tastes like tin—a taste you knew from biting your tongue.

You told yourself the lie decently brought-up women tell, the one embroidered on every pillow in this place: It’s only politics. It isn’t me.

On the third day, the servants didn’t avoid your eyes. They sought them. They carried gossip as if drawn on with kohl, as if their lips were the brushes and your heart the inkstone. You made your mouth still. You made your hands still. Somewhere in the garden a thrush sang, mad with desire. It seemed to you that the palace had fewer birds until you had need of silence.

By the fifth day, the whispers slithered into the open. “He was seen in the east pavilion,” a laundress told a stable boy who told a perfumer who told a kitchen maid who told the woman who tended your braids. Her fingers were steady with hairpins; her voice was kind beyond her station. “He was seen taking dinner…not in the ceremonial hall. In his personal quarters.”

You kept your head high. It was stubbornness, that old family brand. It was also the only thing you could still hold upright.

It was Mai.

Of course it was Mai. The palace had hardly remembered her as a woman. It had remembered her as an expectation. She was a sliver slip of a thing still, cut right and thin as a blade, her face a lake that did not ripple unless a stone of intent dropped into it. She didn’t look at you in corridors. She didn’t need to.

On the seventh night, you put on the red silk robe he’d once slid from your shoulders with shaking fingers and walked to his quarters because there are pains best swallowed boiling. Better to scorch your tongue than your lungs.

You should have been turned away at the east pass door. Servants were told to say His Majesty is indisposed if such and such and so on and so forth. Your guard was a child trying to wear a man’s scowl. He faltered when you met his eyes.

“I need to see him,” you said, and your voice was a perfect blade. He stepped aside.

Inside, light fanned like brushed lacquer. The hearth murmured. And there they were: Zuko and Mai, seated on cushions at a low table, a bowl of fish with ginger and scallions steaming between them. The scent of sesame oil clung to the air. He had never let you eat here. Personal quarters, he had explained once, were for solitude, for boyhood, for the crown to unhook his neck from its weight. He had said this with regret as if you were a law carved into his own ribs—and you had accepted it because you had been taught to accept the wicked with the good. The ember must learn to live inside the coal.

Mai looked up with that low-lake face and raised an eyebrow as if you were a new foreign utensil no one had taught her to use.

Zuko’s chopsticks froze. He was halfway to offering Mai the ginger.

“Leave us,” he said to no one and to everyone. The doors slid shut like breath held too long.

You did not bow. You did not kneel. You did not cry. You let only the worst part of your throat show: the part that pulsed with speech you could not have back once loosed.

“Your Majesty,” you said, granting him what the room demanded. “I see I am late to dinner.”

Mai’s smile, when it came, was not unkind. It was also not kind. “Consort,” she said, without the courtesy of your name. “You have a flair for entrances. Was there some…floral emergency?”

Your gaze ticked to the mantle. Three red camellias sat there, stiff and rich, their leaves glossed like lacquer. A spray of baby’s breath crouched at their feet like small snow.

Zuko recovered enough to look at you. He could not meet your eyes. He faced your hair. Your earlobes. The space between your shoulder and your throat where he had once rested his face like a contrite animal. “This isn’t… The Council has asked—”

“The Council does not pull your hands like a puppet’s,” you said softly. “They have asked—and you have answered.”

Mai’s chopsticks clinked against the bowl with precise disdain. “He is the Fire Lord,” she said with no heat at all. “He answers for the nation, not for your vanity, Consort.”

Zuko flinched. You saw it. He flinched as if she had sliced him and was only now applying pressure with bandage. “Mai—”

“You asked me a question,” you said, still looking at him, hearing his not-name in the way he avoided yours. “That night. With the flowers. Do you remember, Your Majesty? You asked if I would accept.”

His mouth opened. Closed around something heavy.

Mai’s eyes flicked to the mantle. She counted camellias, perhaps, as you had. She saw, perhaps, the ghost of 108. Her blade-smile widened imperceptibly. “Ah. Gesture arithmetic. It is dangerous, counting feelings. They double-count themselves.”

“I can’t—” he started, “—I can’t marry you,” he finished, and it sounded like a boy taught to confess by standing on pebbles.

“I know,” you said, because you were merciful even now. “But you asked. You asked and you sent 108 flowers. The meaning was plain.”

That was when the anger came—not the kind that bit and lashed like a rope, but the slow anger of stone brightening under friction, older than you, older than this palace, older, perhaps, than fire. You thought of your grandmother’s wrists tied with red string. You thought of camellias bruising under sheer abundance.

“Then perhaps,” you said mildly, “you should be more careful with what you send into the world.”

Mai set down her chopsticks. Carefully. Her voice slipped into something silkier, which was to say something more dangerous. “We all received an education in symbols. Some of us learned restraint.”

It would have been easier if she had been jealous, if she had plucked at your hair with pettiness, if she had stamped her foot. But Mai did not stamp. She placed pins. She suffocated with pillows of propriety. You wondered—as you had never let yourself wonder before—if the boy you had loved had always loved someone whose knife was not the kind that bled you openly, but the kind that simply made sure you could not breathe.

“Congratulations,” you said, and you did not look at her. “I hear there is to be a wedding.”

Zuko breathed in so sharply it could have been flame. “I meant to speak with you,” he said, and his voice dropped into the lower register he used for apologies, which was also the register he used for orders. “I was going to—”

“Make me your Empress Consort?” you asked, and did not smile. “You had, as the apothecaries say, all the necessary herbs.”

Something like guilt made a home in his face. He had always been too unguarded with it. That was his blessing and your curse. “You know I can’t. The council—”

“The Council,” you echoed, and bowed as if to an invisible elder. “Of course.”

You felt the heat rise behind your eyes. You stood very straight so it would have to climb and climb to escape. “I bid you a pleasant evening, Your Majesty. Lady Mai.”

You bowed. You left. You did not run. You walked like a woman walking a garden she would never see again, noting the lantern moss, the ways light hugged stone. You walked like a woman eating the scene so she could have it later in a room without air.

Behind you, the laughter did not start. You were grateful for this mercy you would never forgive.

The wedding arrived with rain that smelled of bronze. The palace polished itself into a blade: bells that sounded like gilded thunder, banners that took their colors as if lacquer had been poured over the air. You dressed in protocol’s colors: a muted cinnabar that meant you were consort, which meant you were revered, which meant you were disposable in a kinder case.

They put pearls in your hair and painted your mouth like a wound. You sat where your rank required: not in the shadow of the throne but to the side of the shadow. You watched.

Zuko’s face when he lifted Mai’s veil was neither radiant nor reluctant. It was duty’s face, which is the face of a man who has decided not to be a boy any longer. He looked as if he had run a long way through a small room. He looked as if someone had smoothed a hand over his mouth and told him to keep quiet.

Mai’s face was the usual water surface. But her eyes—dark and flat as onyx—were on him with a singleness that terrified you. Love was not the right word. Claim was too brutish a word. It was attention as an instrument—a whetstone’s attention to a blade. She would keep him sharp. She would keep him honed to the angle that cut her out of the world. You almost admired her for it.

When the priest invoked Agni and said the fire is witness, you wanted to laugh. Fire is witness. Fire was Zuko’s oldest wound and oldest balm. But fire is not impartial. Fire takes sides. Fire remembers the first hand that taught it to live in the house.

And then, in the wrong moment, at the wrong time, your eyes filled.

You had not wept when your mother died. You had not wept when you left your father’s house. You had not wept when the camellias made red footprints all over your floor. Now tears welled up as if pulled by a string you could not name. You did not let them fall. They sat, trembling, making the world shimmer just a little—as if you were underwater and the wedding were above you. You smiled a very small smile. You imagined it made you look dignified. You imagined it made you look like a woman who remembers the apothecaries’ rule: that dose and poison are twins, and love, too.

There was applause. There were drums. You folded your hands over your lap and smoothed your robe lightly as if you were an empress of ants.

Later, in your chambers, the servants peeled pearls from your hair as though unplucking stars from a net. One of them lingered over your ear just long enough for pity to drip. You tipped her an amount that made her bow often and back out of the room without turning her back on you as if you were a shrine with a history of cursing.

You woke each morning with a second heartbeat. You told yourself it was the memory of tears caught and not the thing it was.

By the second month, gossip had chewed you and spat you into the river. It had moved on to the other consort—a pretty, clever girl named Linh from a line that once kept the palace accounts. She had lacquer-black hair that fell like rain and a laugh that trembled on the edge of hysteria. She had discovered, to her chagrin and her delight, that the Fire Lord liked to be scratched on the back of his neck when he brooded. She had not discovered yet that women sometimes had to become their own brooding.

You did not dislike Linh. You disliked youth, which is to say you were jealous of the time she still thought she had.

Mai liked no one.

The first time you and Mai met as two points on a triangle rather than as two stars in luckless parallel was at a tea prepared by the Mistress of the Inner Court. The Mistress was a woman who could crush you with tea etiquette. You considered it a specific talent. She placed you opposite Mai as if she were planting creeping vines and wanted to watch them strangle or interlace.

“It has come to my attention,” Mai said, after the proper sips and silences, “that certain flowers are being misread in this palace.”

You smiled like a scholar at a lecture she could have taught. “I always assumed misreading was part of the fun. Why else would soldiers cut themselves on letters?”

Mai’s eyebrow raised a millimeter. “Red camellias,” she said, “signify excellence, yes? Or are you with the faction that insists on perfection? Such a provincial argument.”

“It depends on whether you are a gardener or a poet,” you said. “Or whether you are a man bleeding into a poem and hoping the flower looks.”

“And the red lotus,” she went on, bored with your answer and also pricked by it, “is purity of heart in the fire nation’s temple tradition. But in war it has meant stubbornness in blood. The council thinks it is…unwise to send so much flower language into the city.”

“Does the council fear petals now,” you asked, sweetly, “or meanings?”

Her smile did not move. “I fear boredom,” she said. “And women who think symbols are substance.”

“Then best not to wear the empress’s crown long,” you said, just as sweet, and the Mistress of the Inner Court inhaled as if she had swallowed a pepper seed.

There would be ripples from that. You intended them. If she insisted on playing still water, you would stone her gently and often until she adapted, until she remembered water can carve mountains, too.

The sky had the exhausted purple of a bruise. You were reading a treatise on poison. It had been mis-shelved in the apothecary annex because no one wanted to be the one to tuck it in right. It was, you suspected, borrowed often by noble daughters who wanted to feel brave.

Your maid startled then fled like paper. And there he was. The shame came with him. It wore his body like a robe. He stood in your doorway as if the threshold were a sea and he was too tired to swim.

“You shouldn’t be here,” you said, and you meant it two ways.

“I know,” he said, and he meant it all one way.

He stepped forward and you did not step back. You do not flinch from heat you have chosen. That is part of the old training, too. He looked at your hands, patient where they lived in your lap. He looked at your face like a man who could not decide if the sun had always been that color.

“Mai,” he began, then stopped because he had never known how to speak of one woman to another without making the air unbreatheable. “The physicians…” He gestured in a way that could have been at the whole palace. “There have been no… She has not…”

You put the book down very carefully. “Conceived,” you supplied, not unkindly. The word rolled like a herb you knew the taste of.

He nodded. He looked so tired it made something old and unwise in you reach for him. You sat on your hands.

“The Council,” he said, and you laughed, a short uncharitable bark you did not intend. He flinched again, which made something petty and mean in you breathe in.

“The Council,” you said, regulating your voice. “And your duty. And the line. And the nation. And the fire god who presides over all your lack of imagination.”

He rocked back. A man struck in a friendly duel. You had always been a more dangerous fighter when you didn’t want to fight.

“I know what this looks like,” he said, painfully honest. “I hate it. I hate that I’m here like this. I hate that I still—”

He stopped. The room paused with him. Even the rain outside seemed to hold its breath so it would not be accused of eavesdropping.

“Say it,” you said, because mercy is a cruel god and she had your face tonight. “Say that you still love me and cannot act as if you do.”

He made a sound like his scar remembering flame. “I don’t know how to love and rule at the same time.”

“You don’t,” you said. “You choose.”

He stepped closer and reached for your hand with the kind of reverence that makes a person into a shrine. You let him take it because you do not punish yourself with prudery. You do enough penance waking. His hand was rough. He had been training, then. Or had not stopped. Of course he had not stopped.

“I am asking you,” he said, and it was awful, “to help me—to help the palace. To help the nation.”

“To lie with you so you may have an heir,” you said, and it was not cruel, it was tidy. “To do what your Empress cannot.”

He closed his eyes. His mouth was a problem he couldn’t solve. “If there were any other way—”

“There are many other ways,” you said, and you didn’t list them because you had no energy for law tonight. “But they are all not you, and the council can only imagine you.”

He flinched at that, too. It was like slapping a drum.

You looked at him properly then. The man you had loved because he had learned to be gentle despite state violence kneading him into the dough of history. His shame was honest. His cowardice was honest. It would have been easier if any of it had been lies.

“You are cruel,” you said gently. “And I am crueler. I will help you.”

He stepped forward like a starving man offered water. And because nothing is simple—you had to know that last season was not a story, it was a rehearsal—you reached up and caught his jaw the way you always had, like you were checking for fever, and then you tilted his face and kissed him until your heart remembered itself foolish and therefore dangerous.

After, he lay with his head on your stomach like contrition itself. You thought of the book on poison. You thought of apothecaries measuring to fractions of a grain, knowing the smallest degree that made the difference between medicine and end. He fell asleep. He grieved in his sleep as though dreaming were a labor he had been drafted into. You watched the rain. You watched the room not catch fire.

In the morning, you did not wake him. He woke to the absence of your body and made a small, ash-sound. He dressed. He stood in your doorway again, a man in a story who had missed the lesson’s point.

“I will take care of you,” he said, meaning coin, rank, reputation, secrecy, all the things he could imagine that he could not hold.

“You are taking care of a nation,” you said. “Save your hands.”

He looked at you as if you had slipped a knife into his rib cleverly. “Do you hate me?”

You considered. “Yes,” you said. “And I love you and everything in between. I am a noblewoman. We are taught the spectrum early.”

He left. He was a king leaving a room, which was to say the air kept the absence like a bruise long after.

You did not tell him.

You told no one. Not Linh, whose laugh had sharpened since the wedding into something occasionally weapon-like. Not your maid, who had learned to pretend she could not count the mornings you were sick. Not the Mistress of the Inner Court, who would have known what to do and made sure it was done with the softest of gloves and the strongest of boxes.

You hid it with clothes, with posture, with the careful way you folded your hands when you sat so your sleeves blossomed in the right places. You hid it like a crime and loved it like a rebellion. For the first time in months you let yourself think I am alive and I can choose, and even though the choice was already old and made in a bedridden hour, the thought had heat.

You went to the apothecary annex in the hour before dawn when only ghosts do paperwork. You read about roots that made milk abundant. You read about cords that tangled and cords that snapped. You read, to frighten yourself properly, the chapter on what beauty we lose when we bleed too much. Then you closed the book and tied your hair and ate rice and salted plums and forced your body to remember it was not only a statue.

