Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

And so the star-sisters shed their dove-wings by the pool and dipped into it as women. The Cowherd, desiring them, stole one’s garb. That celestial weaver of cloud-floss became his wife; and her keeper, bereft of her sunset-polychrome cloth, stole the weaver back to the heavens. This cruel mistress stranded husband and wife on opposite banks of the Silver River that glimmered to life at night. But there too was the mercy of magpies when, once a year, those beating wings would span the River and bridge the lovers so they would no longer be kept apart.

In the XXXth span of the galactic war against the Phoenix King, the Avatar, Master of the Four Elements, summoned his trusted advisor to his side.

“Aang,” said Sokka, the hem of his parka flapping behind, panting little clouds into the frigid air from the jog over.

The Avatar’s customary saffron made him one with the landscape, white painted gold by the slow-setting sun. He turned, grinned wide, and allowed himself to be pulled down into a kunik. “Sokka.” He leaned back to clap Sokka’s shoulder, then tugged him deep into the chambers of the igloo. “Good to see you back in one piece.”

“Good to feel solid ground under my feet again,” said Sokka. That was true: to feel the snow crunch beneath his boots, his gait syncing back to his familiar weight of Jade Well IV after the long patrol along the southern border of the White Tiger of the West. Homecoming, after decades of travel to all corners of the galaxy, was sweet as ever. Every Sokka that had come before him had agreed on that, at least.

Katara was inside, bustling about; she offered him a perfunctory kunik before thundering down one of the hallways, yelling for Sokka’s teenage nephew to pick his clothes off the floor. A kettle was already huffing over the fire, and Aang poured its contents over the waiting tea leaves.

“Good mission?” he asked, wafting the cup over to Sokka on a gust of air when the tea was done.

A formality. Sokka had sent over a detailed radio report before his return, but he sipped obligingly and launched into his recount. “Business as usual. The cohorts there are doing well. It’s been quieter lately, those Fire Nation ships prowling at our doorstep looking for an opening we’ll never give them. Oh, and Bumi says hi.”

Aang’s smile had a rueful edge to it, which he hid behind his teacup. “Ah, all grown up. His last radio was weeks ago.”

“You know how it is out there. They work the recruits hard. Everyone’s got five jobs at once, they’re running him ragged! And he’s a big boy, he doesn’t even wanna be hanging out with his uncle in front of…” He trailed off. “Aww, Aang, I don’t mean it like that.”

“No, no,” said Aang, “it’s not—” He took another sip of his tea. He worried at his sleeve. Then, he said, “I’ve recalled you for a reason. I have a mission for you.”

Sokka sat up. “I’m all ears.”

“As you know, the Phoenix King has been plotting the impossible.”

“Big fan of the impossible, that guy. Anything within the realm of possibility is simply unthinkable for the likes of His Majesty.” Know thine enemy, and Sokka had made a real study of him—as much as he could, with the distance the man had managed to maintain between them all these decades. Megalomaniac, egomaniac, and plain old maniac: let it not be said the Phoenix King did not contain multitudes.

“Sokka.” Aang knew him well enough to let some fondness flash before he became the stern Avatar again. “He’s going to do it. He’s found a way. He’s going to cross the Black Tortoise.”

Sokka narrowed his eyes, set his teacup down. “What have I missed here?”

Aang sighed. “They’re starting to amass at the Winnowing Basket mansion. They’ve been planet-hopping through the colonies dotted through the Earth Kingdom… That’s why it’s been quieter at the border, I suspect.”

“That’s the northernmost mansion of the Azure Dragon,” said Sokka, rubbing his beard. “Shit.” Aang had laid the groundwork, and that was enough for his mind to slot together the rest of it. “He was never going to get across without enough fuel—not to mention those poor fucks they’ve got on the reactors. And that’s not just to blast across the Black Tortoise, but to launch a full invasion of the White Tiger.”

He shivered. The White Tiger of the West, the base of their operations against the Fire Lord but more importantly, their own abode. This was the home of the Water Tribes, northern and southern. Since the reemergence of the Avatar after his century-long disappearance from the galaxy, its southern border had been well-defended, more recently by Sokka himself, against the Phoenix King’s domain of the Vermilion Bird. The northern border was defended by a natural barrier: the Black Tortoise, the former domain of the Air Nomads and Aang’s former home, the expanse that had lain barren since the genocide that lit the flame of war. In that stretch was nary an earthbender to mine uranium for the Fire Nation’s warships, and not a single soul to replace on the reactors when the labourers succumbed to the poison.

“The treaty they signed with the Wei clan in the last span,” said Aang ruefully. “They had a territorial dispute with the Zhangs…”

“...and the Fire Nation troops have been helpfully clearing those Zhangs off the star system.” Katara, having returned, propped a hip against the doorframe. “And they’re not doing it for free.”

“A base of operations,” said Sokka. “Fuel, food, and bodies.”

“Yep.”

“Shit.” Sokka sat back, mind whirring. “There’s no way we can put up a barrier fast enough… the one we have down there took us spans, and who knows if that fuckwit Hahn would take us seriously, again, and if those bastards break through the north then—”

“Sokka—”

“Uncle?” said a young woman’s voice. Sokka’s head snapped up. His niece Kya had shouldered past her mother into the room, dressed in a standard-issue military parka. “Uncle, I want to come with you.”

“Oh for goodness’ sake,” snapped Katara. “You’re not going anywhere.”

“Come where?”

“Uncle, I’m good in a riptide, I’ve done my standard training, my bending’s—”

“This conversation is not for you. Go back to your room, young lady!”

“I’m old enough. I’m older than you were when you and ataata—”

Katara raised a hand. Water pulled out from the ice walls, gathering to swirl in her palm. “Go.”

Kya’s face pinched. She slunk back through the door.

“Sorry,” said Sokka, “where am I going?”

Katara and Aang exchanged a look, the kind you could do when you had been married for decades and were about to throw your brother into a riptide. Oh no.

“Not all is lost,” said Aang. “I have someone I would like to task you to recruit.”

“Alright,” said Sokka. “Who?”

“He lives on my home planet.”

“Sure.” Then, “Wait, your home planet?’

Serenely, Aang said, “Yes.”

“Can you—live there? Can anyone?”

“Well, yes. Yes, one can live quite comfortably there now.”

“N…ow? And you’ve know this for… how long?” Sokka wheeled round to glare at Katara, who merely looked away. “When did you plan on sharing?”

“Many spans ago, I met a rogue traveller during our travels through the galaxy,” said Aang. “He was… purposeless, directionless. A lost soul. So I tasked him with custodianship over my home planet. And since then, he and the refugees have breathed new life into it.”

Something was curdling in Sokka’s gut. “Refugees?”

“Thanks to him, my home turned from a barren wasteland into a sanctuary…”

“Whole spans,” said Sokka. “When were you going to tell me?”

“The Avatar has his reasons,” said Katara, clipped.

“You have to understand, Sokka,” Aang beseeched. “For his safety, I could not tell a soul. Not even our children. The people on that planet depend on secrecy for their survival—”

“Katara knows.”

“Drop it,” snapped Katara. “This is way bigger than you.”

Sokka would’ve quite liked to respond to that, but Aang—ever the diplomat of their partnership—jumped in. “It all rests on you, Sokka. The only souls that know about him are in this room right now. I swear to you. You’re the only one I—we can trust with this. With all your strategic experience, there’s no one better placed to persuade him to join our cause.”

He was a sweet talker alright. But he was also that—sweet—and that was why Sokka loved him as his own brother. So he swallowed down the hard lump that was resentment and let it go uneasy down his gullet. The Avatar’s right hand man. Need the hand be privy to the designs of the mind? “So, who is it? The custodian of your planet.”

“Oh,” said Aang breezily. “The Phoenix King’s son.”

And Sokka, who—it must be said—had made a valiant attempt to calm his simmering emotion, exploded now. “Who?!”

“Knock knock. Anyone here?”

“No,” said Sokka, but Katara barged into the shipyard anyway. Sokka glared, then returned to his tinkering.

“Brought you muktuk.” She held out a package and, when Sokka didn’t take it, left it atop a water drum. And then hovered.

“I’m quite busy, you know,” said Sokka. “Got a trip to the other side of the galaxy coming up? Ring a bell?”

“Oh, come on. You can’t stay angry forever.”

Try me, Sokka thought. Aloud, he said, lightly, “When did we start keeping secrets from each other? Do enlighten me, sister dearest.”

“You know he had no choice,” hissed Katara. “Look, it’s a shame that you—”

“Is the Avatar so lofty he needs delegates to deliver his apologies now?”

“He was sworn to secrecy— If word got out that he was still alive and on that planet, every single person there would suffer the Phoenix King’s wrath.”

“You know.”

“Yes, well.” Katara sniffed. “I’m his wife. Doesn’t that count for something?”

Sokka turned sourly back to his ministrations. That was the crux, wasn’t it? After all these decades together, it was Aang-and-Katara, and then Sokka. He always came second.

“Do you trust him?” He didn’t mean Aang.

“Of course I do,” Katara said. “You think I’d send you on a suicide mission?”

