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Zuko knew what the scroll contained before he even took it into his hand. The attendant holding it out to him had the red-rimmed eyes of someone who had been crying since before he'd even been summoned.
The palace loved Sokka. It always had—from the kitchens to the war rooms, every corridor he'd ever walked down.
"When are Aang and Katara arriving?" Zuko asked.
"Within the hour, Fire Lord."
"Please inform Master Toph that my husband is dead."
"Your Majest—"
"He's a day late." Zuko placed the unopened scroll on the table between them. "He has never once been late. I will wait for my friends in my chambers."
He made it there without breaking. It was only when he saw Sokka's sandals sitting crooked by the door—left there ten days ago, swapped for the formal ones he'd packed—that he stopped being able to hold it.
Sokka had gone only to renounce his candidate for chief of the Southern Water Tribe. A formality. A week's journey at most, over water he'd crossed a hundred times. They were twenty-five years old and had never once discussed what Sokka wanted done with his body because there had been no reason to. Zuko sat down on the edge of their bed and looked at the sandals and understood that there probably wouldn't be a body.
Hours later, Aang sat beside him on the bed and said nothing for a long time. Then said, "Hot man."
Zuko almost laughed. It came out wrong. "I know. I can't punish a storm."
Katara's arms were around him from behind. She had been crying since she arrived. "He loved—"
"Katara." Toph's voice was quiet. She was standing by the window with her arms crossed, her bare feet still. "Not right now."
Zuko stared at Sokka's sandals. He had not moved them.
"I don't know what to do," he said.
Aang put his hand over Zuko's. "We live. We make him proud."
Katara made a sound.
"He loved living," Toph said, from the window. "More than anyone. You know that." She crossed the room and sat on his other side, and for once did not make a joke about it. "Twinkletoes is right."
Zuko looked at the sandals for a long time. "Uncle will need to take the throne for a while," he finally said. "I can't—I'm not able to—"
He stopped. He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to. Katara pulled him in, and Aang's forehead came to rest against his temple, and Toph put her hand flat on his back the way she always had, and he came apart.
Days passed in the hushed twilight of the royal chambers. The four of them slept in a tangled heap in Zuko and Sokka’s bed, a mess of limbs and grief, their shared body heat the only warmth in the room. Iroh arrived, his own face a mask of sorrow, and accepted the heavy mantle of regent without a word.
The official announcement was made to the nation: The Flame Consort was lost at sea. In response, all of Caldera plunged into mourning, the vibrant reds and golds of the city muted behind a shroud of grey and blue ash that fell like snow.
On a distant island, Sokka was losing an argument with a fishing net.
It was tangled around his left arm in a way that had seemed fixable twenty minutes ago. The woman who had pulled him out of the water was watching him with the particular patience of someone who had already decided he was an idiot. Her husband leaned in the doorway. Neither of them spoke his language, or pretended to.
"Zuko," Sokka said, for the fourth time, pointing at himself. Then, carefully: "My husband. Fire Lord. Big hair."
The woman gave a patient sigh, her calloused hands stilling on the net she was mending. “We understand you, peasant.” Her voice was soft, as though explaining something to a child. “But the Fire Lord is Azulon. And same-sex marriages are forbidden.” She paused, her eyes tracing the Water Tribe markings on his tunic with a look of weary pity. “Even if you were betrothed to the prince—and even if the law had been abolished—Azulon would never marry his grandson to a Water Tribe savage.”
Sokka groaned, dropping his forehead into his good hand. He’d been washed ashore on some backwater island whose news was twenty years out of date. Zuko was going to kill him.
“Okay,” Sokka said, the words thick and clumsy in his dry mouth. He gestured vaguely eastward, toward a horizon he couldn’t see from the small, smoky hut. “But can you get me to Caldera? To the Capital City?”
The woman looked at him with a patience that felt heavier than scorn. She reached out and patted his uninjured arm, her palm rough as salt-worn wood. “You are a good boy,” she said, her tone softening the refusal. “So, no. They would kill your for your delusions there.”
Sokka’s jaw tightened. He stared at the stubborn tangle of netting still wound around his forearm, then back at her. “I will honestly take that risk.” The growl in his voice was less anger than raw exhaustion—the sound of a man who has nothing left to lose.
He’d built a raft when he was twelve with Katara, and it hadn’t been half this difficult. The ropes were made of seal-gut and his fingers weren’t raw from salt, but the principle was the same: tie it tight, point it west, and pray for a tailwind.
Now he was working with a half-rotted sampan and the world’s least enthusiastic salvage crew: a pair of cormorants with gimpy wings and a sullen, one-eyed child who kept flicking fish scales at him. The woman who’d saved him had relented just enough to let him squat in her netshed, but every time Sokka tried to slide out of sight with a length of line or limp down to the docks, her husband would materialize, arms folded, and watch him with the bored intensity of a sheepdog.