Mai came to you the day after your third month’s turn. She came without guard, which meant she had told them to trail and then leave at the last second so she could show trust or expose herself to risk. You had lived long enough to know when a woman rehearses her own courage.

You received her in your courtyard under a trellis heavy with wisteria. The purple made everyone beautiful. You poured tea because you wanted your hands busy.

“Consort,” she said. She never used names. Names are a kind of grip.

“Your Majesty,” you returned, pouring for her first because she did not need the homage and therefore needed it most.

She sat and tucked her legs so perfectly it made you bone-tired to look. Something around her eyes had tightened since the wedding, and there was a tension in her wrist as she lifted the cup that reminded you of a violinist tuning against a crowd. If you had been crueler, you would have been glad.

“It has been remarked,” she said, as if offering a courtly puzzle, “that you have been…unwell.”

“You mean thin,” you said, not helping and not harming. “Or pale. Or quiet in rooms I used to fill.”

“That is what they mean,” she said. She did not drink. She watched the steam with the concentration of a scholar desiring distraction.

“What do you mean?” you asked. You were tired of women who used the mouth as a cipher machine.

Mai’s eyes rose to meet yours. Her voice had no tremor. “I mean that one of us still bleeds,” she said, and did not blink. “And the other does not.”

There it was. A gift in sackcloth. You took a breath so small only trained eyes would notice. “And which am I?” you asked softly.

She smiled. The smallest displacement of shore. “If you wish to preserve your dignity, it is time to decide the manner of your news.”

You looked down at your own hands as if they were herbs you had plucked and forgotten to label. “And what is the manner you would prescribe, Your Majesty?”

Her smile grew the width of a grain. “Discretion. Which buys clemency. And gratitude, which you can afford.”

“And your gratitude,” you said, tracing the rim of your cup, “is worth…?”

She set her tea down without spilling a drop. “Being allowed to keep what can be kept,” she said. “Your rooms. Your stipend. Your title.” She paused, and insult peeped shyly. “Some comfort.”

“Comfort,” you repeated. It tasted like the inside of a joss stick.

“It is the best I can do while retaining the dignity of my rank,” she said. It was honest—Mai’s honesty was a cardinal virtue of the cruel.

You thought of 108 flowers. You thought of fire as witness. You thought of how quietly women had always negotiated plague and succession. You thought, too, of how careful you would have to be when it was time to deliver—that some midwives were more loyal to seals than to the bodies that opened in front of them.

“You are to be a mother to a nation,” you said, and did not mean it kindly. “Even if the nation does not pass through you.”

The smallest crack showed at the corner of her mouth. “I will be Empress regardless,” she said, and in those words was all of the palace, the law, the god. “Do not mistake my visit for helplessness.”

“I never have,” you said, and did not smile. “I congratulate you on your courage.”

“On my restraint,” she corrected. She stood. “We are not enemies,” she added, and it was possibly the worst thing she could have said. “Unless we choose to be.”

“The choosing,” you said, “happened elsewhere.”

She left. She did not look back. You let your shoulders slump when the wisteria hid you.

The Mistress of the Inner Court sent small bland favors—a rare fruit, a packet of herbs that did nothing but suggest concern. Linh came kneeling with stories, sitting on your floor like a child as if to exorcise your melancholy. She confided that she faked headaches now to avoid nights she could not endure—“He has started to…talk during,” she said, which was Linh’s way of describing that Zuko’s guilt had gotten chatty with his body. You almost told her you envied that talk. You almost told her to let him speak until he remembered he had a tongue for consent.

Zuko did not come back.

You hated him. You loved him. You hated him with the clean hate of a craftsman for poor work. You loved him with the rotten love that comes of being seen and then being made invisible in the same room. You kept your head up because someone had taught you it was nicer that way for others.

The evening the pain started, there was no omen. The sky was pink, like a bruise that had given up on passion. You were writing a letter to your father you would not send. You wrote a line about the pond and then struck it out because the pond was not a thing your father had time for even when you were ten and trying to learn to speak the language he wanted.

The pain folded you clean in half.

Your maid screamed your name and then bit it back because she had been trained, too. The midwife you trusted most was in the south wing with a cousin of a concubine whose child had decided to come sideways. They came running with another midwife—older, her hands strong, her eyes cool as cirrus. She had delivered Emperors and kitchen hands. She did not waste voice on comfort that meant nothing. She inserted two fingers and told you a thing you did not want to know like she was telling you a recipe.

“Early,” she said, and something in her tone was not Heavens save us but Ah.

You did not cry. You are tedious in your stoicism and you will carry this through as you have every other thing. You bit your wrist to keep your teeth from your tongue in the wrong way. You gripped the bedding like judgment. You breathed as the apothecary aunt had taught you to breathe during applied leeches: slowly, at the same speed as the woman chanting the sutra in her throat.

It is a thing to labor with your jaw clenched so hard you will not even give the air your pain.

Someone ran for Zuko. You do not know if it was your maid or the midwife or the hand of a god that decided he should carry another sliver of what was owed.

He came. He wore his crown. He did not remember he wore it. He went pale in a way men do only in battle and in rooms where women make blood into people. He reached for you and then did not because he could not tell where his touch helped and where it branded.

You hated him as the wave came. You loved him as you pushed. There was nothing in between; there never had been. The room went white and then narrower than your body.

When the child slid into the world, she came with a sound you had never heard and would never know again. It was not crying. It was a small raw flare, like an ember remembering fire. She was red and furious. You laughed once, a bark, a bad sound, and then you sobbed—a single body-wracking sob you did not permit a second of.

You did not look at Zuko right away. You looked at your daughter. She was uglier than myths allow and so alive you could not count it with breath. You wanted to put her on your chest and never let any hand but yours own touch her.

The midwife, old and cool as cirrus, cut the cord. She lifted your daughter into the light as if she were something rare a fisherman had dragged up from a ledge and did not trust to surface.

Zuko made a sound that was familiar and not. “She—”

“She is a girl,” the midwife said without tone. She wrapped her in your cleanest linen. She put her on your chest at last, and your daughter rooted with the implacable will of all hunger. Your breast ached. You put your nipple in her mouth and she latched with a ferocity that made you cry again for the good reason this time, the reason that made you feel like a door the world had finally opened correctly.

Zuko’s hands hovered like planets. He touched the baby’s hair as if it were spun sugar. He cried the way men do when they do not wish their faces to know. You forgave him a little for that honesty. You despised him still for everything else.

“What will you name her?” he asked, and then looked at you as if the question were a rope thrown across a chasm you stood on opposite sides of.

You had thought of names. You had not permitted yourself that indulgence and yet you had a list that had lived under your tongue like a small god. You wanted to name her for fire that didn’t burn. You wanted to name her for the apothecary who taught you how to bleed right.

“Meilin,” you said, and then corrected yourself without shame. “No. Not delicate. Xinran.” You looked at the midwife, not Zuko. “Heart-joy,” you translated, and the midwife nodded once in the way of women who bless with the absence of nonsense.

Zuko said the name under his breath as if it would bite him. “Xinran,” he said, and then, after a beat, “She needs… she deserves—”

“She deserves protection,” you said, meeting his eyes for the first time in hours. “And a father who does not ask me for mercy when he brings knives into our rooms.”

He flinched. You were tired of counting.

He left an hour later, looking back as if glances were threads that braided safety. You let him go because you were not stupid and you were not about to invite a spectacle. You had learned the palace’s lesson: you could only burn a thing so many times before it learned to be stone.

Your body bled and healed and bled again. Your daughter howled like a divinity who wanted the old primacy restored. You learned the sounds she made, which were not one sound but a grammar. You learned the squalls for hunger and for wet and for the strange small pains of a stomach learning to be world. You fed her with a patience you did not know you had kept in a box in your ribs. Linh came and brought improper songs and the gift of making you laugh so hard milk leaked.

Mai did not come. Her absence was a knife differently handled.

But the palace was a fisherman’s net and you both tangled in it. News reached you the way leaves reach the ground: ceaselessly, drifting whether you willed it or not. Mai had taken to visiting the shrine of a minor goddess of children carved into a corner between two courtyards where no one went unless they were desperate or very old. She prayed without moving her mouth. She burned offerings as if she could make the goddess addicted to the smell alone. The temple women left oranges on the shrine to supplement her rice cakes.

You wanted to pity her and did. You also wanted to hurt her and did not.

Zuko saw the baby twice that month. The first time he came with too many guards and had to be sent away until he remembered to come with one. The second time he came with a toy—a wooden phoenix painted clumsily by someone terrified of you. He held Xinran with the cautious ecstasy of a man who has been given a treasure and a curse. He cried again in that quiet man-way.

“Do not make a habit of that here,” you told him, not unkindly. “She will learn that men must be consoled.”

He looked at you like a student caught behaving exactly like the book told him to. “You think poorly of me,” he said, and it was not a question.

“I think poorly of me,” you said. “For expecting anything else.”

It earned you a look half-gratitude and half-wound. You could not tell which part of you it fed.

The argument landed on you both on a day with weather so mild you could have mistaken it for mercy. Zuko came earlier than he should have. He came without telling anyone who would have told someone who would have told Mai.

He came and he stood over your daughter’s sleeping form and he said, not meeting your eyes, “There is to be an announcement.”

You pressed your lips together to keep a thousand little pities from escaping. “An announcement,” you said. “How the palace eats.”

“About… about the matter,” he said, and looked at Xinran with a softness that rearranged the furniture of your mind briefly. “About the line.”

You felt something old and coup-shaped rise in your throat. “What manner.”

He took a breath. “She cannot be named Crown Princess.”

“No,” you said promptly; you were not an idiot. “She is born of a consort.”

“She will be acknowledged,” he went on. “As my daughter. Publicly. With honors.”

You waited.

“She will be raised in the palace,” he said, and your throat closed just enough to make air feel like a privilege. “With tutors. With safety.”

“With eyes,” you said, very softly. “With enemies.”

“With protection,” he insisted, and the word protection hurt the air between you like a high sound only animals hear. “And I will see her as often as—”

“As often as you can fit me into your guilt,” you said, sweetly. “No. As often as you can slip the leash of dignity and duty.”

He put his hand on the table. It was the way he used to hold your wrist at the wrists when sex was prayer and not contract. “Do not do this,” he said, and he meant the way you held the room in contempt.

“I am not doing anything,” you said. “I am watching you do. That is my station: to witness. Fire is witness; did you know?”

He closed his eyes, an old habit when he wanted to light a room against his own thoughts. “Mai knows,” he said then, and it was a coward’s blow.

You kept your expression as still as your grandmother’s funeral. “Of course she does.”

“She… she is not—” He fumbled. It was not a thing you had thought you would ever see: him losing words not out of shame but out of lack of weaponry. “She is not unkind.”

“No,” you agreed. “She is not unkind. She is careful. Care can be the slowest cruelty.”

“She told me I should do right by the child,” he said, and shame washed his face the way dye washes cloth: all at once, staining everything.

“And by me?” you said. Not expecting. Testing the steel you already knew the answer of.

He did not answer. You laughed once. It was not beautiful.

“Get out,” you said, friendly as if offering tea. “Your guards must be bored on the walkway.”

He went. He took the toy phoenix accidentally. You did not call him back. You did not permit yourself the small failure of wanting.

Linh brought you a parcel as winter decided its first attack. She had secreted it under the tray with the pickles. She was a terrible spy and a loud friend and you loved her for both. You opened it after she had gone, out of decency. Inside: a tiny silk pair of slippers, red with little lotus threaded on in pink. They were the size of your palm. Your throat made a sound you would never have admitted to if anyone had been listening.

There was a note, folded very small. Linh’s handwriting was messy as laughter; this was not Linh’s. It was Mai’s.

The script was the kind sold to girls for whom beauty was a cage and a resource both, court hand neat enough to forgive itself extravagance: You will not find it easy to leave. If you attempt it, the palace will take it as an insult, and the insult will burn the child. Stay. Raise her. I will make sure the right doors are closed and the right ones opened. We do not have to like each other to make a pact. We only have to fear the same gods.

You did not know, after reading it three times as if it might turn into a hawk, whether to throw it into the brazier or wear it under your clothes like a relic. In the end, you did what women do with things that are both poison and medicine: you folded it into your memory and told no one.

You saw Zuko less and less. The palace began to eat your days with officials and with women who wanted to touch your daughter so their luck might change. You learned when to accept offerings and when to crush them underfoot with etiquette. You kept your head high because that was the pose that made the guiltier among them flinch. You wore red often and white never.

At night, sometimes, when Xinran fell asleep with her hand on your breast as if to make sure you would still be there in the morning, you told her stories that were not stories but strings of facts made into music.

“Your father is not a bad man,” you told her, and then, because facts must be careful with babies, “He is a man with a crown. He is a man whose father did not teach him how to be a man and who learned anyway, and now the crown thinks it can make up the difference.”

“You are a firebender,” you told her, even though she was still all wet lungs and blunt fingers. “Not because of blood but because of breath. Because of how you will learn to take a room into you and give it back as heat.”

“Once,” you told her, and this one was a story, “your mother thought all flowers were kind. Then she learned that flowers have teeth, too.”

You tucked into those nights the knowledge that one day you would have to burn. Small stealth fires first: to cauterize gossip, to boil dirty water, to keep men from freezing their own hearts. Then, perhaps, larger ones. You did not fantasize about revolt. You fantasized about the tiny rebellions that make revolts possible.

You would teach your girl to kneel properly and to never kneel too long. You would teach her the names of flowers and their meanings and the meanings you would give them if you were permitted poetry. You would teach her not to believe men’s numbers when they counted love.

Zuko sent a message—a request, braiding formality into a plea: Will you walk with me in the south gardens.

You considered not going, which was to say you lied to yourself long enough to perform dignity. Then you went because there are ghosts you must feed once or they bang on the door forever.

He was waiting beneath a cherry tree so heavily flowered it looked vulgar, which you suspected was the point: to make the pain a little ridiculous so it could be borne. His hair was tied with a ribbon you had once slid into your own hair as a joke he had kept.

“You look well,” he said, which was not what he meant.

“Our daughter thrives,” you said, which was what you meant.

He nodded. He looked as if his hands itched to reach for a sword he had put aside as a decision. “I dream of a day,” he said, “when no one in that palace says the word council to me again unless it is because I have chosen to ask them.”

“That day may come when you begin to speak in I instead of we,” you said, and did not soften it. “And when you stop using women as bridges.”

He took it like a fruit he deserved to eat and did not like. “You are… You have always been—”

“You do not get to praise me,” you said, and you did not raise your voice. That was the old lesson, too. A noblewoman’s real weapon is not anger but precision. “You get to do better.”

He nodded. “I am trying.”

“Try with someone else’s spine,” you said, and smiled once, sharp. “Mine is occupied.”

He winced, which was penance by a different altar. “She smiles at me,” he said suddenly, as if this were the thing that had sprouted in his chest and burst his ribs to show its flower. “Xinran. She… she smiles and it is like… The world becomes a small room and only the right things are in it.”

You looked at him and the old wild love bit you once more viciously just to remind you it lived here, too. “Then perhaps,” you said, “you will learn to rearrange more rooms.”