“You’ve sent me on plenty.”

“You’re incorrigible.” Katara smoothed a hand down her parka. “As though Kya hasn’t been giving me enough grief lately.”

“You’re too hard on her,” said Sokka.

“She’s a ch— She’s young.”

Sokka caught the slip; charitably, he thought, he did not comment on it. “She’s nineteen.”

“That’s young.”

“That’s five years older than you were when we found Aang.” Then he changed tack. “Bumi’s been really coming into his own on the frontier.”

“I didn’t ask you for advice on parenting my daughter.”

“But you don’t see her as your daughter, do you?”

Katara said, “Watch your tongue, General.”

Sokka, when he found the sore spot, was accustomed to twisting the knife. His sense of self preservation had never been high; that was why he excelled in his line of work. “Just because she carries our mother’s chip—”

A whistle through the air, a slice of cold against his cheek. A lock of hair fell from his wolf tail to his feet. The ice shard shattered behind him against the hull of his ship. Katara was breathing hard.

“Goodbye, Sokka,” she said. “I wish you safe passage.”

The journey to the galaxy’s shrouded north was long, and lonely.

When his ship finally veered into the Emptiness mansion, he felt only a grim relief. It was a mansion populated by ten star systems; his destination was the star that shared its name, planet unknown. When he turned on his radio, the reply was instantaneous.

“General Sokka,” said a woman’s voice, mellow-deep through the crackle, “we’ve been expecting you. I’ll send you the coordinates.”

Sokka entered them as she read them out: the radio map plotted his course to the second planet in the system. And then he was approaching Emptiness II, an ever-growing dot of light girded by its rings, and veering to dock his ship on the planet’s sole satellite: a moon blasted into a permanent crescent shape. He had grown up knowing about the great supernova that Fire Lord Sozin, the great-grandfather of Aang’s little friend on the planet before him, had harnessed the power of against all four Air Nomad settlements in the Black Tortoise of the North. Who didn’t? The greatest atrocity of their age. But confronted now with the sheer power of the weapon, Sokka shuddered.

It was a rudimentary station; there was no room for Sokka to berth. The voice over the radio shot off more instructions and he dutifully chained his craft to one of the existing ships to stop it from floating off, then bounced out of the airlock.

He was featherlight on the moon, springing footsteps puffing up dust under his boots. He made his way down the line of ships—outdated, motley, but well-maintained—and went up to the ship where the speaker on the radio awaited him.

At the top of the ladder was a view of Aang’s home planet. Sokka stopped to stare.

Below, over the jagged horizon of the shattered moon, it glowed blue—blue with its oceans swollen after Sozin’s sun weapons had melted the icecaps, and after the rhythm of the tides was choked out by the destruction of the moon. And those remnant fragments were dotted in orbit all around the planet like tundra midges in the summer—

“General,” said the woman on the radio drolly, into his earpiece, “plenty of time to look later.”

Sokka chuckled, and it broke over the welling emotion. “Of course, ma’am. Do let me in.”

The airlock slid open. When Sokka stepped inside, his feet readjusted to the artificial weight inside: heavier than the moon, but a hair lighter than what he was used to back home. He pulled his helmet off and took a breath, shaking out his hair.

“General Sokka,” said the woman from the radio. “It is an honour.”

She was standing before him now, bowing. Eyes kohl-lined, hair plaited down her back; Sokka guessed her to be at about fifty spans of age. There was a no-nonsense dignity to the way she carried herself. “What should I call you?”

“This one is Osha, General.”

Osha. A Fire Nation name, if Sokka had guessed correctly. He took out his fan with an affected casualness. “Thanks for welcoming me.”

“I couldn’t miss it. Everyone has been so excited for your arrival. General, you’re a celebrity.”

So the inhabitants on the planet were apprised of the happenings in the world beyond. Sokka filed that tidbit away. “Well, take it away, Osha. Can’t keep my adoring fans waiting.”

He watched the planet near through the sliver of crystal embedded into the shell of Osha’s ship as they approached, its impossible blue. Then a static flash: a ghost-print of the same view but the coastlines all different, eating green into the oceans, big patches of white around the poles. He shook his head and the image melted away. “Emptiness II. That’s a creepy name for a planet.”

“It leans into the philosophy of the Air Nomads,” said Osha. She was sitting behind him, hand on the rudder and eye on the radio map that plotted out the route and environs ahead. “Emptied of desire, to shed the cycle of suffering and reach enlightenment.”

Watching the space debris, Sokka couldn’t help but wonder how much suffering this philosophy had averted. Then Osha hit the radio. “We’re heading through boys, open her up.”

Before his eyes, the orbiting moon-fragments started to shiver, then move. “Hold on tight.”

“Wh—?” said Sokka, already strapped tight into his seat. A gap was opening through the debris. “Earthbenders?”

“Neat, right?” said Osha, though her eyes remained fixed on the radio map. “They get rostered to stand guard at the moon and they open and close our gates.” She waved a finger at the map, no doubt tracing the planetary rings. “But not everything out there is earth, so we still need to be careful.”

An object ahead; small, by the looks of it. Osha pushed the rudder. Sokka saw it pass through the sliver of crystal. “That’s metal,” he said. “The mast, red paint, I’ve never seen this make in person…”

“From a hundred spans ago,” said Osha.

“A Fire Nation battleship.”

“There’s a lot more of the other guys.”

She swerved again. The next piece of space junk was a hull blasted in half, almost neatly. From the small window Sokka saw the string of sun-bleached flags trailing from one mast—something he had only seen in books. “The Air Nomads.”

Osha nodded once; her gaze was fixed predator-like on the radio map’s screen. Another sharp turn and Sokka recoiled when he saw the next piece of debris drift past.

“What was that one?” said Osha, noticing.

“An… arm?”

“Hm.” Her lips pinched. “You do get the occasional one.”

The next object registered larger on the map. Sokka watched the window with some trepidation, and whatever instinct had cautioned him was proven right. First came the spacesuits, lit chiaroscuro by the fierce white light of Emptiness behind them, whole sets spiralling slowly around the pull of the planet below, splayed limbs frozen in rigor mortis. They were the lucky ones. There were suits bisected at the waist by jagged black scorch marks. There were unidentifiable black husks. And then there were the remains that time had separated from their suits, charred and undecomposed for a hundred spans, suspended in perpetual orbit.

“The necropolis,” said Osha, hushed.

Sokka watched the corpses careen past, these scars of a century-old battle hung in diorama over the planet. “Do you ever get used to it?”

“No, never.”

They sailed through, Sokka’s gaze unable to detach from the sight. “General,” said Osha, “atmospheric entry.”

The clipped tone made Sokka start. Military; not just any military, with her name. Ex-Fire Nation military. He pulled his gaze from the window and the corpses, the graveyard left by her ancestors. His grip tightened on the straps of his seat and he plastered a grim smile over his face. “Take us down, Osha.”

The ship landed atop a vast lake in the planet’s southern hemisphere, skimming its surface before coming to rest beside the shore. They shed their spacesuits and Osha helped him out onto the dock; Sokka blinked in the searing white glare of Emptiness above, then pulled a pair of snow goggles over his eyes.

“A glacial lake?” he said, taking in the surroundings. They were high up in altitude, snow-capped mountains shouldering heavenwards on all sides, ice pressing fierce and white into the pristine waters. The shoreline was rocky; strings of multicolour flags fluttered in the chill breeze. It was desolate, lonely; he was galactic miles from home.

“Our waterbenders have done some great restoration around here,” said Osha. She ushered him to a patient creature waiting beside a shack beside the dock. One Sokka was much familiar with: the second sky bison he had ever seen. “You’ll forgive us for the muted reception, General. Everyone’s waiting for you at the temple.”

“You— that’s—” Sokka shook his head. Reset. One thing at a time. “Waterbenders?”

“Yep, some southerners like you, I believe,” said Osha, nudging him into the bison’s saddle. “Your sister instructed them a few times when she visited.”

Right. When she visited. Without his knowledge, over the past twenty-five spans. Sokka made a valiant effort not to brood as the bison took off.

The landscape changed under them, a lexicon of mountains: the cold white alpine heights softening into the treeline, then the plateau. “We regenerated the soil here for agriculture,” said Osha casually as they soared past. “And the rice paddies and tea plantations further down in the foothills.” She gestured to their left, where Sokka could make out the terraces, green striping the hillsides. This was the place where Aang grew up, Sokka realised, over a hundred years ago. Had he flown over these same mountains with Appa? Did the same wind nip cold at his scalp?

“I thought—” said Sokka. “Aang told us the whole planet had died.”

Osha spared him a backwards glance. “It’s true. It was a husk when we came, mass extinction from the warming or just being burned to ashes. The Avatar did a lot of groundwork just fixing up air and ocean currents.”

So pleasant to hear about Aang’s extracurriculars. “You’re raising the sky bison again? Giving Appa some cousins?”

Osha patted the bison’s head and it lowed in such a heartbreakingly familiar way. “Every bison contains a bit of his material,” she said. “We had bones and engineered whole ecosystems back from them, but there’s always something missing.” Something stirred in Sokka’s subconscious—splicing animals together, that was ancient lore, where did that come from?—and then Osha was saying, “Oh hey, General, we’re close!”