Sokka thought about running, but he had no shoes and no map and the islanders knew every tide pool and goat path by heart."What do you have to lose by letting me try to sail to Caldera?"
The man considered this with the unhurried calm of someone who had never once needed to be anywhere. "Supplies," he said finally. "And Fire Lord Azulon learning we harbored a Water Tribe savage." His eyes moved over Sokka's tunic again. "You could be the new Avatar."
"If I were the Avatar," Sokka said, with great restraint, "I would bend something." He pressed his good hand flat to his chest. "Zuko is Fire Lord now. I am his husband. He thinks I'm dead."
The man looked at him with something that was almost pity and almost fondness and was mostly just immovable. "We will not kill you," he said, as though this were the generous part. "We are safe here. The Fire Nation has forgotten we exist."
Sokka turned to face the wall of the netshed and breathed through his nose for a long moment, his jaw working as he tried not to scream.
Fire Nation funerals had never felt so naked.
The official rites for the Consort were held on the central palace lawn, under a sky thick as old tea. Mountains of chrysanthemums and orchid, yellow lotuses for safe return, and paper flags painted with the blue of Sokka’s tribe. The crowd was dense with the highest of dignitaries—admirals, guildmasters, robed councilors, and far too many glossy reporters—yet Zuko felt as alone as a candle in a storm-wracked house. Katara and Aang stood flanking him at the front, hands buried in ceremonial sleeves. Toph had flatly refused every formality, and lurked somewhere in the back, invisible to all.
He was not sure what to do with his hands. The priestess’ words muddled and blurred, some ancient litany about bridges of flame and journeys by moonlight, but Zuko could only watch the empty dais before him, the white silk bundle lying small.
The silk bundle looked weightless, as if a gust might unspool it onto the air, and for a moment Zuko was seized by the urge to run forward, clutch it to his chest, and refuse to let it go. He gripped the lacquered rail instead, steadying himself with the practiced discipline of someone who had learned, year by year, to make his body behave.
Katara's hand found his sleeve under the fabric. Her knuckles felt sharp and cold.
The priestess intoned something about the sea’s mercy. Zuko let his gaze blur, fixed on the bright edge of the ceremonial blade that would sever the silk, as if by dividing it they were dividing the years he had left, the centuries of tradition, the memory of Sokka’s voice still echoing in the palace halls. There was an ache in his chest he could not breathe around. He waited for the moment that would make it feel real.
The priestess finished. Aang and Katara pulled Zuko from the dispersing crowd and into a side room. Toph shut the door behind them with her heel. The noise of the lawn dropped away. In the quiet, the chrysanthemum smell clung to all of them.
"He knew how to swim," Toph said. She had her arms crossed, her jaw set, her blind eyes aimed somewhere between Zuko and the wall. "He was only a day out. There are at least seven islands in that stretch of water. Has anyone actually gone to look?"
Nobody answered.
"Toph—" Aang started. "That's—"
"I'm not being cruel, Twinkletoes. I'm being the only one asking." She turned her face toward Zuko. "What if he's out there right now eating some weird fish and waiting for his idiot husband to come get him?"
Zuko looked at Katara. Something moved across her face—grief pulling back just far enough to let something else through. She nodded.
"Only us four. We take Appa. We check each island."
"Now we're getting somewhere." Toph's voice came out harder than usual, the way it did when she was holding something in place by force.
Zuko watched her. The chrysanthemum smell was still in the room, still in all of their clothes. Toph had not loosened her crossed arms since the funeral ended. He thought about what it meant that she was still standing like that—braced, ready—and felt a bruised kind of gratitude move through him, followed immediately by the dull certainty that she was wrong.
By the fifth island, even Appa seemed subdued, his great head low as they descended through the clouds. Nobody spoke much. The night before, Zuko had woken to the sound of Toph's breathing going uneven in the dark, and then to the rustling of Katara moving toward her, and then to nothing—just the wind off the water and the particular silence of someone being held.
They descended on the sixth island as the sun broke low and flat across the water. Most of the villagers scattered from Appa's shadow, but one boy—no a man with a wild wolf tail—whooped and drove his fist into the air. Zuko was over the saddle rail before Appa had fully landed, and Aang's air caught him just before the ground did.
Sokka looked terrible. Sun-cracked lips, a healing gash above one brow, clothes stiff with salt. He was grinning like an idiot.
Zuko grabbed him by both arms and held on.
"We had a funeral," he said. His voice came out wrong—too thin, too close to breaking.
"Without a body?" Sokka's grin faltered only slightly. "That's presumptuous."
Zuko kissed him. Sokka's hands came up and gripped the back of his neck, and for a long moment neither of them moved.
"I promised you," Sokka said against his mouth. "You and me until the end of the world." He pulled back just far enough to look at him. His eyes were red at the edges. "I keep my promises."