He laughed; it was ugly and honest and made something unclench in your spine. “You always knew how to make me hate myself less,” he said, and then he was very quiet. “And more.”

“Good,” you said. “Balanced diet.”

He wanted to say I’m sorry. He wanted to say I love you. He wanted to say I am a coward. He wanted to say I will change. You saw the boy and the man both learning and unlearning in his face. You had no patience left for his process. You had used it all ensuring your daughter remembered she was not a secret.

You walked with him in the garden where butterflies were stupid with spring. You said nothing else of substance because too much substance drowns people who have not learned to breathe underwater. You took your leave with a bow shallow as a tea dish. He bowed too deeply in return, which made a courtier later frown the exact correct amount.

In the end, the palace did what palaces do. It encased. It displayed. It powdered. It gossiped until the gossip turned into scripture.

You did what your grandmother had ordered on a day with peaches: you kept your head up and learned to let the ember live in the coal.

There were nights, after, when you woke with your daughter’s foot pressed into your throat, when you found yourself laughing like a madwoman and you let it run through you like lightning because if you didn’t you would become a statue of a noblewoman and someone would put you in a corridor and burn incense in front of you and girls would pray to you for consolation instead of revolt.

There were afternoons when you met Mai in the corridor and you both paused infinitesimally and then kept walking. You lived long enough to watch her soften around a child not of her belly. You lived long enough to serve her tea once—once—and to say without flinching, “It is time we spoke of tutors,” and to hear her say, “I have made a list,” and to not throw that list in the brazier. You lived long enough to know she, too, was holding a red thread she had not chosen, and she too bled from where it cut.

There were mornings when Zuko trained until the ground steamed and you watched from a distant balcony with your daughter on your hip and you whispered to her the things men forget: that breath is not owned by kings, that fire is not the only witness, that blue flames burn hotter when the air is tight but they still must be fed.

And there was, sometimes, a small joy so sudden it made you graceless: your daughter lurching across a room to you as if you were not a person but a fact; your name in her mouth not as consort or lady or the other woman but as mama—a word that flattened palaces and rebuilt them in an afternoon.

The flowers returned one evening—not the poor apology of a miserable man, not the blitz of a boy. A simple arrangement placed quietly on your table. A servant had slipped in and out like a soft-footed ghost.

Four kinds.

Red camellias. Red lotus. Balloon flowers. Baby’s breath.

Not one hundred and eight. You counted because you had learned to count love even as you swore never to count it again.

Four.

You stood looking at them long enough for dusk to forget itself and turn to lamp light.

You picked up the card. It had no seal. It had no signature. It had one line in a hand you knew as well as your own was, once.

I am learning the difference between asking and vowing.

You almost laughed and you almost cried and you did neither because your daughter picked up a fistful of baby’s breath and made stars of them on the floor, and you had to stop her from eating them, and it is difficult to be tragic when a small person is conducting astronomy with petals at your feet.

Still. Meanings mattered. They had always mattered more to you than they should. You found a clean page and you wrote—because writing was your revenge as much as it was your kindness—the simple facts, ready for the day your daughter would ask what the flowers meant and why.

Red camellia: in court language, excellence perfected and the admiration that bows its head to greet it; in lovers’ code, you are the flame I want to carry in my sleeves.

Red lotus: in the temple’s strict tongue, purity of heart proved by perseverance; in the soldiers’ slang, a vow kept even when it burns the mouth that says it.

Balloon flower (platycodon): in old apothecary scripts, truth-telling and constancy that does not require audience; in folk joke, the honest star that opens when it is ready no matter who yells at the sky.

Baby’s breath (gypsophila): in bridal hands, everlastingness and the courage of small things; in the way your grandmother said it, the promise that what is tender can survive what is hard if held right.

You put the paper away. You did not send a reply. You sat on the floor with your daughter and let her be astronomer and emperor both. You counted with her, not love this time, but petals you would sweep up later, together.

Outside, in the palace that was a machine for remaking people into myths or into bones, bells began to ring a ceremony you were not required at. You did not move. You could hear them and choose not to attend. It was not the sort of victory that could be dressed in banners. It was the sort that meant you were still your own witness.

And if one day, when the bells rang for a thing that was yours to decide, you would be ready to choose without counting—well. You had been taught early how to keep the ember alive.

You blew on it now, quietly. You watched it glow.

You did not imagine it into a bonfire that night.

Not yet.

But you did not imagine it ash.

You’re six months pregnant now, and the baby kicks like a tiny, stubborn earthbender practicing their first seismic sense—soft, insistent pulses low in your belly. You feel them best when you’re lying on your side, bare feet pressed into cool packed earth, eyes closed, palms resting over the swell. And beside you—always beside you—is Toph.

She’s sitting cross-legged on the woven grass mat beside your sleeping pallet, back against the sun-warmed adobe wall of your little home just outside Gaoling. Her bare feet are splayed wide, toes curled slightly, sensing everything: the lazy crawl of a beetle beneath the floor, the slow drip of condensation from the clay water jug, the subtle shift in your breath as you drift between wakefulness and doze.

She doesn’t speak. She rarely does—not unless she has to. Not since the day you came home from the healer’s hut and told her, voice soft and trembling, “My ears don’t forgive loud things anymore.”

Toph didn’t say I’m sorry. She didn’t say I’ll fix it. She just reached out, cupped your face—her calloused thumbs brushing your cheekbones—and whispered, so low it was almost vibration alone, “Then I’ll learn how to live in quiet.”

And she did.

She learned to close doors without letting them click. To pour tea without the clink of ceramic meeting rim. To walk barefoot not just because she liked the feel of the earth, but because her soles could tell her exactly how much pressure would echo through the floorboards—and she adjusted, always, always , for you.

Right now, she’s braiding her own hair—slow, deliberate, fingers moving with practiced grace—and you watch her from half-lidded eyes, heart swelling like warm honey.

“You look like moonlight caught in river reeds,” you murmur, voice still thick with sleep.

Toph’s hands still. She doesn’t turn. But her lips lift—a small, private thing, just for you.

“Moonlight doesn’t have split ends,” she says, voice barely louder than wind over dry grass. “Or tangles from sleeping on my arm all night.”

You laugh—soft, breathy—and the sound makes her shoulders relax further. You push yourself up slowly, one hand bracing on your lower back, the other resting instinctively over your belly as the baby rolls, a soft thump-thump against your palm.

Toph’s head tilts. Her eyes are fixed on you, but her expression is pure knowing . She feels the shift in your weight, the change in your heartbeat, the tiny ripple of muscle as your abdomen tightens around the baby’s movement.

“Little boulder’s practicing her stance today,” she murmurs, shifting closer. She doesn’t touch you—not yet—but her knee brushes yours, warm and solid. “Left foot forward. Right foot rooted. Very serious.”

You grin, reaching out. Your fingers skim her wrist, then travel up her forearm until they reach her hair. You thread your fingers through the thick, black strands, separating them gently, finding the rhythm of her braid again. You’ve done this a thousand times. It’s your ritual. Your grounding. Her hair is soft at the roots, coarser at the tips, smelling faintly of crushed mint and sun-baked clay.

“Mmm,” you hum, pulling the braid taut just enough to feel the tension. “She takes after her Mama. Stubborn. Focused. Unbelievably beautiful.”

Toph exhales and leans into your touch, her temple brushing your knuckles. “She better. I spent years being told I was ‘too much’ for everyone else. If she’s anything like me, she’ll spend her whole life proving people wrong just by existing.”

There’s no bitterness in it. Just quiet pride. And love so deep it hums, quieter than your tinnitus, warmer than any sun.

You finish the braid, tying it off with a strip of soft green silk—the same color as the scarf you gave her on your first real date, the one where you sat on the roof of her family’s old estate and watched the stars without talking for two hours straight. You tuck the end behind her ear, then trail your thumb down her jawline.

“My Angel,” you whisper, the pet name slipping out like breath. It’s only for her. Only ever for her. You said it the first time you saw her kneeling in the garden, barefoot in the rain, pressing her palms flat to the soaked earth, feeling the tremors of distant thunder—not to warn, but to wonder . You thought, She is the most breathtaking thing I have ever seen , and the words stuck. Like roots.

Toph’s breath catches—just once. Then she lifts her hand, slow and deliberate, and places it over yours, covering your fingers where they rest on her cheek. Her skin is warm. Her pulse thrums steady and strong beneath your thumb.

“My Angel,” she echoes, voice barely audible, rough with something tender and raw. “Who forgets to stir the rice and burns the dumplings every single time .”

You snort softly. “Who also once used seismic sense to find the exact spot where Sokka hid the last piece of candied yam and ate it before he could blink.”

A real smile this time wide, lopsided, dazzling. “He deserved it. He laughed while I choked on dust trying to earthbend that stupid rock out of my shoe.”

You both laugh then you press your forehead to hers, eyes closed, breathing her in. In this moment, there is no ringing. No distant thunder. No memory of pain or fear or the hollow echo of a world that used to be louder. There is only this: the press of her nose against yours, the soft give of her lips when you kiss her—slow, unhurried, tasting of mint and morning air—the way her fingers tighten just slightly around yours, like she’s memorizing the shape of your bones.

Later, you go out to gather herbs—chamomile for tea, feverfew for your occasional dizzy spells, lemon balm for calm. You move carefully, deliberately, your bare feet sinking into the soft loam of your garden patch. Toph walks beside you—not ahead, not behind—but with , her hand resting lightly on the small of your back, guiding not with direction, but with presence. Her touch is your compass.

You pause near the eastern fence, squinting at a cluster of purple blooms. “Are those the ones we want?” you ask, voice low.

Toph crouches, presses her palm flat to the earth, closes her eyes.

A beat passes. Then another.

Her brow furrows—not in frustration, but focus. Her lips part slightly, breath slowing. You watch her—the line of her throat, the sharp angle of her jaw, the way her lashes cast soft shadows over her cheeks—and you think, This is what love looks like when it listens with its whole body.

“They’re right there ,” she says finally, tapping the ground two feet to your left. “Three inches down. Roots thick and pale. They’ll taste like cool water and green light.”

You dig carefully, fingers working the soil loose. When you pull up the slender, fragrant roots, you hold them out to her. She doesn’t take them. Instead, she lifts her hand, lets your fingers brush hers as you place the roots in her palm. Her thumb strokes your knuckle once and she smiles.

“You’re getting better at listening to the earth,” she says.

You lean into her shoulder. “I had the best teacher.”

She doesn’t reply. She just tucks the roots into her satchel, then offers you her hand again. You take it. Her grip is sure. Her warmth seeps into your skin.

Back at the house, you set about preparing the tea. Toph sits at the low wooden table, sharpening her knife not for fighting, but for slicing ginger thin enough to dissolve in hot water. She moves with economical grace, every motion intentional, every scrape of metal against whetstone measured, softened by the cloth she wraps around the blade’s base.

You catch her watching you as you pour water into the kettle. Her gaze follows the curve of your spine, the gentle swell of your belly beneath your tunic, the way your hair falls over one shoulder as you reach for the teapot.

“Sokka’s coming by this afternoon,” she says, voice neutral, matter-of-fact.

You nod, stirring honey into the steaming cup. “He said he’d bring the dried apricots.”

“He also said he’d ‘check on the future patriarch’.” She wrinkles her nose. “I told him the future earthbender doesn’t need a title, just good shoes and decent aim.”

You laugh, handing her the cup. “He’s trying.”

“He’s Sokka ,” she says, taking the cup with both hands, cradling it like something sacred. “He tries very loudly.”

You sit beside her, leaning your head on her shoulder. She shifts just enough to make space for you, her free hand settling over your thigh, warm and heavy.

“We never told him why ,” you say quietly, staring into your own tea. “Why we asked him… to be the one.”

Toph is silent for a long moment. Then she sets her cup down and turns to face you fully. Her hands find yours, lacing your fingers together, her thumbs stroking the backs of your hands in slow, soothing circles.

“We didn’t need to,” she says. “He knew. He saw . He saw how I held your hand when you flinched at thunder. How I stopped mid-sentence if your jaw tightened. How I’d kneel beside you after a nightmare—not to talk, but to press my forehead to yours and feel your heartbeat slow back to steady.”

She lifts one of your hands, brings it to her lips, kisses your knuckles soft, reverent.

“We didn’t choose him because he’s non-bending,” she continues, voice dropping even lower, rough with emotion. “We chose him because he loves us . Because he loves you . Because he looked at you— really looked—and said, ‘Whatever this baby is, whatever they can or can’t do, they’ll be loved like crazy. And I get to help make that happen.’ ”

Your throat tightens. Tears prickle—warm, quiet, unashamed.

“And because,” she adds, her voice cracking just a little, “I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else’s blood in you. Not when yours is already the only thing that’s ever made me feel whole .”

You cry then—not sobbing, just soft, slow tears tracking down your cheeks. Toph doesn’t wipe them away. She just pulls you closer, tucking your head under her chin, her arms wrapping around you, one hand splayed wide over your belly, feeling the baby’s next kick—strong, sure, alive .

“She’s going to be so loved,” you whisper against her collarbone.

“ We’re going to love her,” Toph corrects, voice fierce and soft all at once. “All of us. Me. You. Sokka. Katara. Zuko, if he stops pretending he doesn’t adore you both. Even Appa—he’s already nuzzling your belly like it’s his favorite pillow.”

You laugh through tears, pressing closer.

“I’m scared,” you admit, voice barely audible. “Not of the birth. Not of motherhood. But… of failing her. Of not being enough. Of my ears… of the quiet not being enough for her.”

Toph pulls back just enough to look at you—her blind eyes holding yours with terrifying, beautiful intensity.

“You are enough,” she says, firm, unwavering. “You’re more than enough. You’re the woman who taught me how to hear silence like music. Who showed me that strength isn’t just bending rock—it’s holding space for someone else’s fear. It’s braiding my hair when your hands are tired. It’s loving me even when I burn the rice and forget to water the basil.”

She cups your face, her thumbs brushing away your tears.

“And our daughter?” She smiles—soft, radiant, full of quiet certainty. “She’ll know love before she knows language. She’ll feel it in the earth beneath her, in the warmth of your skin, in the way I’ll press my ear to your belly just to hear her heartbeat echo back at me— thump-thump-thump , steady as tectonic plates. She’ll learn love in vibrations. In touch. In stillness. In us .”

She leans in, forehead to forehead again, her breath mingling with yours.

“Our world isn’t quiet because it’s broken,” she whispers. “It’s quiet because it’s ours . Because we built it—brick by gentle brick, breath by careful breath—to hold us . To hold her .”

You kiss her then—long, slow, full of everything you can’t say aloud. Love. Gratitude. Relief. Awe. When you pull back, your noses still touching, you whisper, “My beautiful Angel.”

She smiles—that rare, full, unguarded smile that makes your chest ache.

“And you,” she murmurs, “are my whole damn world.”

Later, Sokka arrives not with fanfare, but with a sack slung over his shoulder and his usual blend of awkward charm and genuine warmth. He knocks once , softly, with the flat of his knuckle and waits patiently until Toph calls, “Come in, meat-brain,” in a voice that’s teasing, fond, utterly devoid of sharpness.