The bison swooped downwards. Sokka saw the vista, and it was breathtaking. The mountains rose like spindles from the vegetation below, sheer rock faces and the trees that clung to them. The bison swerved between them and Sokka marvelled as the cliffs rose on either side, the claustrophobia. When they swung around the next bend he saw it rise before them.

What struck him first was the colour, how it heaved with life. It was on everything: the roofs, the painted walls of the village houses, the flags that trimmed the streets, leading all the way up to the temple that perched at the summit. It was a settlement etched into the mountain.

They swooped upon it. Osha landed them in a paddock where other sky bison were chewing hay or taking lazily off into the sky. It was like looking at a field full of Appa clones and little ones too, the juveniles latched onto the mother, huddling beneath the legs or trailing behind her in the sky. But a clamour at knee-height stopped Sokka from following the thread of feeling that bubbled up at the sight. He looked down.

“Is it true you’re the one who killed all those Fire Nation soldiers in the battle?” cried a child, gaps showing between her teeth.

Sokka waggled his eyebrows. “You’ll have to be specific.”

“At the battle of Seat Flags VI in the hundred and first span of Avatar Aang, then the battles of the Well mansion in the hundred and second span, and then the battle of—”

“General Katara’s my favourite,” piped up another.

“My sister?”

“She froze a WHOLE planet, lured the Phoenix King’s army into landing onto an ice planet, and then unfroze it. They all drowned!”

“The ambush of Fish III. That was my idea,” said Sokka, partly proud, partly reasserting his claim in the sibling rivalry. That had been the first planet they’d reconquered of Ba Sing Se.

“Come on now, youngsters,” said Osha, cutting through with an arm around his back, “don’t swamp the General.”

“It’s nostalgic,” said Sokka. “My niece and nephews haven’t done this to me in a decade.”

The children followed them partway up the street, then dropped off back to their kite game. The path wound ever upwards through the heart of the village like a cobbled vein. Pulley systems on either side drew cartons up and down its slope, and Osha laughed as he bent down to inspect the mechanics. Villagers came to greet him, calling him by name or bowing to him. There were so many going about their day, regular folk of all ages garbed in the clothes of—if Sokka were not mistaken—all four nations. Living all together here, in the husk of the Air Nomads’ civilisation.

But before his eyes was no husk. He leapt when flame burst from a villager’s hand but he was only roasting a skewer of meat, and a gaggle of youths cheered and ate it with gusto. Between yellowing leaves flitted a pair of birds, plumage black and white; the sunlight picked out an iridescent shimmer on their tails. A winged lemur, just like Momo, flapped after them. Higher still above them wheeled even greater winged shapes: gliders. And people, non-airbenders, were simply—commuting in them. Something Sokka had only seen Aang (and later Tenzin) do, but out here it looked so… mundane.

The hike took the wind out of Sokka’s lungs; he had to pause to fan himself. “Here’s the centre of it all,” said Osha, who didn’t sound the least bit puffed. “The air temple.”

It reared above them. The gates beckoned. Sokka had heard the stories from Aang: sky bison soaring overhead, the monks freewheeling through their forms, teeth tearing through cream-topped moon peaches as the juice burst upon the tongue. Watching the scene before him, it was as though nothing had changed. Rows of young folk filled the temple courtyard; a drum echoed over the stonework and they changed formation in one swift motion, a bird ruffling its feathers. Osha led them through down the middle. The disciples, Sokka noted, were of mixed gender and ethnicity, ranging from Tenzin’s age to their early twenties. They ranged tall, tall like Aang, owing perhaps to the relative lightness of the planet’s attraction. Somewhere above, someone was playing the flute badly. More drums, and they twirled their staffs in unison, a tide crashing ashore.

Sokka watched pensively, getting a bird’s eye view as they climbed the next set of ramparts up the temple. He leaned over the railing to catch his breath—wooden, painted yolk-yellow—and followed the formations below. Movements precise, strikes sharp. Put them in the field, how would they perform? The drum rumbled and they hurried to split in two. Good discipline, quick to obey. He snapped his fan back open and overlaid it upon the two groups. Like a pair of wings. An outdated form, from a world twenty-five spans out of sync.

“I don’t know where he is,” Osha was saying, flustered, “he told me he’d meet us here at the hour of the monkey, he’s probably—” and then there was a roar of wind.

A banner of red punched through Sokka’s vision. Unending red, sinuous, which blasted across and then twisted up and around: a violent shimmer in the sunlight. The wind buffeted Sokka’s clothes; he heard a passing whoop. He pulled off the snow goggles and winced at the flare of light. The disciples in the courtyard scattered. The huge coil of red landed with a thump and flurry of leaves, then the huge face of a dragon—a dragon! Sokka thought faintly—was peering up at him and puffing smoke up into his face. Sokka coughed and batted it away with his fan. It was the first dragon he had ever seen, weren’t they all meant to be extinct? But no—a volcano rising from a glittering golden sea, the unimaginable heat, oppressive and cleansing both, great wyrms twisting through the clouds above—

Sokka shook the ghost-memory away. Not the time. Absurdly, the poor flautist warbled away. And amid the cloud of white, the dragon rider vaulted off.

“Ugh, interminable show-off,” said Osha, no small amount of fondness in her voice. “General, you must forgive him…” Sokka wasn’t listening. His gaze followed the figure up the stairs, until it disappeared around the bend. The sound of the flute cut short. He moved to look.

He saw the back of the seneschal, garbed in bruised red and the colour of millet. The flautist was a child, sitting with legs drawn up on sacks of rice. The seneschal opened his palm.

The child looked up. The cacophony stopped. The flute went into the open palm. And something flashed in the seneschal’s other hand, in the sunlight. A knife. Sokka started. The seneschal’s body hid his hands, but when he handed the instrument back, the child grinned. When he picked his tune back up with the same unskilled gusto, it was this time distinctly—blessedly—in tune.

The seneschal turned.

Sokka had been briefed on the basic facts. He knew the seneschal’s name was Zuko, that he was about Sokka’s age, that he had been banished by his father at age thirteen, that he had been the steward of Aang’s planet for the last twenty-five spans. But he felt distinctly unprepared when this man, forgotten by time, closed in on him. In his thirty spans of conflict against the Fire Nation, Sokka had never seen the Phoenix King in person, though he had seen the illustrations—including one made of noodles, courtesy of Aang. He had wondered, sometimes, what the man himself might look like in the flesh, liberated from the artist’s stylised brush; wondered too whether the portraits’ aristocratic handsomeness was a vanity, smoothing over a weak chin or crooked nose. But the identifying difference between the Phoenix King’s portraits and the man approaching Sokka now was the large burn scar over one eye, wrapping over to his ear and streaking down over his cheek.

Sokka bowed to hide his surprise, and said, “I am General Sokka of the Southern Water Tribe, hailing from Jade Well IV. I send my greetings—”

“From the Avatar?” said Zuko. And he was coming close, closer, closing in, and he clasped Sokka’s forearm. The Southern Water Tribe greeting. “Any friend of Aang is a friend of mine.”

The custodian of the planet ushered Sokka inside. He wended through the temple, its interiors draped in light and colour—flags, flowers, frescoes. He turned prayer wheels with an idle hand as he passed, helped a teenager right a stack of tilting steamers, whispered a move to a pai sho player while the other wailed at him in mock dismay. Sokka tried to keep pace. But the relative lightness of the planet and his cybernetic knee were no match for the endless stairs looping their way up the temple.

“You don’t go easy on the stairs here, huh?” Sokka huffed.

Half a flight up, Zuko deigned to offer him a half-turn. A smile played at his mouth. “We’re all used to it. Most of us get around with gliders, or the flying beasts. But there’s a goods lift we could crack out for you?”

Sokka was a decorated general, a veteran of thirty spans in the arena of war. “I’ll give it a pass.”

Zuko led him to a room on the highest floor and stepped aside to let him enter first. It was airy, panelled with dark wood. A low seating platform dominated the centre, which Zuko ushered him towards. Sokka, sweating a little, took off his parka and eased himself onto a cushion.

When Zuko lit the fire under the teapot, Sokka jumped. The spark that burst from his open palm flared bright, then allowed itself to be stuffed into the brazier.

“Sorry about that,” said Zuko. He was watching Sokka. “Just reheating. I didn’t even think…”

“It’s fine,” said Sokka. He thought, unerringly, of the necropolis around the planet. An orbit of charred limbs. “Don’t worry. Just—” Just what? Habit? Trauma? Sorry man, I just haven’t seen firebending used outside of mass murder before?

“Um.” Zuko pushed a plate of small cakes towards him. The tips of his fingers were stained with henna, red. “Snack?”

Sokka watched him while he nibbled on the cake—mung bean, soft between his teeth, a muted sweetness. “How’s Aang?” he was saying. “Katara? The kids?”

He was smiling. That was one thing the Phoenix King’s portraits never did, but Zuko had lines pressed around his mouth from it. Threads of grey wove into his topknot and his neat, trimmed beard. When Sokka met his gaze, his eyes wanted to dart away by instinct.