He grins, stepping inside, and immediately drops to one knee beside you, placing a gentle hand on your belly.

“Hey, little boulder,” he says, voice hushed, reverent. “Uncle Sokka brought snacks. And wisdom. Mostly snacks.”

Toph rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling as she tosses him a plum from the bowl on the table. He catches it one-handed, winks at you, then glances at Toph.

“Rice okay today?”

She snorts. “Burnt. But edible. Barely.”

He nods solemnly. “I brought extra apricots. For emergency sweetness.”

You laugh, reaching out to squeeze his wrist. “Thank you, Sokka.”

He meets your eyes—warm, kind, steady—and gives your hand a gentle squeeze back. No pity. No hesitation. Just love. Pure and simple.

That night, after Sokka leaves and the fire dims to embers, you lie beside Toph on your shared pallet, wrapped in soft wool blankets. The baby kicks—three quick, playful thumps—and Toph’s hand finds yours, guiding it to the exact spot, her fingers curling over yours as you both feel the movement.

You’re quiet for a long time. Listening—not with your ears, but with your skin, your bones, your heart. To the slow rise and fall of Toph’s chest. To the soft sigh she releases as she shifts closer, her leg hooking over yours, her arm sliding around your waist, her face burying in your hair.

The ringing is still there faint, familiar, like distant wind chimes.

But it doesn’t drown out this :

The weight of her trust.

The safety of her silence.

The certainty in her touch.

The love that lives not in noise, but in the deep, resonant hum of two hearts beating in time earth and sky, stone and storm, quiet and everything .

You turn your head, press a kiss to her temple.

“Thank you,” you whisper.

“For what?” she breathes.

“For building this world with me.”

She holds you tighter, her lips brushing your ear—not speaking, just feeling the shape of your earlobe, the delicate curve, the old scar along the edge, the way your pulse jumps when she touches you there.

“For loving me,” you add, softer.

She doesn’t answer with words.

Instead, she slides her hand down your spine, slow and sure, and rests it low on your belly.

When she looked at you like she used to, you pretended you were still there mentally and all.

The decent man arrived.

He had hands that worked and a laugh that did not make promises. He carried buckets without being asked and left flowers that looked like weeds until they opened. He sat with Su while you napped in a chair and did not wake you. He hammered a nail straight the first time and did not boast. He did not ask you to love him, only asked what nights you slept and what nights you did not and, on the nights you did not, brought you warm water and the story of a bird that built its nest in a lantern.

You married him because life is not a poem unless you are in pain and you were tired of making meter from your own blood. You married him because Toph’s hands were full of a city and its dangerous heartbeat and because love, when it could not be held, still asked to be fed. You married him because decency can be a soft place to put your head and you were so, so tired.

Toph stood at a distance with her mouth tilted like a scar. She put her hands behind her back. She did not clap. She did not have to.

You did not stop loving her.

You had a child with the decent man. You named them a name that tasted like copper and sweetness on your tongue, a name you had once whispered into Toph’s collarbone just to feel the shape of wanting in your mouth.

The midwife said breathe and you did and the room filled with red and with the high thin cry of something new.

Complications is a polite word for a storm.

It is a way to say the roof came off without describing the sound. It is how people talk in doorways when they do not want the children to understand. You understood. You understood the way a cliff understands the ocean.

You told the midwife it is all right and she said do not talk and you laughed because once Toph had said the same thing and you had obeyed and it had saved you and this time it would not. You said to the decent man I am glad I met you and meant it. You said to the room do not let Toph carry this like a punishment. You said to the ceiling I am not ready. You said to the small hot weight on your chest I am not sorry.

When you closed your eyes, you did not see white. You saw the creek. You saw her ankles in water. You saw silk clinging and her mouth making a stubborn line she would later pretend was not a smile. You saw the way she had stood in front of you once like a door you could lean on, even if it never opened the way you thought it might.

Toph arrived late and early.

She walked into the room after the storm, the boards still humming with thunder it could not spend. She did not cry. She set her hand flat on the floor and the house stilled, as if a great animal had lifted its head and then laid it down again at her feet. She reached for the decent man and he let her. They grieved like two people at opposite ends of a bridge: feeling the same wind, not touching the same rope.

She sat between the beds and learned stillness that was not discipline but surrender. Lin pressed her face to Toph’s knee and Su clutched the blanket and the baby slept. The decent man made tea and burned it. The midwife folded linen, her hands stained and kind.

Time did not pass. It pooled and thickened.

Later, when later could be counted, Toph came to the creek. She did not wear shoes. She let the hem of clothing she did not care about drink muck. She stood where you had stood , which was that everything had happened and kept happening.

She listened, because that was the oldest way she loved you: by putting her ear to the world and insisting it speak.

She bent and found a stone by feel. It was not special. It was heavy and palm-warm and shaped like a heart if you lied. She crouched and skipped it. It hopped twice and sank. She said your name and her throat answered with a sound you would have recognized even if you had been made of metal. She did not write for a long time. Then she did.

dear you i am writing here because this is where you would call me a coward and then forgive me before i earned it the house is loud in the morning silence sits only on top of the kettle and even that is brief lin hates crusts and su steals them when she thinks nobody is watching i pretend not to be watching i am tired in places i did not know could ache but i learned to be a mother by standing next to you and stealing your notes when you went to pee so i am not as lost as i could be the decent man has hands like fence posts he holds the baby the way i hold a city careful and too hard and then softer because we remember who we are lose and then remember again i watch him count breaths i understand him in my bones we share you without speaking and it is the only way i can look him in the eye i am angry and i am not i am a cliff and i am water i am a door that does not open the first time you knock that was always true i told myself duty was a word that meant love with a uniform but now i know it also means choosing a steady road while the person you love is a path through the dark i chose wrong or right i do not know i think i chose small choices over a single large one i think you knew that and loved me anyway you said once that i do not forgive slowly it was a joke because i never forgive slowly i hit the ground and the ground forgives me fast because we are the same it is not that way with everything there are things i do not forgive and they are all mine i am still laughing at silk it still lies to my feet i let it i can tell when it is lying i can walk anyway i brought the girls to the creek lin said it sounds like someone whispering secrets to themselves su found the flattest stones and said i bet i can throw these farther than auntie y/n ever did i told her she was wrong i said your name and the water did not argue i will raise them like you would have i will teach them to be gentle with the ground that holds them and rude to any hand that tries to shape them into anything but who they are i will give them lullabies and law ,i will give them both i am sorry that i am not sorry i would do it again i would still be the person whose hands were too full to hold everything i would still trust you to hold what i dropped and you did you always did this is not me forgiving myself it is me telling the truth the way you liked it with the bruise named i kept the stone you liked in my pocket i take it out when i have to tell the city no and when i have to tell the girls yes it helps me hear the hum if there is dirt where you are lay down and let it know your weight tell it my name if that makes it easier to rest i will listen from here i am listening now toph

Time did not heal. It layered. Toph became a stack of papers and a rumor and a law and a woman who cut her hair with a knife in the kitchen because it kept getting in her eyes while she braided Su’s. She made a home that held heat on the coldest nights. She learned how to cook one dish perfectly and burned everything else. She wore her badge like a scar and her scars like jewelry. People said Chief like it explained anything. It did not. She wrote again when Su broke a rule loudly and Lin broke one quietly. She wrote when the decent man remarried a good woman who did not try to replace a ghost and did not fail. She wrote when the baby said your name first as if it were a color. She wrote to tell you she had found the letter you never sent, the one that had lived under your mattress in the old house with the legs that wobbled. When storms rolled in, the city tested her. It needed to know the rock could still take the rain. She let it. She took cases and put out fires and laid hands on the dirt until it told her where the lies were buried. She came home with the night clinging to her like a second coat. She sat on the floor because chairs were made for people who thought the distance between them and the ground was safety. You were everywhere the ground was. That was the trick of loving someone who taught you to listen. The world would not shut up. She resented and worshiped it for that. She kept a habit of taking off her shoes at thresholds. She liked the shock of cool tile the way you liked the first breath after a laugh. She kept the girls’ height marks on the door frame and never painted them over, not even when someone suggested it might be better for photos. The decent man grew lines at the corners of his mouth that said he had smiled often and worried more. He came by on market days with too many peaches. He and Toph traded jokes with soft edges. They did not say your name in front of the girls when the room was bright. They said it at the sink when the house was quiet, like they were testing the temperature of old water with their fingers.

On the anniversary, the creek ran high from melt. She went alone. She took the girls when they asked once and never again. She has learned some doors are for one person at a time. She stood in the same cold and waited for the ache to crest and said out loud all the things you had taught her to say out loud.

I am angry. I am grateful. I am here. I am not forgiven. I am not condemned. I am carrying. Put down is not what I do. I will not put you down. I will learn to carry better. She wrote one last time the way you would have liked best: badly, quickly, with the truth trailing mud across the page.

my love i dreamt last night that we built a small house i put the studs in wrong and you laughed and said the wind will fix it, we slept on the floor because we had not finished and in the morning we were not there we were under the estate steps and the servants pretending to cough to warn us someone was coming, i woke up with dirt in my teeth i kept it

i am writing to let you know i still hate silk and i am still an earthquake and the girls are storms of their own and the world is exactly as heavy as you said and i am strong enough i am telling you this because it is true and not because it will make you rest i know better than to tell you to rest if you are a stone skip far if you are dirt hold roots if you are water call me when you can i am listening always even when i am pretending not to i am listening in the way you taught me with my whole body i loved you like a promise i love you like weather i will love you like bedrock

The torches hissed. I watched a bead of sweat trace the line of his jaw before dropping onto the polished obsidian table, evaporating instantly.

"You don't remember, do you?" My fingers grazed the ledger's edge where I'd pressed Mai's jade hairpiece between the pages—the one I'd pried from his sash three nights prior. "Those nights you came to me reeking of cherry blossoms and rice wine, when she wouldn't answer your letters unless you delivered diamonds first."

His nostrils flared. "You're lying."

The slap echoed through the chamber before I registered the sting. His palm left a ghost of heat across my cheek—familiar, like all the other times he'd touched me without truly seeing me. I laughed then, sharp enough to make his remaining eyebrow twitch. "You disgrace the crown," I said, tasting copper where my teeth had cut into my cheek. "Azula would have burned you alive for less."

His fist clenched, the muscles in his forearm corded tight beneath the embroidered silk of his sleeve. "Don't—"

"You don't get to tell me what to say." I stepped closer, close enough to see the flecks of gold in his good eye, the way his pulse rabbited beneath the scar at his throat. "Your mother would've wept to see what you've become."

This time, I saw his arm tense before the blow came. I caught his wrist mid-air, the bones grinding under my grip. "I fought in your father's war," I hissed, twisting until he gasped. "Do you really think a spoiled prince's slap frightens me?"

The silence that followed was heavier than the ceremonial robes still draped over my shoulders. Zuko’s wrist trembled in my grasp, his pulse frantic against my fingers—not from fear, but from the dawning horror of what he’d almost done. His good eye flickered to the ledger still splayed open on the war table, to the meticulous records of his betrayals inked in my hand. The numbers glared back at him like accusations.

"You're carrying my child?" His voice cracked on the last word, raw in a way I hadn’t heard since the war’s end. The scent of cherry blossoms clung to him still, mingling with the metallic tang of my split lip.

I released his wrist with a shove that sent him stumbling into the table. "Was," I corrected, watching his face drain of color. "Until three nights ago, when your screams with Mai echoed so loud the servants thought the palace was under siege." The words carved into him deeper than any blade. His knees hit the marble floor with a hollow thud, his fingers scrabbling at the edge of the ledger as if it could undo what he’d done.

The advisors had long fled, their scrolls abandoned. Only the torches remained, their flames guttering in the sudden draft as the chamber doors swung open. Mai stood framed in the doorway, her obsidian hairpin glinting in the firelight. She took one look at Zuko kneeling in the wreckage of us and smirked.

Mai’s smirk was a blade twisting in the silence. She didn’t step forward, just leaned against the doorframe, her nails tapping idly against the hilt of her dagger. “Late for our meeting, Zuko?” she drawled, as if the room weren’t thick with the scent of my blood and his shame.

Zuko didn’t move from where he’d collapsed, his fingers still curled around the ledger’s edge. His knuckles were white, his shoulders rigid , caught between the woman who’d been his childhood shadow and the wife he’d reduced to a ledger of regrets. I wiped my split lip with the back of my hand, the copper taste blooming again.

“Get out,” I said, not to Zuko, but to Mai. My voice didn’t shake. It didn’t need to.

She raised a thin brow, her gaze flicking to Zuko. Waiting. Always waiting for him to choose.

Zuko didn’t move. Not when Mai’s smirk deepened into something cruel, not when my breath hitched audibly as another wave of pain curled through my abdomen. The ledger slipped from his grip, the pages fanning open to reveal the last entry—three nights ago, the night I’d lost the child, the night he’d been with her. The ink was smudged there, where my tears had fallen.

Mai sighed, pushing off the doorframe. “Pathetic,” she murmured, not to me, but to him. She turned on her heel, her robes whispering against the marble like a retreating shadow. The door clicked shut behind her, leaving only the sound of Zuko’s ragged breathing and the distant echo of fireworks from some forgotten celebration.

I pressed a hand to my stomach, the embroidered silk of my robes damp with sweat. “You let her walk away,” I said, my voice hollow. “Again.”

Zuko’s head snapped up, his good eye bloodshot. “Y/N, I didn’t know—”

I turned away before he could see the tears pooling in my lashes, the last vestiges of my pride clinging to the set of my shoulders.

Outside, the gardens were in full bloom, the fire lilies unfolding their crimson petals in the midday sun. A cruel irony, a life flourishing while mine withered. I crossed the courtyard without feeling the stones beneath my feet, past the spot where we'd buried our wedding ribbons beneath the magnolia tree. The earth there was freshly disturbed.

Zuko's footsteps echoed behind me, hesitant at first, then frantic. "Wait—" His hand gripped my elbow, the heat of his touch searing through the thin silk of my sleeve. I wrenched free with a violence that sent us both staggering.

"You don't get to touch me," I hissed. The words tasted like venom, like the poisons Mai used to coat her knives with. His face crumpled, the scar pulling tight across his cheek ,ugly now, where once I'd traced it with reverence.

The divorce papers arrived at dawn, carried by a trembling servant who wouldn’t meet my eyes. I signed them with Zuko’s own ceremonial dagger, the blade catching the morning light as it scored through the parchment .The servant flinched when I handed them back, my fingers leaving smudges of gold leaf from where I’d peeled another jewel from the windowsill.

They found Zuko’s crown in the turtle-duck pond that afternoon, the metal still warm from where I’d held it over a candle flame until the edges warped. The servants whispered as I passed, their eyes darting to the empty space where my belly should have swelled. No one spoke of the bloodstained sheets they’d burned in the dead of night, or how the royal physician had vanished to the colonies with a chest full of emeralds.

I left the Fire Nation capital when the moon was highest, the stars blotted out by the smoke of my burning bridal silks. The palanquin swayed as we crossed into Earth Kingdom territory, the heavy curtains doing little to muffle the sound of Zuko’s messenger hawks screeching overhead. Their talons scraped against the lacquered roof, each desperate cry unanswered. By the third day, they stopped coming.

The new palace was smaller, its halls lined with tapestries from my homeland—no gold in sight. I spent the first week smashing every jewel Zuko had ever given me, grinding them to dust with a mortar and pestle until my hands bled. The servants swept the glittering powder into the gardens where it mixed with the soil, poisonous and beautiful.

The first snow fell in sheets the night Mai arrived at my new palace, her silhouette framed against the moonlit courtyard like a paper cutout. She wore no jewels—just the obsidian hairpin I'd last seen glinting in the war council's torchlight. The guards didn't stop her; they never did when it came to Mai.

"I didn't come to apologize," she said, shaking snow from her sleeves as she stepped into my private tea room. Her fingers grazed the empty space where my belly had been, her touch clinical. "He's drinking himself to death over you."

I poured tea with steady hands, watching the steam curl around my wrists. "Then let him die." The words should have tasted bitter, but they were just air.

Mai's lips twisted, her nails tapping against the teacup in a rhythm I recognized—the same impatient staccato she'd used while waiting for Zuko in doorways. "You think this makes you strong?" She flicked a glance at the jewel-dust staining my gardens. "Breaking pretty things doesn't heal broken ones."

The teacup shattered against the wall beside Mai's head, jade-green shards scattering across the floor like dragonfly wings. She didn't flinch. That was the infuriating thing about Mai—she never reacted.

"You don't get to lecture me about broken things," I said, my voice steadier than my hands. The scent of snow and crushed juniper berries clung to her robes, mingling with the metallic tang of my still-healing wounds.

Mai tilted her head, examining the tea dripping down the wall. "I wasn't lecturing." She reached into her sleeve and withdrew a small silk pouch. It hit the table between us with a muffled clink. "Zuko sent these. Again."

I didn't need to open it to know what lay inside. Jade, probably. Or rubies. Always red stones when he was feeling particularly guilty. My fingers itched to throw this offering into the brazier, but instead I reached for the fire poker, stirring the coals until they flared crimson.

The silk pouch sat untouched between us, its contents pulsing like a wound. Mai’s reflection flickered in the polished surface of my discarded dagger—her expression unreadable, as always.

"You should take them," she said, pushing the pouch closer with one finger. "They’re worth more than pride."

I laughed. "Is that what you tell yourself when he slips into your bed?" The words were meant to cut, but Mai merely blinked, her lashes casting spiderweb shadows across her cheeks.

"His bed," she corrected softly. "And no. I don’t need jewels to know my worth."

The pouch burst open under my fingers, a cascade of rubies scattering across the lacquered table like drops of blood. Mai didn't flinch when one struck her knuckle, leaving a faint mark. "You always did have a flair for dramatics," she murmured, brushing the gems aside with her sleeve.

The fire crackled between us, its glow catching the hollows of Mai's collarbones—sharper than I remembered. She'd lost weight since the wedding. I wondered if Zuko noticed, or if he only saw her through the haze of cherry blossom incense these days.

"They're shipping you off to the colonies next week," I said abruptly. The words tasted like betrayal, though I hadn't been the one to sign the order. Mai's fingers stilled on the rim of her teacup.

"I know." Her voice was flat, but her thumb traced the chip in the porcelain where she'd dropped it last summer,the day Zuko first kissed me in the war room. Some wounds never healed clean.

Mai left before dawn, her footsteps silent on the frost-laden stones. I watched from the balcony as her silhouette merged with the retreating shadows,a ghost slipping back into the night. The rubies still lay scattered across the table where I'd left them, their facets catching the first pale streaks of sunrise. I swept them into my palm, feeling their edges bite into my skin. Not guilt. Never guilt. Just more pieces of Zuko's fractured atonement.

The royal hawk arrived at midday, its wings beating frantic circles above the courtyard before collapsing onto the marble with a thud. The scroll tied to its leg bore the Fire Lord's seal, the wax still soft from the haste with which it had been applied. I cracked it open with my thumbnail, the parchment tearing unevenly. Three words, written in a hand that trembled like a dying man's: Come back home.

The ink had bled where Zuko’s hand had shaken the characters, smudged as though he’d pressed his palm over them before they dried. I traced the jagged edge of the torn parchment, imagining him hunched over his desk, the candle guttering as he fought to steady his fingers. The royal hawk lay panting at my feet, its feathers matted with sweat from the frantic flight.

A second scroll tumbled from its leg strap, smaller, tighter. This one bore no seal. I unrolled it slowly, the paper whispering against itself like a secret.

You used to laugh when the turtle-ducks stole your hairpins,he’d written. The ink was thinner here, diluted,not by water, but by something far more damning. You’d pretend to scold them while feeding them crumbs behind the servants’ backs. I watched you from the pavilion, thinking how strange it was that someone could be so kind without reason.

The words unraveled something in my chest. I remembered those afternoons—Zuko lurking in the shadows of the columns, his scar half-hidden by the drape of his hair. Back when he still flinched at sudden movements, when his voice cracked mid-sentence if I stood too close.

I miss the way you’d hum off-key during sword practice," the letter continued.

The way your robes smelled like lightning after training. You were alive in a way that made the air around you crackle. Now, when I see you in court, you’re so still. Like someone extinguished you.

A droplet hit the parchment, blurring the character for "lightning." I hadn’t realized I was crying.

The third paragraph was written in darker ink, as if he’d reforged his resolve: I was wrong. Not just about Mai. About the gold, the jewels—as if I could buy back what I broke. You were never meant to be kept in a gilded cage. I thought if I gave you enough pretty things, you wouldn’t notice I’d stopped giving you myself.

Outside, the first winter storm gathered over the mountains. The hawk ruffled its feathers, eyeing me with the same wary desperation as its master. I touched its beak and remembered how Zuko used to trace my jawline with those same tentative fingers before kissing me.

They allowed me to stand through the royal advisory meetings as an extension of the Fire Lord’s security rather than his counsel. This suited me fine. I am not a counselor. I’m a blade that thinks too much when someone’s left me in the sheath too long.

The first meeting I attended, an admiral tried to sell the court a war with a ribbon tied around its neck—naval expansion “for security,” which is what powerful people call appetites. Zuko listened. He did that thing where his thumb pressed the edge of the table and his jaw worked like he was trying to sand down a thought until it fit.

“We’ve only just begun rebuilding,” he said. “I’m not spending a year’s tax to prove our ships can look impressive while doing nothing.”

“Appearing strong is a form of action,” the admiral clipped back.

“So is not wasting money,” Zuko said.

I watched him deny a polished version of hunger and saw the admiral’s eyes stiffen with future grudges. After, when the room had emptied and the table still smelled like incense and stubbornness, Zuko looked at me. He’d noticed I notice things. It’s a problem. I am fond of details that do not belong to me.

“Well?” he asked. “You’ve had that look all hour.”

“War is a habit. He misses the exercise,” I said. “Deny him a reason by giving him a hobby.”

“A hobby,” Zuko repeated, not sure if I was joking.

“Build your navy a training program that looks like expansion without leaving our waters. Let the people see sailors hauling nets and patrols rebuilding piers. Work their muscles, not their appetite for fire.”

“That’s… morally gray.”

“Only if you think of it as lying. Think of it as redirection.”

He exhaled and, against his will, looked a little like he wanted to laugh. “And if they don’t like being redirected?”

“Feed them,” I said. “Men don’t scheme when they have stew.”

That was how it began: after the advisors left, I gave him my strange compass. Sometimes he nodded and I could see the thought puzzle neatly into his logic. Sometimes he stared at me like I had just suggested weaponizing dumplings.

Another meeting: a governor begged for tax relief after a flood. The conservative councilors were ready with ledgers and rulebook words. Zuko’s hands twitched when someone called compassion “bad precedent.” He chose a middle road and ended up with a compromise no one loved.

Afterward: “You look like you swallowed a coal,” I told him.

“I hate this,” he muttered, in the way only a person can hate something they’ve decided to do because it’s correct. “If I give too much, we’ll have a line of governors with buckets and sad stories.”

“Then give exactly enough,” I said. “Publicly. Loudly. Announce a disaster relief fund. Create a system so people need not beg. If you make generosity a structure, it skews less corrupt than moods.”

“Make compassion bureaucratic?”

“Yes. Paperwork can be a leash.”

He blinked at me. “You are terrifying.”

“Thank you.”

We found a rhythm that did not feel like dancing until I noticed our steps lined up. He asked, I answered. Sometimes he threw my idea out the window for good reason. Sometimes he pocketed it like a stolen coin. Sometimes he was confused and said, slowly, “I don’t think you can bribe a volcano.”

“Not with money,” I said.

“That was a joke, wasn’t it,” he said.

I shrugged.

He began to call me by my name less like a new acquisition and more like a person he had become used to surviving the day with. I still called him Fire Lord because it was true and because other words refused to form. Words cost. Words put you on maps. I had tried to be off maps for such a long time that my scalp still itched when people looked at me for too long.

At night, I ate. Wild pork became my ritual. The palace cooks raised an eyebrow the first time I brought them a wrapped chunk of shoulder from a vendor in the lower tier—me, in dull armor and a plain sash, moving like a shadow with grocery money.

“Again?” the head cook said, exasperation gilded with fondness I didn’t deserve.

“It makes me loyal,” I said.

She snorted. “If I fed the council pork every day, would they become loyal?”

“No,” I said. “They’d become fat.”

“Then it’s a waste of pork.”

We laughed. I ate over a ledger, taking notes on structural weaknesses and exit points with grease on my fingers. I could make a blade out of hairpins; I could make a plan out of a meal.

The pins in my hair had been with me since before I changed sides. They hold a bun that could survive a fight and also slip clean into a throat. They hum at the base of my skull like messy thoughts. It is strangely intimate to wear a weapon as ornament. It feels like bedding down with a knife under your pillow and pretending sleep is peace.

One evening, after a tiring day of arguing about mines and the ethics of forced labor (I argued that it was unethical because too many people survived it with their anger intact), Zuko came to the training yard where I was burning a line down the sand with my foot. The heat felt like a familiar animal.

“You’re quiet,” he said.

“I am always quiet.”

“Quieter. Which for you means you might be about to either tell me something important or leave the country.”

“Both,” I said. “Important first: there’s a thread connecting three bribes in the lower registries. It leads to a captain whose brother owns a shipping company. The captain stalled repairs in the harbor district so his brother’s contracts could inflate and sell to us at a discount.

Zuko swore in a way that made me like him more.

“As for leaving the country,” I added, “I am not. The beds in the barracks are too good.”

He let out a breath I didn’t look at too closely. “I need people who find threads.”

“You need people who cut them,” I said. “Say the word. Quietly.”

He hesitated. “Quietly… but lawfully.”

I considered that strange marriage. Lawful quiet. “Then you’ll need a judge with a steel spine. And a public announcement after the verdict. If you don’t tell the story, the rumor mills will.”

He rubbed his scar the way people rub worry stones. “Do you ever choose the easy road?”

“I don’t know it,” I said. “Introduce me if you see it.”

He laughed then, really laughed, and it folded the edges of him into something warm I wanted to rest my wrist against. I didn’t. My hands were busy staying still.

Weeks grew into a house with rooms, each one an event, a day, a stupid council squabble. I learned Zuko’s footsteps by the notes they made on marble. He learned that my silences were different shapes. He would say, “What,” and I would say, “The southern aqueduct will fail in the summer unless we pull men now,” and he would mutter a curse and I would try not to smile. We were practical. We were foolish around the edges. He was kind in private and stern in public, and I found myself bending—not my knees but my heart—in directions I had trained out of it.

I still called him Fire Lord. He still called me by my name. Respect is a weapon that doesn’t always wound—but it is sharp.

He started bringing tea to the meetings that looked like they would rot sanity. Jasmine when he needed to be soft. Ginseng when he needed to be unmovable. I brought myself and two hairpins. The council called me “the shadow” in a way they thought I wouldn’t hear. I heard. I like shadows. They let the light be braver.

Once, when an envoy from the Earth Kingdom grew red-faced accusingly—anger is a contagious sport—Zuko lost patience. He leaned too far over the table. I caught his sleeve beneath the wood where no one could see and pressed two fingers to his pulse. It wasn’t a softness; it was a signal. He inhaled and did not say the first sharp thing that wanted out.

Afterwards, in a hall that loved to echo, he said, “Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me. I like our peace more than I like their faces.”

He snorted. “You should try saying that out loud in there sometime.”

“I am trying to avoid prison.”

“You’d break out,” he said with too much confidence.

“Probably,” I admitted. “But the paperwork would be exhausting.”

The first time he used my hairpin as a joke, we were both too tired to notice we were being almost tender. He had a map spread on a table and hair falling into his eyes; he’d cut it shorter, and it was rebelling. Without warning, I pulled one pin and slid it across to him. He balanced a lock of hair back with the roguish concentration of a man trying not to blush while doing something ridiculous.

He did blush. Just a little. “I’ll never live this down,” he said.

“Then don’t let them see,” I said, and tugged the pin free again. It sung. I set it back, gentle as returning a knife to a friend’s belt.

“You treat your weapons like people,” he said quietly.

“And some people like weapons,” I said, not looking up.

The thing with unspoken fondness is that it keeps its hands to itself and still finds a way to touch. He started stopping by the kitchens when I was there, which was often, as the cooks could attest with dramatic eye rolls. He took to leaning against the doorframe like walls were made for him. I sometimes slid him a piece of pork from my private stash. He pretended to steal it because it made it feel like less of a gift.

“You’re going to ruin me,” he said, chewing. “If the people find out their Fire Lord is addicted to pork belly—”

“They’ll love you more,” I said. “You’ll be relatable.”

“Relatable,” he repeated, tasting the word like soup.

“Very in fashion.”

“I thought honor was in fashion,” he said dryly.

“That was last season.”

He laughed into his hand so he wouldn’t spit a piece of meat.

We were accumulating a dictionary that only we could read. I didn’t notice I had begun translating myself for him until I found myself about to say, “Kill their ambition at the root,” and instead said, “Redirect the incentives so no one profits from being reckless.” Both true. One was more polite to his edges.

He began to experiment with nicknames too, in the shape of insults I had to work to hear. “Shadow,” he said once in a courtyard bright with noon, and the word warmed somewhere under my ribs. “My shadow,” he amended. And that was too much. I shot him a look and he raised both hands, surrendering to a crime he hadn’t finished committing.

“Fire Lord,” I said pointedly.

He shut his mouth. I heard something unsaid crane its neck in him and then lie back down.

Then came the mission.

It wasn’t called a mission at first. It was called a visit. The governor of a coal-rich district had invited him to inaugurate a new safety program for miners. On the list of things that smell like lies, “governor” and “coal” is a top pairing. I didn’t object; I don’t object with words when a thing is inevitable. I sharpen. I ask for maps. I eat.

He asked, “Are you coming?”

“As your guard,” I said.