“Doing well,” said Sokka. “Aang’s busy, as usual. Katara’s… a menace, bad news for the Fire Nation. Kids are… well, they’re not really kids anymore. I don’t know how much you know.”

“I’ve always wanted to meet you,” said Zuko.

Sokka said, “The privilege is mine to meet such an… honoured friend of the Avatar.”

“I’ve heard about your exploits, of course.” Zuko took a cake of his own. “Teo’s a whiz with the radio. I was getting blow by blow accounts of your victories at the Southern border.”

Sokka chuckled, took another bite. “I do regret we’d not made our acquaintance earlier.”

“You must understand, the secrecy was crucial.”

“If I am to understand, this restoration was your work.”

The seneschal ducked his head. “I could not have done anything without my community.”

It was hard to get a gauge on him. Zuko busied himself with the teapot as it started to steam. Where did his loyalties lie? A firebender with the Phoenix King’s face, who smiled and rode a dragon. Sokka tapped his fingers against the tabletop when Zuko filled his shallow cup with a pale, opaque liquid.

“Butter tea,” said Zuko. “Just like the airbenders used to drink. We harvest the bison milk.” Sokka took a sip. “What do you think?”

It was nice. Creamy, a little savoury: not a flavour profile Sokka had ever expected from tea. “It’s… different from what we drink at home. We make it out of rhododendron. No milk.”

“We cultivate the tea at the foothills,” said Zuko, taking a sip, “and process it ourselves. This one is fermented, with quite an earthy flavour.”

“A tea connoisseur?”

“I couldn’t possibly claim to be.”

Sokka took another sip. “There’s this dinky teashop in the planet system of Ba Sing Se. The guy who runs it…” He looked up. “But I don’t suppose you’ve ever been.”

“No. I don’t suppose so.” Zuko sipped his tea, refilled Sokka’s cup, and set the teapot down with a clunk. “I assume,” he said, and his voice now was all business, “if the Avatar sent you, this is not a social call.”

The cup hovered at Sokka’s lips. Then he put it down, directly in front of himself.

“This is my people. The Southern Water Tribe.” He took the teapot and put it to his right—south, by the compass. “And this is your—the Phoenix King. For the past decade or so, the White Tiger of the West has been impenetrable from attack from the Vermilion Bird of the South.”

“The ice barrier,” said Zuko.

“My brainchild, my sister’s execution. Daggers of ice arrayed to block the ships’ navigation. It’s repelled every Fire Nation ship that’s tried to get through. The arena of war has largely focused on the Azure Dragon of the East.” Directly opposite his own teacup, Sokka pushed the plate of cakes in place. “The Earth Kingdom, with its myriad settlements.”

“And colonies,” said Zuko.

“This means the only route left for the Fire Nation into the White Tiger is through the Azure Dragon, and the Black Tortoise of the North, empty of its Air Nomads”—Sokka traced with a finger, drawing the arc up around his rudimentary map—“before they hit the Northern Water Tribe.

“The North’s defences are… inadequate.” Sokka felt his lip curl, but this was hardly the time to hash out the long disagreement between himself and Chief Hahn. “You’ll know they haven’t been active in the war—I guess they’ve had little reason to be since the invasion we thwarted, oh, decades ago. But once they fall,” he waggled his own teacup, letting the dregs of tea slosh within, “the Fire Nation will be right at our doorstep.

“Without proximity to resources,” said Zuko, tracing the loop of tea paraphernalia, “an impossible route. Almost a full revolution of the galaxy.”

“Not anymore.” Sokka tapped the cakes. “There are enough colonies in the Azure Dragon now to supply the Phoenix King’s forces across the long trek through the north.” He swept his fingers over the empty expanse of table that lay between the cakes and his own teacup. “That’s where you come in.”

A stricken look was dawning upon Zuko’s features. “Me?”

Sokka snagged Zuko’s cup, its tea abandoned halfway. He put it in that emptiness. “And this is you. Emptiness II. The sole inhabited planet in the Black Tortoise of the North.”

“You want me to join the war,” said Zuko.

He sat up straight. Gone was the easy smile, and the solemnity that replaced it did make him look more like his father’s portraits. “Yes,” said Sokka, simply.

Zuko’s henna-dipped fingers drifted over the array on the table. “I have fifty thousand on this planet,” he said. “Refugees, defectors, people with nowhere else to go. People who escaped the war.”

“Yes.”

“You want me to lead them into war, and against my father.”

“To staunch the escalation of war. To cut off their route to the West, and the devastation he might wreak there.”

“We have shrouded ourselves from war, with no intention of joining.”

“The youths I saw in the courtyard,” said Sokka, taking an idle sip from his teacup. The last drops had gone cold in the shallow cup. “What are they training for?”

“Fitness,” said Zuko. “Mental discipline.”

Zuko held his gaze; the proud line of his features was, Sokka thought, unmistakably aristocratic. Then he retrieved his teacup and drained it. When he set it down again, his face was serene again. “You understand I will have to think on this,” he said. “In the meantime, let me show you your rooms. Get you settled and feeling at home.”

Chapter Text

He is skimming the clouds. The sea below teeters between blue and green, and it meets the shoreline in clods of foam. How beautiful it looks like this, the shallows still definable from the depths. They flew out from the temple first thing in the morning because he said there was something he needed to show Sokka, and he’d strapped them together, Sokka’s back pressed against his front, and taken them out on the glider. Now they pass the other monks freewheeling on bison and gliders alike, then leave them behind to streak out into the great blue beyond.

“I took you out here,” he says, voice rumbling against Sokka’s back as they hang there in the sky, “because I adore you. You are my one treasure. Against the will of the monks, I want to take you as my wife—”

Aw fuck. Not again?

And then Sokka is freefalling, careening into the sea—

He woke up on a big hard bed with Emptiness bright and white, high in the sky.

He floundered out of his blankets. The room they had put him in shared the top floor with Zuko’s and the view outside was beautiful, blinding sunlight highlighting the contour of each mountain. From this vantage point he could even see the distant blue expanse of the swollen sea.

His stomach growled. Sokka pulled on a fresh set of clothes and made his way back down the infinite stairs.

The temple became busier as he descended. He nodded to the pointing onlookers, bustling about at their daily tasks, as they spotted him. Towards the bottom, a man in a hoverchair accosted him.

“I see you’re finally up,” he said jovially. A crop of wild hair sat atop his brow, with some attempt to tame it into a knot. Lines were carved deep around his mouth and at the corners of his eyes. A toddler squirmed in his lap.

“Yeah,” said Sokka, blinking. “This planet rotates faster than mine, I didn’t realise… Sorry. I’m Sokka.” He bowed.

The man cocked his head. “No problem. The big guy”—he must mean Zuko—“asked me to look out for you. I suppose you’re hungry.”

He turned the chair and started down the stairs. Sokka, with nothing better to do, followed. “I’m Teo, by the way. This is my youngest.” He told Sokka the name of the toddler, which he promptly forgot. “We’ve heard all about you, of course. You’re a legend. My dad is especially—”

“Wait,” said Sokka, wincing in the glare when they passed a window and wishing he had brought his snow goggles down, “what time is it?”

“Hour of the snake,” said Teo with a laugh. “Don’t worry. You’ll get used to it soon.”

Sokka, with his wealth of experience travelling, knew that. But the smell of food, mmmm! came wafting through and then they were in the kitchens, big and steaming and heaving with life. “Morning, chefs!” crowed Teo. The toddler made a valiant attempt to wriggle out of his lap. “Famed and famished general coming through.”

Sokka found himself fussed over, cheeks pinched and told that he was too thin. He left with a tray laden with congee and little dishes filled with curry, another cup of butter tea, and a white lump he thought might be cheese. Teo led him through the labyrinthine stairways and hallways of the temple, chattering all the time.

“Laundry’s down that corridor. Ask them for extra blankets if you need. The resident doctor’s over here, if you ever need the heat in your chi redirected. But check when she’s in, cos she might be out making paper.” The toddler reached a sticky hand towards Sokka’s tray; Sokka sacrificed his cheese. “There’s another one out in the outlying villages, specialises in earth medicine. Oi! Very important general coming through!”

They burst into the courtyard. Monkey-pigeons and people alike scattered. A few people called morning! to Teo, who made the toddler say morning! back. They rounded the building, passing a room where black smoke huffed from a chimney. “The smithy,” said Teo, and poked his head inside. “Morning, Toh-ki!”

A hulking figure, silhouetted before the furnace, raised a hand in brief greeting. “She’s a good one, always executes my dad’s fantasies. Made this baby for me”—he patted the side of his hoverchair—“based on Dad’s design and it still works like a gem, even decades later. Doesn’t talk much though. Aaaaand here’s the man himself!”

He flung the next door open. Inside, the room was crammed absolutely full: blueprints plastered upon the wall, shelves full of parts and models and little drawers, half-built contraptions on the tabletops and on any spare patch of floor. It took Teo beelining inside, the chair nimbly floating over the miscellany on the floor, and the toddler chirruping, “Ah kong!” for Sokka to notice the tuft of white hair bobbing among the piled machines.