“As you,” he said, and then pretended like he hadn’t.

We went with a small escort. I wore plain armor. My hair was up and armed. The road wound through hills that wore wig after wig of pines. I hated the prettiness of it because it made even danger seem like a painting.

I knew the safe houses in that area like old mistakes. There had been a time when I had needed places to be unknown quickly, and friends who were only friends because we agreed on pretending we didn’t know each other.

The governor met us with the swollen plenty of a man who is very sure the earth belongs to him. He shook Zuko’s hand with two hands like he could catch royalty if it fell. He smiled at me like I was a ghost.

Things went well until they didn’t. That’s how ambushes prefer to work; they want to persuade you that calm is the truth and surprise is the lie. Then the arrows start.

We were leaving a warehouse demonstration of new pulley systems—genuinely clever; I hate when villains have good ideas—when the first small explosion snapped the air. The escort closed ranks around Zuko and me as a second blast barked from the north wall. Smoke. Screams. The governor disappeared with suspicious speed.

“Inside,” one of the guards shouted, and I shook my head sharply.

“No. They want us in a box.”

Zuko was already looking for the lines of the trap. That’s the thing about being hunted young: you recognize footprints even when they’re in the sky.

Then the arrows came, low and mean. One took a chunk of a post near Zuko’s shoulder. He flinched and turned with fire a reflex on his palm.

“Move!” I shoved him toward the south alley and took the rear. My hairpins sang as I drew them; they loved air and problems. I batted a dart aside with one pin and sank the other into a knee that appeared where a face should have been. Screams rearranged themselves into strategy.

We cut around the warehouse to the narrow chute behind it where the ground sloped and the smell of coal turned to wet. A third blast punched the windows out like the warehouse was made of brittle sugar.

“Down,” I said. “There’s a turn and then a run of brush. We take that into the old kiln road. There’s a safe house that way.”

He didn’t argue. He ran. The escort moved to follow and then a net of arrows dropped like a fisher casting for promotions. I saw a man I knew by his laugh go down with an arrow in his shoulder. Another cursed and threw a slab of fire like a door. We couldn’t help them. I know a calculus I hate: the one where the most important life is the one that keeps every other life somewhere possible in the future.

We ran. Branches slapped my face like poorly-behaved friends. I heard the pursuers in the brush—three, maybe five. I felt Zuko’s heat behind me, controlled and tasting of iron.

“Left,” I barked. He leapt without confirmation and there was the road, char-black and soft as a scar in the earth. We sprinted the length of a panicked animal.

“There,” I said, pointing with a pin toward a slope that looked like it hated visitors. We slid down, dirt in our mouths, hands grasping. A low structure leaned against rock, the roof sagging like a sigh. I had slept under that sigh once on a night when my bones had been convinced they were made of glass.

I banged knuckles on the side door in a pattern I wished I could pretend I’d forgotten. The door opened with the speed of a hand that already had a weapon in it.

“Y/N?” said a voice like dry silk. “Who did you drag to my doorstep?”

“Nara,” I said. “I brought a fire hazard.”

Zuko, behind me, had the grace not to look offended while catching his breath like he was and wasn’t human at the same time.

Nara’s eyes flicked over him and calculated twelve things I would have to deny later. “Inside. And if anyone bleeds on my floor I will charge you extra.”

“I have money,” Zuko said automatically.

“We have money,” I corrected.

Inside smelled like old smoke and fresh herbs. It was cleaner than the outside suggested and contained more knives. Nara had always organized her life so chaos wouldn’t have to.

“You were followed?” she asked, closing the door.

“For a while,” I said. “I lost them after the kiln road turned. But they’ll sweep.”

“Of course they will,” she muttered. “You collect trouble like coins.”

Zuko watched our exchange with a look that collected questions and then stored them for a time with less smoke.

“There’s a back room,” Nara said. “One bed. No arguments. This is not an inn.”

I did not look at Zuko. Looking is a language, and I didn’t know that verb yet.

“We’ll take it,” I said simply.

Nara led us down a short hall. The room was small and tight and clean. The bed was broad enough for honesty, which is to say it would require it. There was a basin, sturdy shelves, and a window that preferred secrets.

“I’ll bring water,” Nara said. “And tea if you swear not to fight in my house.”

“We won’t,” I said.

“I’m not sure we have a choice about that,” Zuko muttered.

“You do,” Nara replied. “You always do. You just may not like it.” She vanished like a trick.

I felt the adrenaline drop me like a lover leaving in the morning. My hands shook a fraction. I sheathed the pins in my hair and they made their familiar click. The sound made something inside me unknot.

Zuko set his back to the door and then, slowly, slid down it until he was sitting on the floor. He looked at his hands like they belonged to someone else.

“Are you hurt?” I asked. Assessment first, then the rest.

“No.” He took inventory aloud. “No… just a scratch. You?”

“No.” I checked anyway. Old habits keep you alive and also very single.

He blinked at the bed, at the room, at me. “One bed.”

“Geography,” I said. “Not philosophy.”

He snorted and then winced like laughter cost. “You always talk like this when ambushed?”

“I always talk like this.”

“You do,” he said, and something eased in his shoulders, as if the shape of me—my voice, my angles—was familiar furniture in an unfamiliar room. “It helps.”

“Good,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to do with the fact that my familiarity helped him.

Nara returned with water and a kettle that steamed like a gentle threat. “No blood,” she observed, sniffing at us as if we were soup. “You’re lucky. Or good.”

“Both,” I said.

Zuko opened his mouth to argue with humility and then shut it when Nara lifted a brow sharp enough to shave with. She set the basin by the window and the teapot on a low stool, then flicked a cloth at my face with precise affection.

“Wash,” she ordered. “You look like you fell through a chimney. You—” she nodded at Zuko, “—pace first, wash second. Do not pace grooves into my floor. It is already moody.”

The door shut. We were left with the close quiet of safety’s first inhale. I poured water over the cloth, twisted it until it dripped in a respectable way, and wiped coal-dust and dirt from my face. I moved with the same care I’d use to clean a blade. Zuko did not pace. He watched me like watching was an apology.

“What?” I asked, finally.

He seemed to taste the question. “You knew this place. This road. This pattern on the door.”

“I did.”

“From before,” he said.

“From during,” I said, which was more honest and therefore less polite. “Assassins don’t tend to have addresses. We have coordinates you only know by the feel of your bones. This was one of mine.”

He nodded. The nod held both the things he knew about me and the things he didn’t. “Nara’s a friend?”

“Nara is a constant,” I said. “She sells clay jars to people who need them and silence to people who need that more.”

He considered that, then looked at my hairpins. “You fought with those.”

“I always do.”

He tipped his head, as if to see the weapon beneath the ornament and the ornament beneath the weapon. “I still can’t believe you held an arrow off with a hairpin.”

“I held the arrow off with training. The hairpin was just the shape the training wore.”

He huffed. “You have a way of making survival sound like poetry.”

“It’s cheaper than therapy.”

He snorted, and the sound warmed the room. I realized I was cold; the adrenaline had washed out, leaving me a little human. I sat on the edge of the bed like you sit on the lip of a cliff you trust.

He didn’t move closer. He set his boots in a neat pair by the door, as if manners were a portable temple. He rolled his shoulders and grimaced in that way a person does when assessing new bruises that will announce themselves properly tomorrow. Then, carefully, he unfastened the top layer of his armor and set it aside. Without the metal, he looked more like someone I could touch and less like an office.

I looked away. My eyes are better used on exits.

“Do you think we were the target specifically?” he asked, voice low.

“Yes.”

“Because the governor ran early?”

“Because the governor ran early,” I agreed. “And because whoever ordered the blasts knew the warehouse’s structural soft points. That’s not bandits. That’s a ledger with teeth.”

He frowned. “Ledger with teeth?”

“Corruption,” I translated for his edges. “Someone wanted you hurt or humiliated or gone. Preferably gone.”

He looked at me like he was measuring a cliff. “Do you think they’ll follow us here?”

“Yes,” I said. Then, because truth should be salted with function, I added, “But they’ll be slow. The kiln road forks and then forks again, and their map will argue with itself.”

He nodded, then rubbed his scar with a thumb, a gesture I understood as the body’s version of a steadying breath. “We should sleep in shifts.”

“We should,” I agreed. “You first.”

He blinked. “I thought you’d insist on taking first watch.”

“I would, normally. But you carry the kingdom in your head and your head needs to defragment.”

He blinked again, slower. “Defragment?”

“Sleep,” I said. “But with a fancier word.”

He laughed once, almost silent, and the sound landed gently on my ribs. “All right. But only if you wake me in two hours.”

“I’ll wake you when you snore,” I said.

“I don’t snore.”

“Everyone snores,” I said. “Pride is not a cure.”

He opened his mouth, closed it, and sat, as if he’d been granted permission he hadn’t known he was waiting for. The bed dipped. The room felt smaller and softer. He stretched out on top of the blanket, boots off, armor aside, shirt rumpled by the kind of day that makes laundry a moral question. He kept his hands folded on his stomach like a soldier pretending to be a prince pretending to be a soldier.

“You can get under the blanket,” I said, trying for practical and missing something I refused to name.

“Are you going to?”

“Yes,” I said. “Eventually.”

“Then I will,” he said, as if we were bound by some compact older than either of us.

He slid under, careful, leaving space like a border he was determined not to cross accidentally. I took the chair by the window and let the darkness outside press its ear to the glass. I listened. I have always been good at listening for footsteps, for the breath of the world when it changes its mind.

After a time, his breathing slowed. I watched the way his chest rose and fell and thought about the word “alive” like it was both a blessing and a blade.

Nara’s house shifted in the small ways all houses shift, wooden bones settling, wind considering and declining an invitation. I sharpened my attention against the whetstone of silence. At one point, a fox-thing skittered in the brush and then thought better of it. Farther off, a voice called to another voice with the uncertain echo of people who do not know the land they’re walking. I loosened a hairpin with the barest whisper, then set it back. The body understands promises made to it.

Two hours passed, then a third. I did not wake him. The king of a fire should sleep when it is safe.

At some endless point, an ache bloomed in my neck. The chair was honest but unforgiving. I stood to stretch and the motion stirred something in the air. Zuko’s breath hitched. He came awake like someone who had been taught by the road how not to startle, eyes focusing without flare.

“I told you to wake me,” he said. It came out softer than the scold he’d intended.

“I tried,” I said, which was a lie even he could hear.

“Chiisana Hasu,” he said, and the room became a bell. “You’re impossible.”

The name hit me with the precision of an arrow and the gentleness of hands not drawing blood. I went very, very still.

“What did you call me,” I asked, without asking.

He winced, not in regret but in embarrassment, like the word had slipped past his teeth when it wasn’t supposed to. “Sorry. It… slipped. Little Lotus.” He looked at his own mistake as if it were a nervous animal and he was trying not to spook it. “You’re quiet and you live in the mud without being of it. And when you open, it’s—” He cut himself off, because he is not a poet, he is a boy who learned to be a man in a furnace. “If you hate it, I won’t—”

“I don’t hate it,” I said, clean and fast, the way you defuse a bomb with words. My heartbeat, annoyed at being noticed, tapped hard against my ribs. “But names are… expensive.”

“I know,” he said, and I believed him. “It wasn’t an order. It was…” He flailed gently for a while. “An observation.”

“Careful,” I said, lightly, because everything else I could have said was heavier than the air in the room. “Observations lead to maps.”

He smiled, rueful. “I’m trying to make a better one.”

We looked at each other like we were standing on different shores of the same narrow river.

“Sleep,” he said, then. “My turn to listen.”

I nodded once, a soldier acknowledging another soldier’s usefulness, and shed my boots. I slid under the blanket, next to warmth. We kept our backs to each other out of habit and new shyness. The bed carried our heat like a shared secret.

“Wake me if you hear anything,” I murmured, the words soft enough that they could be mistaken for breath.

“I will,” he said. A pause stretched, thinned, hummed. “Chiisana hi,” I added, and if there was a tremor in my voice, it was only the house. “Little Flame. Don’t burn the place down while I nap.”

“Little Flame,” he repeated, wonder buried in humor. “That’s not very respectful.”

“It’s not an order,” I said. “It’s an observation.”

He laughed into the pillow as if he didn’t trust the room with the sound.

I fell asleep like a knife cooling after work.

I woke to tea.

Not the kettle’s hiss—that had come and gone—but the smell, jasmine with edges of something wild Nara had dried and sworn at. Zuko sat in the chair by the window, shoulders squared, eyes intent on the world beyond the glass. The light was the kind that makes morning look expensive.

“You let me sleep too long,” I said, stretching until my spine negotiated its grievances down to a dull mutter.

“You were tired,” he said, which was an argument as stubborn as bedrock.

“Everyone is tired.”

“Pride is not a cure,” he said, throwing my words back at me with the kind of satisfaction I refused to find charming.

“Rude,” I said, sitting up. The blanket slithered to my lap, and I pressed my hands into it like it might teach me something patient. “Anything?”

He shook his head. “Two men on the kiln road looking lost. One woman with a cart who is not lost at all. A bird that hates mornings as much as I do.”

“Same bird that hates afternoons,” I said. “She’s consistent about it.”

He glanced at me, quick, like he couldn’t help it. “Tea?”

I stood and joined him near the window, taking the cup Nara had left us. My fingers brushed his knuckles. We both pretended that the touch was a miscalculation in geometry.

“We should send word to the escort,” he said.

“I did,” Nara said from the hall, because she has very kind ears and no respect for timing. She stepped in, set a plate of something golden and flaking on the low stool, and looked satisfied at our uprightness. “I collect favors so I can spend them dramatically. Your men are scattered but breathing. Two hurt, neither dead. They’re regrouping at the eastern mile marker, which is very ugly and therefore easy to find.”

Tension left Zuko’s shoulders in a slide so quiet you had to be listening for it to hear it. I was listening. I filed the sound away with the names of governors I trusted less today than yesterday.

“Thank you,” he said to Nara with a gratitude that had practice but no varnish.

She shrugged like a marketplace and tilted her chin at the plate. “Eat. It’s pork.”

Zuko closed his eyes briefly, sanctified by the idea. “You really are trying to ruin me.”

“I am trying to keep you from making decisions with low blood sugar,” she said, slapping a napkin into his hand. “Y/N, stop adopting strays with crowns. It’s bad for my business.”

“He pays on time,” I said, mouth already complicating itself pleasantly around pork that crackled like a argument you want to keep having.

“He’d better,” Nara said. “I tripled my prices when I saw his hair.”

“You can’t charge people more for hair,” Zuko said, offended and chewing.

“You can charge people more for everything,” Nara said with the cool fatalism of a woman who has watched civilizations argue and come back for jars. “Finish eating. Then both of you get out of my house before your trouble finds my good broom.”

We didn’t argue. We ate. I pretended not to notice Zuko stealing exactly one more piece than he had been allotted. He pretended not to notice me noticing. We are very good at making pretense into kindness.

After breakfast, I repacked my small bag, slid my hairpins into place, and checked the window’s latch because ignoring superstition is the first step to becoming a ghost. Zuko laced his boots with competence that would have been endearing if I allowed myself to have that word. Nara handed us a pouch of dried pork and another of tea leaves she swore would keep even our kind awake through boredom.

At the door, Nara caught my sleeve with two fingers. “Try not to die,” she said, which in her language is “be careful” with the varnish stripped.

“I’ll invoice you if I do,” I said.

“I’ll collect,” she said, then looked past me at Zuko. “And you, Fire Hazard—learn to duck faster.”

“I’m trying,” he said, that boy-embarrassed, man-earnest look back on his face.

She snorted. “Try better.” Then she kissed my cheek because she has always been rude and tender on the same day, and shut the door on us like she was closing a book to save the page.

We took the back way out, through brush that remembered my ankles. The day was the kind that pretends to be innocent: sky complacent, air carrying the smell of pine and old fire. We moved along the kiln road until it emptied into a cut path that would take us to the eastern mile marker. Zuko walked with purpose and a touch of something I refused to call swagger. I walked with the kind of alertness that tastes like mint and iron.

“Chiisana Hasu,” he said after a time, casual as a knife laid on a table. “Is it all right if I…?”

“Use it?” I asked.

“Yes.” He looked over at me and didn’t pretend not to. “It feels… right.”

“It feels like you seeing me,” I said, quieter than the road warranted. “That can be dangerous.”

“I know,” he said. “I’m not trying to make you a map. I’m trying to learn how not to get lost around you.”

Heat, and not just from the sun, rose to my face in a way that made me want to scold my blood. “You’re doing fine,” I said, because that is the sort of lie that is also a truth.

“And me?” I asked after a beat that we decorated with breathing. “Chiisana hi? Is it all right if I…?”

His smile was a sunrise stubborn about being dignified. “Yes. It feels… like you remembering I’m human.”

“You are,” I said. “Infuriatingly.”

The mile marker squatted ahead, ugly in the exact way Nara had promised. Our men were there, tired and reassembled into a shape like loyalty. I counted heads and found the two missing from the night lined up in wounded, cursing but upright. I let my lungs do a thing like gratitude. Zuko did the rounds with a steadiness that made me want to check the ground for new roots. He spoke to each guard, not like a speech but like a person speaking to another person. I could see the way it eased them, like a hand pushing a door open from the inside.

“Orders, my lord?” the senior guard asked, once the tallying and swearing and drinking had been concluded.

“We’re returning to the capital,” Zuko said, voice turning to office but not hardening. “We’ll send investigators back for the governor. Quietly first, publicly after. No one goes anywhere alone. Y/N leads the route.”

All eyes slid to me. I nodded once. “We’ll take the ridge line. It’s slower but harder to trap. Eat now. We won’t stop until the valley turn.”

We moved.

Travel under potential pursuit is a choreography of attention. You learn where to put your feet, where to put your eyes, where to store your breath in case you need it later. Zuko kept pace like a person who understood that survival is equal parts lungs and decisions. He let me make the choices you make on instinct and map: when to cut under the shade of a boulder, when to keep to the rocks to keep our scent off the brush, when to stop and pretend to be part of the mountain for a minute while a pair of riders passed below, swearing at dust.

By late afternoon, the sun had gotten over itself and began to consider the idea of leaving. We crested the ridge and the capital’s crown of smoke and stone was a bruise on the horizon.

“Home,” Zuko said, complicatedly.

“Home,” I echoed, and did not attempt to define it.

We reached the lower gates by dusk. The city received us with the clatter and softness of a spouse pretending not to have worried. The palace was a different sort of beast: orderly, scented with ink and tempered steel, and full of people who had learned how to look at a Fire Lord and see both a man and a nation without getting whiplash.

The council wanted blood, or at least the shape of blood spelled out in polite phrases. They wanted to roar about betrayal and demand heads or resignations or both. Zuko, to his credit and my relief, did not roar. He listened. Then he turned with that careful, lived-in gaze and said, “We will investigate. Thoroughly. We will not turn this into a spectacle that teaches cowards how to aim better. Dismissed.”

It was not what some of them wanted. It was what the country needed. He is irritating like that.

After, in the room that smelled like incense and stubbornness, he looked at me the way you check a compass when you’re too tired to pretend you aren’t lost.

“Well?” he asked.

“Two things,” I said, holding up a hand like I was haggling with fate. “One: give the governor a rope to hang himself with. Announce a surprise safety audit across all mines, not just his. Publicly. Loudly. Invite Earth Kingdom inspectors to participate. He’ll panic and make mistakes. Corruption hates sunlight more than it hates prison.”

“And two?” he asked, bracing.

“Two: pretend you’re merciful. Quietly. Offer amnesty to any of his people who turn over evidence within, say, a week. People love to survive. Let them do it in a way that serves us.”

He blinked, then pinched the bridge of his nose. “That’s… morally gray.”

“Only if you think mercy should be indiscriminate,” I said. “This is strategic compassion. It looks better on you than revenge.”

He made a face like he couldn’t decide whether to be amused or offended. “Strategic compassion.”

“It’s like stew,” I said. “Works better in a pot than thrown at people.”

He tried not to laugh. He failed. The sound did something to the part of my chest that collects knives and stories.

“Done,” he said, sobering. “We’ll do it your way.”

“Our way,” I said, before I could stop myself.

His eyes flicked up, quick and bright. “Our way,” he repeated, and for a moment, the room felt almost too small for the size of that word.

We drafted the orders. We argued over commas like they were supply lines. He sent for a judge with a spine and a memory. I sent for a clerk who owed me fourteen favors, none of which we spoke about out loud. The machinery of justice, which is really just people in rooms trying to outmaneuver their worst instincts, began to grind.

Days turned into a rhythm that tasted like ash and tea. We slept; we ate pork more often than I had the nerve to admit to the kitchen budget; we trained; we watched. The city breathed wariness in and something like relief out as no more explosions sounded and the governor sent a letter so cloying with innocence it should have come with bees. We sent an answer, polite as a blade under a napkin.

In the evenings, after the meetings that tried to gnaw on sanity, Zuko and I found ourselves in the training yard or the kitchen or the small garden that had refused to die under all the iron. He brought tea; I brought my strange compass. Sometimes our conversation slid into an ease that felt like a door cracked open on an unlit room. Sometimes it didn’t. That’s the thing about unnamed things: they don’t owe you consistency.

One quiet night in the garden, he held a cup between his hands like he was trying to learn it by touch. “When you ran with me,” he said, as if we hadn’t been not-talking about it all week, “you didn’t look back.”

“If I’d looked back,” I said, “we would have had to stop to pick up my head from where it fell.”

“I know,” he said. “I’m not… accusing. I’m—” He searched, frowning slightly, as if the right word had hidden in a hedge. “Noticing. I’m grateful. I’m also sorry.”

“For what?”

“For the men who went down,” he said, voice thin with the pain of arithmetic. “For the position I put them in. For the position I put you in. For the position I am.”

“You’re apologizing for being a fulcrum,” I said. “That’s not how levers work.”

He huffed a laugh into his cup. “Strategic compassion. Lever lectures. You’re going to turn me into a better ruler out of pure stubbornness.”

“I’m going to keep you alive out of pure stubbornness,” I corrected. “The ruling is extra.”

He looked over at me then with a steadiness that made my breath think about leaving. “You call me Chiisana hi,” he said, like we were approaching something and he wanted to make sure our feet were on the same stone. “Little Flame.”

“I do.”

“What am I to you,” he asked, so simply it might have been a knife.

I considered the garden, the soft bruise-blue of the evening, the way the lantern light made a geography of his face. I considered the way truth could be a weapon wielded too early.

“You are the person I keep alive,” I said. “And the person who makes that feel less like a job.”

He exhaled, and I realized I had been holding a breath with him. “That’s… more than I had a right to want.”

“Don’t get greedy,” I said, and felt the tremor beneath my voice like an animal testing a trap it had built itself.

He didn’t push. He is many things; a fool is not one of them. He nodded, once, like a soldier, and sipped his tea. We watched the lantern flicker. Sometimes love is the thing that sits with you and does not ask for more chair.

The next week brought the audit’s first fruit: a ledger missing a page and a foreman with a suddenly bad memory. The amnesty brought three men and a woman to a discreet door with eyes that wouldn’t settle and hands that wanted to confess even if their mouths didn’t. The governor sent a gift basket of fruit that had been picked too early to be sweet. I had it sent to the kitchens after I ran a blade through every pear.

“Paranoid,” Zuko said mildly.

“Alive,” I corrected.

When the judge with the spine finished his quiet work, Zuko made the loud announcement he had promised: a measured statement about safety and corruption and the simple indecency of profiting off other people’s lungs. He did not say the governor’s name. He did not need to. The city is a clever animal; it can smell a story even when you keep it in a box.

That night, tired in the way only bureaucracy can make a body, I went to the kitchens and found the last of my private stash of pork disappearing into a familiar thief’s mouth.

“You,” I said, pointing a pin at his chest.

“Me,” he said through a contrite chew.

“That was my last piece.”

“I’ll buy you more,” he said, then frowned as if revising an edict. “No, I’ll go with you to buy more.”

I blinked. “Into the city. With me. For pork.”

“Yes,” he said, eyes bright with the sort of stubborn that gets statues built and broken. “Unless you don’t want—”

“It’s dangerous,” I said, already calculating routes and disguises and whether my hair could pass as hair rather than armament.

“I’ll be with you,” he said, and I hated how my chest liked the shape of that. “If it gets dangerous, you’ll be with me. Between us, danger can eat stew.”

“Stew again,” I said. “You’re becoming very metaphorical.”

“Bad influence,” he said, and smiled in a way that took years off him without making him smaller.

We went at dusk two days later, in clothes that would never be called plain if anyone had ever seen us in anything but crowns and steel. He wore his hair loose and unassuming. I left my pins in but tucked the sharpness deeper, ornament pretending harder at being ornament. We moved like two people who liked shadows and each other’s company.

The market smelled like five countries having a lovely argument. We blended, to my relief and his quiet delight. I bought pork from the vendor who knows me by my appetite and my refusal to haggle. Zuko tried to haggle and got swindled magnificently, then tipped anyway because honor is apparently contagious.

We ate on a low wall while the sky decided what colors to be. He chewed with his whole concentration, which is a rare and beautiful thing.

“This,” he said finally, licking a thumb in a way that would make the council faint, “might be the best decision I’ve made all month.”

“The audit,” I suggested.

“Second best,” he said around another bite.

“Strategic compassion,” I reminded him.

“Third.”

I snorted and let the sound keep some of the tenderness from shaking my hands. “You’re incorrigible.”

“I’m hungry,” he said. “And happy.”

The word landed between us like a small animal that might be coaxed closer with silence.

We walked back by the long way, through streets that had learned not to look too hard at strangers. When we reached the palace’s shadow, the city’s noise folded behind us like a blanket being put away.

In the corridor that tried to pretend it wasn’t lonely, he said, “Thank you.”

“For the pork? It thanks the pig.”

“For the day,” he said. “For… this.” He gestured at the space between us, then at the memory of the market, then at something he didn’t have a word for.

“You’re welcome,” I said, because I am learning to take thanks like a blade you put back in the right sheath.

The governor fell two weeks later, not with the roar of a felled tree but with the quiet of a rotten door touched by a hand that finally ran out of patience. The judge’s verdict was clean. The foreman’s memory returned. A trunk appeared with ledgers that suddenly had pages where there had not been pages. The city nodded, satisfied by the neatness of the story, which we fed it like a stew that had been simmering for exactly long enough.

After the verdict, Zuko stood on a balcony and spoke simply: about safety, about the kind of strength that doesn’t need to break things to prove it exists. The people listened. The wind listened. I listened, standing just behind him where a shadow belongs.

When it was over, he turned and the wind put a hair across his scar, and I thought, very unprofessionally, that I wanted to touch it, not to heal it or fix it or make it smaller, but to acknowledge it the way you acknowledge a mountain you have no intention of moving.

“Chiisana Hasu,” he said later, in the small room where we keep our truer selves, “have you ever thought about… after?”

“After what,” I asked, because I like to force people to define their ghosts.

“After this. After council meetings, after governors who think they’re clever, after… the part where I need you to stand between me and arrows.”

He didn’t look at me when he said it. He looked at the window, where the sky was making bad choices about purple.

“No,” I said truthfully. “I don’t think about after. I think about next. It’s easier to aim at.”

He nodded, absorbing that like a lesson from a teacher he hadn’t meant to respect. “What’s next, then?”

“Next, you sign the trade agreement with the northwestern ports and make sure you don’t let their ambassador talk you into forgiving the late tariffs. Next, you sleep. Next, we eat pork I am assured is somewhere in this building because you stole it and hid it and then forgot where.”

He laughed, caught, and rubbed the back of his neck in the way people do when they don’t know where to put their hands. “You make me sound predictable.”

“You’re not,” I said, before I could stop the softness. “You’re… consistent. It’s different.”

He looked at me like he wanted to ask a question and then didn’t because he is learning the shape of my silences. Instead, he reached for the teapot and refilled my cup first. It was an intimacy that had no body and all the weight in the world.

The next mission—because there is always a next mission—came in the form of a delegation from Ba Sing Se that wore too much green and not enough sincerity. They wanted guarantees; he wanted honesty; I wanted to go to bed. We all compromised.

On the third night of negotiations, our escort found a knife under the tablecloth of the banquet hall, the sort of knife that belongs to men who think they are invisible because they are small. We didn’t flinch. We simply changed the tablecloth and moved the chairs and made eye contact with the right people at the right times. No one bled. The city slept through it. In the morning, Zuko signed a treaty that tasted like vegetables and righteousness.

After, I found him in the training yard, practicing forms with a seriousness that made the air straighten its spine. I leaned in the door and watched the way his fire moved: disciplined, contained, refusing to apologize for being itself.

“You’re staring,” he said, without turning.

“I’m assessing,” I corrected, stepping onto the sand. “Your left sweep is a fraction late.”

He repeated the form and corrected it, just like that. That is one of the many undramatic things I admire about him: he changes without needing to be congratulated for it.

“Better,” I said.

“Fight me,” he said.

“You’ll lose,” I said.

“Humor me,” he said, and there was pride and there was also something else: the knowledge that you do not get to stop learning just because people have started to call you wise.

We sparred. He was better than the last time and worse than me, which is the balance the universe has decided not to apologize for. He pressed me back with a flurry that tasted like tea and duty. I let him. Then I turned the heat down, altered the angle, and stole his center the way you steal a spoon. He hit the sand with a grunt and a laugh.

“Unfair,” he said, looking up at me with a grin that made an argument for daylight.

“I warned you,” I said, offering a hand.

He took it. His palm was warm, dry, callused, human. When he was upright, he didn’t let go immediately. Neither did I.

“Thank you,” he said softly.

“For humiliating you in front of the training dummies?”

“For… this,” he said again, and again gestured at the space between us as if to keep it from running off.

“Don’t thank me yet,” I said, dropping his hand because I could hear my own heart and I don’t like when my body tattles. “We still have to survive dinner.”

“Pork?” he asked, hopeful like a child who knows better.