“Hello, sir,” said Sokka as he picked his way through. Something clattered to the floor.

“Leave that,” said the old man inside. He hobbled out from behind the piles, zanier than even his son in appearance and half the size of Sokka. “Oh General, it is an honour. It is a real honour.” The hand not gripping his walking stick came out to claw at Sokka’s: cool, sun-spotted, with little mechanical joints attached to the arthritic knuckles. “They call me the Mechanist.”

“You see a machine around here, it’s his,” said Teo proudly. “Designed the lifts, the gliders, the delivery belts in the village… He made me this chair. I’ve even got a pair of boots, if I wanna get up and walk around.” He pointed to a chunky pair sitting on the windowsill.

“I’ve been working on a grain harvester. Could make the harvest faster. Figured out how it can work on slopes but the main issue is making sure it doesn’t crush the plants to paste. Anyway”—the Mechanist nodded now towards Sokka—“we’ve heard all about you, of course. The ambush at Fish III, what a spectacle that was!”

“How do you get your news here?” said Sokka. For a population that no one knew of, the settlers were curiously abreast of the galactic news. “I don’t suppose Aang comes down with the book of annals.”

“Oh, no,” said the Mechanist, easing himself onto a stool. “The Avatar doesn’t visit often. He is quite busy.”

“I’m on the radio,” said Teo. “I can tune into pretty much any frequency I want.”

Sokka, who had long-range radio on his ship for journeys like these, said, “Even the clandestine channels? All the way out here?”

“It was a matter of restoring the Air Nomads’ old signal towers. Took a while but it was worth it. If I know about a channel, I’ll find a way.” He tapped his temple with a wink.

“How did you two come to live on this planet?”

The Mechanist sighed. “Oh General, it’s not a story I’m proud of…”

“Ah-pah, you were in desperate circumstances. You can’t be that hard on yourself for things that were outside your control.”

The Mechanist shook his head. “The Avatar wasn’t happy when he found us. But he is compassionate. And he encouraged us and our small band to join the seneschal here, when the planet came under his stewardship.”

Teo patted his father on the back. The Mechanist scratched the toddler’s head. What a picture they painted, Sokka thought, the three generations in one tableau. “It’s been a journey for all of us. But I’ve raised all my children here—”

“—I would’ve done the same,” added the Mechanist, “if I could.”

“Sokka.”

They turned. It was Zuko, peering in through the door with a bright, expectant look. He nodded at the Mechanist and Teo and the toddler, then returned the beam of his attention to Sokka. “You slept well… I trust?”

“Very soundly.”

“I’d love to show you around,” said Zuko in a rush. “We so rarely entertain guests. If I’m not impinging…”

“No, of course not!” said Teo, with a meaningful look that Sokka didn’t know how to interpret. He moved the hoverchair out of Sokka’s way and swept his arm wide over the cleared path. “General.”

Sokka, who had been starting to quite like Teo, considered revising his opinion. He followed the seneschal out and into the daylight.

“They are lovely,” said Zuko. “I hope they’ve made you feel very welcome.”

“They’re interesting,” said Sokka, and he meant it.

“I thought I should give you a proper tour of the settlement, now that you’re freshly awake.”

“Lead the way.” Sokka was imagining, rather distantly, the sky bison ride he had taken with Osha yesterday. Then they hit the courtyard.

Sokka baulked. “I’m not getting on that.”

“That,” said Zuko, “is my baby.”

Zuko’s baby, a fifty foot dragon, huffed. Great white plumes of smoke issued out of his nostrils and buffeted around Sokka. “Play nice, Druk,” said Zuko, laughing.

“I don’t care if that’s your baby or your cousin or your aunt, I am not getting on it.”

“Him.”

“He is going to kill me!”

Zuko approached the dragon. His great fire-breathing snout nudged into Zuko’s hand. “What,” said Zuko, “is the great victor of Fish III not game?”

“He’s not,” said Sokka flatly.

Which was how the great victor of Fish III climbed upon the back of the great serpent Druk.

Zuko sat in front of him, smoothing a hand down the dragon’s neck. Unobserved, Sokka let his lip curl as he watched Zuko from behind. He seemed less skittish now he was reunited with the dragon—what was he plotting?

“Hold on,” said Zuko.

“To what?” Sokka might’ve said, if the dragon did not choose that moment to take off. Sokka clung onto Zuko for dear life. The bastard whooped.

Druk shot like a firework into the sky. They rose past the trees, past the jeering paper faces of the children’s kites, past the gliders, past the roof of the temple. Zuko was laughing, chest heaving in exhilaration under Sokka’s hands. And when Sokka chanced a look down, the sight of the vertical drop into the valley below made him screech and mash his face into Zuko’s back.

“You’re missing out on the view,” Zuko shouted over the wind.

He was evil. He was evil and he was out to murder Sokka. “You’re going to leave marks in my skin,” he said, which Sokka felt as vibration more than heard.

“I’m not letting go!”

But curiosity did get the better of him; that was one of his strengths, really, his infinitely curious mind, so open to knowledge and learning. That was the basis of his ingenuity. So he cracked an eye open.

The patchwork of vistas slid below them, the cold scraped itself across Sokka’s cheek. Druk wended through ice-capped peaks and the sheer rock faces whipped past. And noticing that Sokka had emerged to look, Zuko started up his commentary. He raised his voice over the wind to regale Sokka about the communities that lived clinging on wooden supports to the vertical mountainside, how they had reconstructed the design from surviving frescos in the temples. A cluster of horned beasts perched beside the huts, watching them fly across. They gusted past forests of oak and pine thick with foliage, as though the fires of hell had never torn through. It had been a deceptively difficult task to regenerate this; the settlers had arrived on the planet to find it overrun monocultures of whatever had survived Sozin’s inferno, and this was the product of the settlement reviving the balance of the ecosystem.

A flock of birds kept pace with them as Zuko urged Druk down to the agricultural plains. The plateau stretched into the horizon, golden with wheat and millet and barley entering the harvest season, patchworked with fields of vegetable and fruit and soybean. “With all the earthbenders at our disposal,” he said, “we can grow more varieties of crop and more quickly regenerate the soil, meaning the footprint of our land use is much reduced…” And then he took them to the foothills that sloped in the direction of the rat, towards the sun, ringed with camellia bursting with white blossoms. This was where they produced their tea—not the variety Sokka tried yesterday, no, that one was grown further east, at a higher altitude—this one had a more delicate flavour and colour and he wouldn’t put butter in it, he could brew it for Sokka when they got back. They streaked down close enough to wave at the labourers processing the leaf in the villa, then twirled back up into the sky.

And Sokka looked upon the bountifulness of the planet and started to tabulate. How much did they produce? What could be stored—dried, salted, fermented? What was their surplus? How much could be taken on campaign and how much could sustain their troops? If the planet were besieged, life would probably go on as usual—it was incredibly self-sufficient.

It was a helpful exercise. He quickly forgot the drop below.

In fact, he became so lost in his thoughts that it came as a surprise to him when they began to descend. They had come to a verdant patch, tucked like a bookmark between the jagged rock faces. Druk circled lower and lower, then landed in the valley with a thwump in the lush grass. The sudden beauty jolted Sokka out of his calculations, and Zuko had to tug him down by the elbow.

“You can see more if you come down.”

“Is this—” Sokka let the grass sheaf through his fingers. He shook his head. “Is this real?”

“One of the most beautiful places in the galaxy, I think,” said Zuko, hushed. The green, so lurid it felt unreal, a shade Sokka was certain he had never seen before, was dotted with wildflowers that swayed in the breeze; it crawled up the surrounding mountainsides until it gave way to ice and stone. Dozens of rivulets drew shining tear tracks down the rock. “The beyul, a sanctuary to the Air Nomads. The veil between our world and the world of the spirits is thin here.”

For all his agnosticism Sokka could appreciate why the Air Nomads might have thought that. He stumbled in Zuko’s wake along a modest path that cut through the grass, past a couple of feeding sky bison and twittering black and white birds, leading to a wooden house that crouched low so it would not interrupt the view.

“Beautiful, aren’t they?” said Zuko, pointing to the birds. “They cropped up in the last year or so. I don’t think they’re native. I asked Aang and he didn’t know anything, but they’ve blended in quite naturally with the ecosystem. I couldn’t bring myself to cull them. Refugees, like us.” Then he touched the door with his knuckles. “Anyone home?”

“Come in, seneschal,” called a woman’s voice from inside.

Zuko nudged the door open, gesturing for Sokka to step inside. The house was dim, herbal-smelling, warmed by a brazier burning low on the ground. Wooden drawers lined the walls, and anatomical charts were wheatpasted to the wall. The occupant knelt upon the ground, wrapping a packet of paper. She was thin, hair drawn back into a chignon that showed the skin clinging to her cheekbones. “You’re the general, aren’t you?”

“One and the same,” said Sokka. “And you are…?”

“This is Doctor Song,” said Zuko, coming up behind to kneel upon the floor. Sokka copied him. “A talented physician from the Earth Kingdom.”