“Pork,” I confirmed, because I am not cruel.

We went to dinner with the council and the green men, and everyone performed their roles like a play that has been staged too many times. Afterwards, we found ourselves again in the small room with the good tea and the stubborn walls. He was tired enough to be honest by accident.

“Sometimes,” he said, “I think I don’t know how to be both a man and a symbol.”

“You don’t,” I said. “No one does. You learn a choreography that makes the crowd believe you do.”

“That sounds…” He searched for the word and didn’t like the ones he found. “Dishonest.”

“It’s theater,” I said. “Theater isn’t dishonest. It’s mercy. It gives people a story they can survive.”

He considered that, turning it in his mouth like a strange fruit. “And you?”

“Me?”

“Do you ever want to stop being a blade?”

The question landed and skittered. I watched it move. “Wanting things like that gets you killed,” I said.

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I have that won’t make me into a map.”

He looked like he wanted to argue and then didn’t. Instead, he reached out, gently, and tapped the end of one of my hairpins. “If everything fails,” he said, repeating words I’d given him once like a knife, “you have a weapon.”

I inclined my head. “Always.”

“And if nothing fails?”

“Then I have an ornament,” I said, and let him see, just for a second, how tired that made me.

He saw. Of course he did. He is infuriating that way.

We did not say the thing that had been building, because we are both stubborn and careful and also because the world is loud and timing is a religion I don’t pray to. But the language we had invented grew another page that night, a new word we did not write down.

Weeks turned. The council picked new fights to lose. The city breathed. We didn’t use the safe house again, but I dreamed about it: one bed, one breath, one name said soft in the dark.

The day everything tried to change came with rain.

It started as a drizzle, the kind that makes tiles moody, and then poured like a god was practicing. The palace roofs sang their old, busy song. I like rain. It makes fire honest.

In the middle of the downpour, a message arrived: a messenger with the posture of a man who has run too far to care about posture. He had a cut on his cheek and breath that sounded like it had been borrowed. He held out a sealed scroll with hands that shook.

“For the Fire Lord,” he managed, and then, because the world loves theater, he sagged like a curtain and did not quite faint.

We read it while the healer bullied the messenger into living. The message was short and unkind: a faction in the governor’s old district, angry at having their subsidy cut and their corruption interrupted, had taken a thing that did not belong to them. Not a person. Not this time. A train, loaded with coal and people, was stalled on a bridge with men who thought leverage was the same thing as a plan. If the demands were not met by sundown, they would demonstrate their seriousness.

Zuko’s jaw did the working thing. “We can’t give in.”

“No,” I said. “We also can’t let them learn that threatening trains is a good way to get attention.”

“Options,” he said.

“Three,” I said, because I like to pretend the world is tidier than it is. “Storm the bridge and hope we can peel them off without dropping the train. Negotiate long enough for our people to get into position to make storming look like a surprise when it isn’t. Or…” I hesitated, because the third option was the sort of thing that gets good people promoted and bad people killed. “Or we give them what they want in a way that ruins their appetite for wanting.”

He looked at me, intent. “Explain.”

“Let them think they’ve extracted a concession,” I said. “A small one, public, about auditing methods. Make sure it costs them their internal loyalty. Offer different deals to different men at the same time and let them eat each other while we walk the train to safety. After, we make the leader very public and very unhappy.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose. “That’s… so gray it’s almost… I don’t even know what color that is.”

“It’s the color of not dropping a train into a ravine,” I said.

He exhaled, and I watched the scales tip. Responsibility is a cruel accountant. “We do it your—our way,” he corrected himself, and the word put iron in my spine.

We went in the rain.

The bridge was a line across a throat of air, and the train sat on it like a thought someone was afraid to finish. The men with weapons were the sort who had mistaken a moment for a movement. They shouted. They postured. They sweated. They liked the sound of their names.

Zuko did not roar. He stood at the bridge’s mouth with water slicking his hair to his face and looked like a god who had done his time among mortals and was very tired. I stood at his side with hairpins and a plan and the certainty that we were going to make this look easy or we were going to die trying.

He negotiated. I moved. Our men moved like patience with muscles. We found the men whose eyes flicked, whose mouths chewed when they lied, whose hands tightened on their weapons when their leader looked away. We made offers: not of gold or pardons, but of survival. The train breathed. The river complained. The rain tried to decide whether to drum or caress.

In the end, it worked. It never looks clean when plans like this work; it looks like an accident that was waiting in the lane. The leader found himself alone on a patch of bridge that felt very far from help. His men had discovered that loyalty tastes worse than fear when it’s wet. We took the train, car by car, breath by breath, until the momentum was our friend again.

After, soaked to spite and shaking with the tug-of-war between adrenaline and gravity, I stood under the small shelter of the engine’s lip and watched the men we’d outmaneuvered realize that being clever is not the same thing as being smart.

Zuko came to stand by me, water running down his face in lines that knew his history. He didn’t speak. He didn’t have to. The train clanked as if waking from a nightmare. We watched it roll forward, slowly at first, then with a relief that made the steel sing.

“You were right,” he said finally, so quiet the rain nearly stole it.

“Today,” I said. “Tomorrow I’ll be wrong about something and you’ll stop me from getting us killed.”

He made a noise like agreement and gratitude and the sound a person makes when they have decided to buy a thing they cannot afford.

Back at the palace, dry and alive and full of the sort of exhaustion that makes laughter dangerous, we found our way to the small room with the stubborn walls. Nara’s tea had spoiled me; the palace’s tasted like obligation, but we drank it anyway.

He set his cup down and looked at me with the kind of consideration that precedes revolutions. “Chiisana Hasu,” he said, and the name was a touch. “I think I’m in love with you.”

For a moment, the world did not move. The rain remembered it had somewhere to be. The lantern flickered in an interested way. I felt every part of me that had been a blade consider being something else and then think better of it.

“That’s a bad idea,” I said eventually, because sometimes truth is a mercy and sometimes it’s a delay tactic. “You’re a Fire Lord. I’m—”

“My shadow,” he said, and then shook his head at himself. “Not a possession. I know. You’re you. You’re also the person I—” He stopped like a horse before a ditch, not because he couldn’t jump, but because he respected the fall. “If it’s a bad idea, it’s mine to have.”

“You’re not allowed to have bad ideas,” I said, and hated how much it sounded like a plea.

“I have them anyway,” he said, and smiled a little, and I wanted to throw my hairpins at the wall and see if the sound would break the tension.

“I can’t be your liability,” I said. “I can’t be your scandal. I can’t be the reason a governor somewhere dares you to choose between us and the nation.”

“Then don’t be,” he said, simply, like a man offering a hand to someone on a ledge. “Be my ally. Be my guard. Be my—” He searched, then laughed, pained. “Whatever word you’ll let me have.”

“Don’t do that,” I said, sharper than I intended. “Don’t make me the one who chooses the word. Words become maps. Maps get people killed.”

He breathed in, breathed out. “All right,” he said, hands open on his knees. “Then we won’t choose the word. We’ll… do what we’ve been doing. We’ll build something that doesn’t need a name to stand.”

It was the cleverest and kindest trap he could have set. It was also exactly the one I would have built for him if I had been brave.

“Chiisana hi,” I said, because if he could be brave, I could be something. “Little flame. If we do this—this—there will be nights like the safe house again. One bed. One choice. No witnesses. And there will be mornings after where we have to look at each other and then go lie to a hundred people without lying to ourselves. Can you do that?”

“Yes,” he said, as if I had asked him if he could breathe. “Can you?”

I thought about the woman I had been, all blade and silence. I thought about the woman I was, who ate pork and told a Fire Lord how to move his compassion like an army. I thought about the woman I might be, if I let myself be something other than precise.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I can try.”

He closed his eyes, just for a moment, and when he opened them, the room came back into focus. “That’s all I wanted,” he said. “That, and for you to keep waking me when I snore.”

“You do snore,” I said.

“Lies,” he said.

We didn’t kiss. That would have been too easy. We sat with our tea and our names and the map we refused to draw, and we let the night be our witness.

The next ambush, when it came, tried to be smarter than the last. It chose politics over powder and daggers drawn with smiles. It found us ready in a way that only people who have shared a bed and not touched can be ready: attuned, aligned, acting like one mind had gotten into the habit of wearing two bodies.

There were still arrows. There were still rooms that smelled like incense and stubbornness. There were still pork dinners and Nara’s invoices and councilors who thought “precedent” was a synonym for “cowardice.” There were also names whispered in corridors with the ache of hope in them: Little Lotus. Little Flame. And there were nights when we stood at a window with the city a dark animal breathing below us, and we did not need to say anything at all.

Once, on a night when the moon looked like a scythe sharpened on rumor, we ended up again in a place that wasn’t meant to hold us. Not Nara’s house—another safe place, another old coordinate in my bones. One bed. One breath.

He lay beside me like a promise he wasn’t trying to collect. I lay beside him like a weapon pretending to be a flower. He said my name, and then, softer, “Hasu.” I said his title, and then, softer, “Hi.” The words were small and heavy as coins.

“Tell me something true,” he said into the dark.

“I am not as brave as you think.”

“Me either,” he said. “Tell me another.”

“I want to live,” I said, and the quiet took the weight without breaking.

“Me too,” he said. After a while: “With you.”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to. I reached back—just a fraction—and my fingers found his. We didn’t grip. We just touched, like two notes finally finding their harmony and deciding not to show off about it.

In the morning, we ate pork cold and made faces at it and at each other. We put our armor on the way other people put on makeup. We walked out into a world that keeps being itself, inconveniently and with humor.

We did not choose a word. We chose, every day, to be on the same side of the fire.

And sometimes, when the council was particularly tedious and the tea was particularly necessary, he would lean close enough that only I could hear and say, “Hasu,” like a secret. And I would say, “Hi,” like a warning that had forgotten how to be sharp.

We were never careful enough to be saints. We were never foolish enough to be caught. We were something in between, the place where maps are drawn after the fact and called destiny by people who need their stories to make sense.

Me, I liked the nonsense. I liked the pork. I liked the name that turned me from a blade into a flower and then back again without asking me to apologize.

And when the arrows came again—as they always do, eventually—I ran with him, and he ran with me, and somewhere, a house with one bed and a moody floor remembered us like a language it had once spoken fluently.

We did not need saving. We needed each other.

That is the story I keep behind my teeth when people ask me why a blade would choose to be a hinge. Because a hinge knows the value of a door. Because a hinge gets to be there every time it opens.

Because a little lotus can float in fire, and a little flame can learn to warm instead of burn, and between them, a nation can find a way to be less afraid of its own reflection.

it happens fast. it always does when it’s going to matter for a long time.

the thing didn’t have a face so much as a memory of one. you cut it. it cuts you. the world narrows to red and ringing and the way dante shouts your name like it’s a command word that could unbreak a universe.

you go down. breath leaps out. hands find you. he’s there before the body hits the ground, or maybe the ground never happens because his arms are already stealing you from it.

“hey,” you say, mouth full of copper and apology. “guess i… guess i’m the rock now.”

“don’t,” he says. voice gone ragged. “don’t do that. don’t make the joke.”

you try to laugh. it comes out like a cough full of pins. the world smells like cordite and rain left too long in a bucket. he presses his coat against your side, a desperate kind of neatness. he is good at damage control when it isn’t this. he is good at everything except losing.

“look at me,” he says. “stay.”

“i am.” you try to. you tether yourself to the way he looks at you, like you are the first weapon he ever trusted. “dante,” you whisper. “would you still—”

“yes.” it is an answer with teeth. “yes. stop asking.”

sirens far away. the kind that never find the right street. the kind that never get there in time for devils or what they leave behind.

“if i was a rock,” you say, eyes slipping, “put me somewhere warm.”

he swallows. it’s audible. a fault line. “i’ll pocket you,” he says, barely a sound. “you hear me? i’ll keep you on me. i’ll wear the jacket till it falls apart. i’ll take you where the sun is. where the rain is. i’ll show you both.”

you almost say good. you almost say see. you almost say love. but the words break in the doorway and never make it inside.

the world narrows. he widens, somehow. fills the space with the ruin of his breathing. he waits for you to come back from wherever you went like patience could keep a pulse. somewhere metal clatters. somewhere the thing dies twice, because he goes and makes sure.

the office is too bright when he carries you in. he puts you on the couch like you’re only sleeping off a bottle and a bad joke. he closes the blinds halfway, the way you liked, because full dark made you feel like a secret and full light made you feel seen in the wrong ways. half-light for you. always half-light.

he cleans the blood like it’s a chore with a finish line. he stacks the invoices. he lines up bullets that do not care. he turns your mug so the handle faces out, because you hated reaching the wrong way. he finds himself halfway to the door three times before admitting there is nowhere to go that fixes anything.

the question follows him from room to room. it finds him in mirrors and in the black of gun barrels and in the quiet when the neon sign burns out with a soft pop.

would you love me if i was a rock

he buys a little tin at a corner store at four in the morning. the kind meant for mints or buttons or flowers pressed flat. he hates it. it isn’t enough. he fills it anyway. a lock of hair he pretends he stole as a joke. a piece of the ribbon you used to tie the curtains back. a shard of something from that alley, smoothed on one edge from the night he couldn’t stop turning it over in his hand. he puts the tin in his inside pocket. he walks different for a while, like protecting a secret with ribs.

days get strange. nights get stranger. his laughter shows up late and leaves early. he forgets to finish songs. he answers the phone like it’s going to be you, like you’ll call to say the alley was a trick and you took the long way home and you’re annoyed that the coffee’s gone cold again.

when the first rain comes, he goes outside and stands in it. jacket open. eyes closed. a hand over the place where the tin lives. he hears your voice in the water, or maybe it’s just the way grief sounds when it finally has something to bounce off of.

“i’d still love you,” he says, to the doorframe, to the street, to the ache that has learned his name. “rock or rain or nothing at all.”

it doesn’t fix anything. he doesn’t expect it to. he goes back inside, leaves wet footprints that dry into shapes he won’t mop away for days.

sometimes he talks to the couch. sometimes to the windowsill. sometimes to the old jukebox that never worked right, like if it starts now you’ll come in with a line about miracles choosing the worst timing. he keeps your jacket on the hook and not in the box. he replaces the neon sign bulb. it burns a softer blue now.

the next job comes and he takes it because that is gravity. because if he stops moving he will harden into something that sinks straight to the bottom. he puts the tin in his pocket. he checks it twice. his hands are steady until they aren’t. when the fight gets bad he feels for the weight. it is nothing. it is everything. it is you, sun-warmed, rain-cold, turned over and over.

he skips a stone across a river on the way back and hates how far it goes. he hates that he counts the hops. he watches the circles fade and waits until the water looks unbothered again.

back at the office he sets a smooth, ordinary rock on the windowsill. he finds it on the walk home, not special until it is. palm-warmed on the way. not heavy. not light. just itself.

he turns it so the best side faces the sun. he pulls the blinds halfway. he sits. he waits through another long morning for the light to find it. he’s quiet. he’s listening.

and when the window glows and the dust looks like tiny planets again, he says it out loud because the room needs proof. because he does.