“My late mother and I hailed from Chaff IV in the Winnowing Basket mansion. We joined the seneschal after suffering regular harassment from passing Fire Nation troops,” said Doctor Song. “No maladies, I trust, General?”

“I think not, besides the encroachment of age.”

That usually drew a chuckle. The physician merely nodded. “If you would lend me a little time, I could perform a quick, routine check-up.”

“Oh, that’s not necessary.”

“Doctor Song is very skilled,” said Zuko.

“Oh, of course.” Sokka favoured her with an affable nod. “But my sister’s a healer too, she would’ve fixed me if anything was wrong.”

“Just your pulse,” said Song. “No longer than it would take for an incense stick to start shedding ash.”

Sokka looked to Zuko. The seneschal nodded in encouragement. So keen; what ploy was this? He pulled up his sleeve.

The physician wiped her hands on a damp towel, then pressed three cool fingers to his wrist. She was quiet for a while, head tilting.

“What’s the verdict?” said Sokka. “I'm still alive?”

“Your leg. It pulses differently from the rest of your…” The fingers pressed harder. “Ah. A replacement?”

“Yes,” said Sokka in surprise. Doctor Song tapped his left knee—the correct one—and Sokka drew up his trouser leg. The wiring glowed in the gloom. “The knee and some of the leg below.”

“All mechanical.” Her fingers ghosted over the exposed metal.

Zuko’s mouth had fallen open. “What happened?”

“Fell out of aircraft when I was a teen. Fighting Fire Nation, you know how it is.” He winked. “The planet’s attraction was pretty strong. Never felt the same again—not until this baby.” Sokka narrowed his eyes at Song as her fingers found his pulse again. “How did you…?”

Her eyes had fallen shut. “Hmmm. Extra energy charge around the mind.” She raised her head to glance at his temples; Sokka knew she was looking where the blue arrows glowed. “But of course. A true Southern Water Tribesman.”

“My namesakes,” said Sokka. He tapped his temple, wry. “All squeezed into a chip the size of a fingernail, and locked up in here.”

“Indeed.” Song smiled. “General, you are for your age a healthy man. No doubt given the nature of your position you must remain active.”

“Good to hear.”

“I do, however, detect a little stagnation. Unusual, given—again—the nature of your position.”

Sokka raised an eyebrow. “Stagnation.”

“Issues with stress, lethargy, emotional instability…”

Sokka yanked his hand back. Too fast, too fast. His tells were slipping. Zuko was watching. He shook the sleeve over his wrist, smiling widely at the doctor. “Thank you for your time, Doctor Song.”

“There are some people I want you to meet,” said Zuko when they mounted Druk again.

So the dragon looped down from the alpine heights, following the slope as it undulated downwards and then into the abrupt crash of the sea. Sokka swallowed against the pressure building in his ears. Druk, a long shimmering line, followed the cliffs created by the risen sea until he reached a rocky shore. They leapt off. Sokka spotted huts clinging to the cliffside rising above them and before them was the long, blue expanse of the water. Zuko lit a flame in his palm.

“Druk,” he said. And from the dragon’s mouth came a whorl of—it was fire, but unlike any fire Sokka had ever seen. Technicolour, like a sky ablaze during the winter nights. The dragon’s fire hit the flame in Zuko’s palm, which shot upwards in a jet of colour and exploded high over their heads. “They’ll come soon.”

He sat down upon the shore, against Druk, and looked out over the sea. Sokka, after some time, sat too. Looking over this seascape, where sky melted into sea, he could almost imagine himself back at Jade Well IV.

The silence stretched. Ordinarily, Sokka would fill it, but he was sitting with the son of the Phoenix King, a man he had yet to make a measure of.

Zuko cleared his throat first. “The old shoreline was—” He gestured into the horizon, somewhere far out. “Emptiness is a cold sun. When the glaciers melted, the sea levels rose nine feet. So, not many beaches left on this planet. They’d take centuries to form.”

“We have beaches where I’m from,” said Sokka. “Sand all black, sparkling like a winter night.”

“I miss swimming at the beach,” Zuko sighed. “Building sand sculptures. I used to do that with my sister. I hear she’s a sage now.”

Sokka’s ears pricked. The subject of the Phoenix King’s heirs was a closely guarded secret and this was the best confirmation he’d get as to their number, gender, and perhaps age. “You have a sister?”

“We’re alike in that way,” said Zuko. “Both older brothers to a sister.”

Sokka filed that away. One female heir, younger than Zuko, likely by just a handful of spans. Surely Aang had known all along, and had simply not divulged because of his source. “What a coincidence.”

“Hmm? Excuse me.” Zuko made an apologetic face. “I’ll sit on your other side,” and proceeded to do exactly that while Sokka followed his movement with guarded bewilderment. “I don’t hear as well in the left ear,” he explained. “I try to keep people on the right.”

“Really?” Sokka craned around to look at the burn scar before registering it might be rude, but Zuko turned to give him a better view. “And your vision too? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“It’s not as clear as the right.”

“You never thought of cybernetics? Could rewire those nerves for you in a jiffy.”

Zuko’s mouth pinched. Before he could reply, a jet danced out of the ocean, snaking through the air before splashing back down before them. Zuko shot to his feet. “It’s them.”

They were two figures growing larger and larger amid the endless blue, heralded by a huge white spray of water. Druk huffed in excitement, sending up more rainbow sparks. As they neared, Sokka could see they were… surfing over on a huge ice floe powered by nothing he could see.

As in, it was powered by waterbending.

Sokka stood up. The floe veered up to the shoreline with the biggest spray yet, and then the pair ran giggling to embrace Druk’s waiting snout. Zuko let them play out their greetings, then cleared his throat.

The waterbenders turned.

They were twins, a pair of moon-faced girls around Kya’s age, dressed in the garb of Emptiness II dyed blue. They looked shyly at Sokka and bowed to greet him—a greeting that was decidedly not Water Tribe.

“Sokka, I’d like you to meet the girls. Siqiniq”—the one with twin braids nodded—“and Taqqiq.” The other, with a pair of hair loopies like Katara’s, ducked her head in acknowledgement.

Siqiniq and Taqqiq, the sun and the moon. Such familiar names in such a distant land. “You’re Southerners too?” said Sokka.

The youngsters exchanged a glance. “Our parents were born in Jade Well IV,” said Taqqiq.

Sokka’s breath caught. One by one, he pulled them close, pressed his nose to their cheeks like they were family. Perhaps they were. Perhaps there was a Sokka in his head who was the forefather of these girls.

“You waterbend?” he said. “What can you do?”

Taqqiq pulled a glob of water from the sea. It rotated above her, large as a tiger-seal, the sun sparkling through it and dappling her with its light. Siqiniq reached out with both hands and yanked; before Sokka knew it, the twins had pulled the glob into an ice sculpture in the shape of Druk. His jaw dropped. They had made it look effortless.

“I’m especially proud of them,” said Zuko. “They’ve been travelling down to the pole to rebuild the ice there. This is our endeavour. The Air Nomads believed rebirth followed death. Emptiness II brought back from death, imbued with the life of its former inhabitants.” He rested a hand on Siqiniq’s shoulder. “And these two developed the techniques between themselves, with Katara’s input whenever she was able to visit.”

“Between yourselves?” said Sokka. “But what about… Don’t you have… Were the memories destroyed too?”

The girls exchanged a glance. “We were both born… here,” said Siqiniq haltingly. “We’ve never had any contact with the Water Tribes.”

“You don’t have it,” said Sokka, realising. And the horrible confirmation when he pulled back: there was no telltale gleam of neon at their temples, pulsing with the memory of every namesake that had ever walked the galaxy before them. “But Siqiniq, that’s the name of my mother’s mother. And Taqqiq, you share a name—you are—”

He shook himself. No, the girls would always be themselves, of course they would—only without that eternal well of collective memory to drink from.

And Sokka’s chest ached at the injustice. To be a Southern Water Tribesperson without even a fragment of memory of your namesake, of atiq—was that even possible? Not only a limb amputated, but a soul; bereft of the burden of their lifetimes.

On the journey back, Sokka barely registered the frigid alpine wind buffeting against his cheeks.

“Sokka… Sokka? Hold tight.” Belatedly, Sokka felt a hand over his, adjusting his grip around Zuko’s waist. Then, a prod: “You alright?”

“It’s nothing.”

They flew in silence for a while. “Katara… she mentioned to me her chip was… incomplete? And the necklace she wears is a locket—”

“The Katara who held it before her,” said Sokka, “was burned to a husk by firebenders. Then they dug into her brain, plucked out the chip, and ground it under their heels. And now my sister carries the irreparable shards of her past lives they could not piece back around her neck. Like a noose.”

“I see,” said Zuko. And lapsed into silence.

Sokka’s rooms, when he returned to them, were a sanctuary. He threw himself into the waiting bath and didn’t think too hard about how the water had been heated. When he climbed out to dress, a slip of paper, folded up as tiny as could be, fell out of his clothes.

He eased it open with pruney fingers. In cramped writing, it said, Dear Uncle,

Sorry we didn’t get to chat more while you were back. Anaana was keeping me away. It’s what I’m writing about, actually. When we were kids she fed us on all her and ataata’s and your war stories. You guys were just kids too. But I’m grown up, even Bumi’s been recruited for years, and I’m not allowed to do anything. I’ve been exemplary in all my tactical waterbending, which she taught me! But she pushes me towards healing and won’t let me go on any missions my classmates are now all taking up.

I’m not dumb. I know why. My dad’s the Avatar, but I wish I didn’t have to live my life as HER avatar of everyone who came before me…

The handwriting, if it were possible, became even smaller, more cramped. I wish I could’ve come with you. They told me it was top secret, even though I argued that she obviously trusted you and you’d always keep me safe. I miss you. Feels like you’re taking longer and longer missions, these days.

Good luck, Uncle. See you in one piece soon, I hope.

Kya

With his late rise and the quick rotation of the planet, Sokka found himself restless when the settlement turned down to sleep, his niece’s letter turning in his mind. It was dark under the shattered remains of the moon, which itself was only visible as a jagged sliver halfway up the star-encrusted arc of night. He idly wrote out a message to Aang, then took a lamp down to the Mechanist’s workshop.

The machines hummed sleepily when Sokka stepped in; the lamplight threw their hulking shadows against the walls. Teo’s radio room was adjoining and the radio took up most of it. It was a complex contraption. But Sokka had a knack for engines, and even if he didn’t there was a Sokka in his head who had been a keen radiographer. He got it whirring.

He dialled into Aang’s private channel, tapped the microphone. Then, he murmured, “It’s a strange place. He showed me the plantations, the sea. I hope you’re happy to see your planet repopulated. Zuko’s not given me an answer yet. He’s… surprising. Give my love to Katara and the kids. Tell Kya I’m thinking of her. Standing by for further instructions.”

There it went, beaming out across the galaxy. In a couple of days, he estimated, it would reach Aang all the way in the southern end of the White Tiger. Then his feet took him back upstairs.

It took him a while to realise this wasn’t his room; he had followed a gleam upon the wooden floors, and it had taken him to a vestibule where two candles and pricks of incense light burned. They illuminated a small altar, upon which sat a small bodhisattva behind piles of cakes and fruit.

Sokka knelt. It was a bronze statue, which might’ve explained its survival after Sozin’s inferno. Maybe Aang had been taught to kneel like this, a century ago, a lifetime ago. He wasn’t sure what else to do. The planet was reborn; were the souls of the airbenders reborn into it? He thought of Kya’s letter and wondered how much of his mother lived now in his niece.

“Hey,” he said, a conspiratorial whisper. “What do you guys think of him, really? You reckon he’s genuine about all this restoration stuff?”

And answering him came a low human-sounding hum.

Sokka froze. There, unmistakably, kneeling beside him, was an old monk: robes a crash of colour in the gloom, a tattoo snaking out of his collar over his bald skull. A tattoo only one living person in the galaxy had. When the monk turned, Sokka saw his eyes black as ash.

Sokka leapt backwards. When he looked again, the monk was gone.

Chapter Text

“Oh yes,” said Zuko, “the temple is haunted. We should’ve warned you, but we’re all used to it by now. It slips my mind.”

Sokka had found him in the main shrine of the temple, offering morning incense. Before him towered great polished bronze statues of airbenders past (scuffed, still, in areas that the elbow grease couldn’t fix), serene on their seats of lotus. At their feet were garlands of flowers, and hundreds of porcelain urns. When Zuko concluded his morning prayers, he propped a basket of cabbages on his hip and strode past Sokka with a briskness that spoke to his familiarity with the hallways.

Sokka, at a loss for other activities he could be occupied with, followed. “Oh yeah, I’m forgetting about the lost souls haunting my own house all the time.”

Zuko shrugged, casting a wry look back at him. “It was their house originally.”

He was holding back, Sokka was certain. All he needed was a chip in the armour, let his guard slip. “Listen, I’m sorry for what happened yest—”

“No, no,” said Zuko, “the fault was mine. It’s a sensitive topic, I shouldn’t have asked.” And then he turned into the dining hall.

Breakfast had been cleared, but the long tables were heaped with dough and piles of chopped vegetables. A veritable production line was going: kneading dough, chopping and rolling it out into flat discs, then filling and folding them into little pouches. “Seneschal!” cried one cook. “There you are.”

“Morning, Ling-jie,” said Zuko, dipping down with far too much grace to submit his cheek to a floury pinch. “Your cabbages, as requested.”

“Good! Nur, go wash and chop these.”

A young woman shot up from the bench with military responsiveness, then carted the cabbages to the kitchens. Zuko settled into her seat, folded his sleeves up, and started to dutifully wrap. When Sokka looked up, Ling’s critical gaze was fixed upon him.

“Well, General. Can you wrap?”

The dumplings didn’t look dissimilar to the steamed buns or dumplings you might find on the outskirts of Ba Sing Se, that sprawling multi-planet settlement in the Tail mansion. “I’ve never…”

“Oh come on, it’s easy. And quite fun,” said Zuko, and he produced a neat little pouch in his palm. “We’ll show you.”

Sokka found himself crushed between Zuko and Ling, sweating as they drilled him in the art of momo folding—on Emptiness II, no mouth would be fed if its owner’s hands did not put in the work. Sokka’s came out lopsided, the pleats uneven, desperately underfilled because Zuko had suggested that perhaps Sokka be less ambitious in his first attempts. But there was a rhythm to it: collecting the disc of dough from the centre of the table, dolloping the chopped vegetable filling inside, pinching and turning the package to seal it.

“Are these all vegetarian?” said Sokka.

“This batch, yes,” Ling grunted.

“We prefer to follow most of the customs of the departed Air Nomads,” said Zuko as Sokka wrinkled his nose. “We do not keep livestock for meat; the bison provides us with its milk and fur.”

“We can actually grow some meat,” the kid Nur piped up, relocated somewhere further down the table. “The same method they used to revive the fauna in the early days.”

“Siqiniq and Taqqiq’s family are good hunters too,” said a young man further down who’d introduced himself as Ujarak—it was a name Sokka recognised from some other southern settlement of the White Tiger, the Net mansion perhaps. “They only harvest what they need.”

“It just wouldn’t do to introduce flocks of foreign species deliberately,” said Zuko. “It’s so mountainous here we’d have a hard time letting them graze, or their feet would trample all the restored earth…”

“And I,” said Ling, “make some pretty mean mock meat.”

“Well there’s no need to mock your meat,” said Sokka with a wink. “I’m sure it’s perfectly nice.”

“Seneschal?” someone called from the doorway. They looked up. “Got an order of fertiliser we need transported…”

“Got it,” said Zuko, rising from the bench. He wiped his hands on a cloth and clapped Sokka on the shoulder as he climbed out. “I’ll leave you in their capable hands.”

“Wait—” said Sokka, thinking about ledgers and troops and rations again, but Zuko was already sweeping out of the dining hall.

When Teo came zooming by in his hoverchair, Sokka had managed to fold a painstaking twenty momos—but the cooks had whisked them off to steam right before Teo’s arrival, so Sokka had nothing to show for his efforts.

“There’s flour on your nose,” said Teo with glee. He had a child in tow again, and upon closer inspection it appeared to be a different one: ambulatory, certainly older, and capable of enough speech to greet Sokka with a polite, “Good day to you, General.”

“You need to get me out of here,” said Sokka.

“You’re in luck. I figured if you’ll be here for a while, you need a way to get around.”

Sokka thought about Zuko charging off on Druk, punching through the mountaintops to goodness-knows-where. He needed a way to catch up.

Unfortunately, what Teo had in mind was a gliding lesson with his child.

Sokka regarded the glider that Teo had fished from one of the temple’s storage rooms with reservation. Aang had a glider, a simple affair: a staff that snapped open two sets of wings at the push of a hidden lever. This was nothing like that. It came in a rucksack that tied around the waist, and by pulling a string would unfurl into a frame of canvas and wire, pulleys and levers. It looked incredibly flimsy.

“What?” said Teo.

“I was thinking, you know, a sky bison…”

“They aren’t cheap! And you’ve gotta feed them. Have you seen their turds? Massive.”

“I just—” said Sokka. He sighed. “Can I be taught by someone who’s more than six years old?”

“I’m TEN,” said Teo’s spawn.

Teo barked out a laugh, giving him a nudge with the chair so he stumbled. “Come on, we get the kids gliding from when they turn three. She’s an old hat. Better than me! I don’t even have the legs to show you how. You game?”

Sokka had faced infernos supercharged by the stars, had brought down entire legions with his wits alone. His name alone shook fear into his enemies. He was not game.

When Zuko found him again, he was dangling from his glider by one arm over the face of a cliff and Teo was flying loops around him in a glider attached to his chair, laughing uproariously. The child, clearly raised wrong, had long fucked off with her friends after they had made special effort to veer by to jeer at Sokka’s efforts.

“Don’t take it too personally,” said Zuko. “They all start flying as children, so they are easily amused by adults with no flight experience.”

“I have flight experience,” Sokka groused. “I’ve piloted atmospheric and interplanetary craft since I was twelve!”

Teo and the child had the good sense to tether Sokka to the ground, though a soft landing was not guaranteed. Now, Druk nudged his long neck under Sokka. Only yesterday, Sokka could not have conceived of finding a sense of safety upon a dragon’s back. Zuko reached over to pull one of the levers and the glider twisted shut.

“There we go. Not so hard, was it?”

They were on the ground again: beautiful, familiar ground. Sokka had never been more grateful for it, though he would never make the mistake of taking it for granted again. Before Zuko, however, he smoothed his expression swiftly. “Ahem. Well, I do thank you for your timely—ah—intervention, seneschal.” Then, “I was meaning to ask—”

“Can it wait?” said Zuko. “They need me to record the latest harvest and distribute the batches…”

Sokka, his mind latching back onto supply, said, “I can help.”

“Nah,” said Zuko, already turning to mount his dragon again. “You’re our guest. I’ve got volunteers already. If you find Osha she can…”

Sokka watched him fly off, the wind eating his words, then let the irritation seep back into his muscles. He shouldered past the kids drilling martial arts, again—except this time they weren’t kids, they were young adults training with long wobbling bamboo poles. He watched the display for some time, his fan tucked under his armpit: the youths striking, turning, responding with military precision to the rhythm of the drummer. What were they training for, if not for this? Then he stalked away.

“Anyone seen Osha?” he called into the Mechanist’s workshop, which only thrummed in reply; and the smithy next door, where Toh-ki merely shrugged and the apprentices hammered away as though he hadn’t spoken. He wandered back into the temple. “Osha? Osha?”

The next room he stumbled into was occupied by a saffron-robed spectre with a half-melted arm. Sokka decided to end his search for the day.

With the seneschal so otherwise occupied, there wasn’t much for his esteemed guest to do besides make enquiries as to his location—unknown—and then hover around the Mechanist’s workshop and shed his awkwardness around the familiarity of machines.

Sokka liked machines. He had a knack for them. He liked how they were put together, how you could take them apart and see how each part fit into the whole. The Mechanist kept him busy with fixing a pile of gliders that he needed younger, defter fingers for.

When Sokka hauled the repaired gliders off the table for the runner who’d come to collect them, he unearthed a pile of blueprints. The Mechanist’s lines were trembly but sure, etching out a number of designs. Sokka leafed through. Ships with sails that would catch the energy of the sun, helmets for the vacuum of space with forcefield visors, weapons powered by fire…

Wait. Weapons?

Sokka inspected the blueprint more closely. He’d been on the blasty end of enough Fire Nation weapons to recognise how they worked, and the mechanism was eerily similar: the explosive, the projectile, the barrel, and then of course the blasty end itself—

“Looking for someone?”

Sokka jumped as an arm came to slam down upon the blueprints. “Shit. Warn a guy, won’t you?”

Teo parked himself at the end of the table, grinning. “The hoverchair’s not the quietest.” He had a bowl of noodles, swimming in glistening red oil. “Got an eye on our seneschal, have you?”

“I’ve been sent by the Avatar to collaborate with him.”

“Collaborate, alright.”

“I’m sorry, what? I’m his guest and I haven’t seen him for days.”

Teo leaned in. “He’s never taken a lover. Too noble, you know?”

Sokka did not say, Why are you telling me this. “I don’t.”

“He’s refused some very generous dowries.”

“Like yours?” said Sokka, more sardonic than it had sounded in his mind.

“Well, my dad’s, since he would’ve footed the bill.” Teo winked, then slurped his noodles. Sokka’s gut curdled. Oil splattered onto the blueprints. He got up.

“I’m going to find better company.”

“Oooh, touchy!”

Sokka stalked out of the workshop. But luck was on his side today, because he caught the hem of a familiar burgundy robe flicking around the side of the temple.

There he was, finally. Off the beaten path. Sokka’s senses prickled. Where was Zuko off to, all alone, after shaking off Sokka’s tail for days now? He hurried to catch up.

Sokka followed him around the back of the mountain, as an orcabear might tail its prey, along a precarious and at times steep path. There were plenty of rocks to hide behind, and the lack of weeds to stumble over told him this way, though hidden, was well-trodden. So Zuko ventured out here often, Sokka thought, peering as his shape up ahead rounded another curve—and this far away from the settlement clearly had something to hide.

He heard the sound of trickling water, Zuko’s footsteps slowing down and the scrape of him climbing down rock. Sokka stayed put, crouching behind a rock. He peered around to survey the seneschal’s movements—and froze.

Below, Zuko’s robe fell over his broad, bare shoulders. It puddled upon the ground. The delicate slop of water, stepping in; the louder splash as he submerged in neat ripples under the misty water. Sokka’s breath lodged in his throat. And then, after a whole era it seemed, Zuko’s dark head broke through the surface. His hair was a slick sheet down his back. The droplets trailed down the swell of his chest like the rivulets in Doctor Song’s beyul, steaming on his skin.

And then, mortifyingly, Zuko spoke.

“Are you gonna stay there all day, or are you getting in?”

Sokka wrenched his head back around the stone. His pulse skittered against his ribs. There was no way Zuko could have seen him, was there? His back was turned, that long line of grey-threaded black falling sleek and wet behind him. Sokka squeezed his eyes shut, counted to ten, and crept away back down the path.

And was it his imagination, or did a wry chuckle follow as he left?

Osha he finally found after taking a wrong turn to lunch, some two floors above the dining hall. He was following the sound of chatter, not yet smelling a delicious steaming hot meal but hopefully close, and when he burst through the doors he stopped in his tracks.

“Oh!” he said. “Osha.”

She was standing in the middle of an airy hall, long pointer stick in hand, instantly commanding even as she was surrounded by an assortment of Emptiness II’s denizens. Arranged around the room, all about them, were crates—stacks and stacks of them, empty ones, lined up in patterns. Something twigged in his memory—or past memory?—but he couldn’t make the connection. “General Sokka!” said Osha.

She didn’t move. A few of the randoms waved.

“This isn’t lunch.”

“No.” Osha laughed, abortively. “No, General, this is…” She waved the pointer. “This is history.”

“Two floors down,” said one of the randoms.

Sokka sucked his teeth and puttered off with a wave. He dodged two apparitions as he descended, a half-blackened one whose ashy footprints disappeared as it went, and another one, red-hooded, standing in a corner and flickering in and out of view like a bad radio signal. It was only as he hit the correct landing that he realised why the crate patterns looked familiar.

It wasn’t the memory of a past Sokka. It was his own, one he was intimately familiar with. It was his own formation of troops from the ambush at Fish III.

The harvest started coming into the temple, big burlap sacks and crates stacked high all full of produce. All spare hands that were not in the fields were now being recruited to sort through and process it. The seneschal flitted on and off the scene, roaring in on Druk to unload the latest offerings (sometimes with the sleeves of his inner garment tied around his bare waist, which Sokka refused to think too much about), marching about with a slim codex to make notations with a stick of graphite, then flying back off to the fields. Sometimes when Sokka was doing miserable loops in his glider, he could see Druk shimmering off into the distance. If not for his training tether, he could follow and discover just where Zuko was sneaking off to. On more than one occasion, Sokka caught his eye but every time he hurried close, Zuko had already twisted away into the crowd.

Sokka was shaking out bucketfuls of wheat to dry in the sun when a blue-clad couple approached him. “Our daughters told us they met you.”

Sokka straightened up. “You’re Siqiniq and Taqqiq’s parents?” They greeted him with much less ardour than he had greeted their children with, a terse clasp of the forearm. “They’re lovely. Your seneschal introduced me the other day. It’s wonderful to see waterbending thrive here.”

They introduced themselves as Omik and Hama, names Sokka knew, and with some relief his eyes found the pulsing glow of the chip at their temples. They readily gave him their story: their families had escaped from Jade Well IV after the Fire Nation’s sustained attacks, oh, decades ago now, and they had wandered from mansion to mansion until the Avatar found them and invited them to Emptiness II.

“Why not come back?” said Sokka. “We were—we are safe now. We built the barrier, we’ve rebuilt the community—”

“It’s not what it was before,” said Hama darkly.

“We left as children,” Omik hastened to say, pouring out a bucket of rice between them. “The only memory of Jade Well we carry is in the chip, before the war…”

“The girls could get a chip, we could arrange it—”

“No,” said Hama. “They’ve never known it. And they’re better off without it.”

She met Sokka’s eye, harsh in a way that made him stop in his tracks. Why the fear there? What did she see in her chip?

He decided to change tack. Pitching his voice lower, he said, “Look, Water Tribesman to Water Tribesman, I’m here to try and protect our people. Something’s coming, something big. Have either of you noticed anything amiss on this planet?”

“Amiss?”

“Yeah, like unusual, out of the ordinary…”

“Aren’t you better off asking the seneschal?”

“Oh believe me,” said Sokka, “I’ve tried, and he’s no help, he’s always gallivanting off.”

“Well he’s a very busy man. He does everything round here.”

“Have you seen,” said Hama, “those damn magpies around? They do not belong here.”

Sokka blinked. “I’m sorry?”

She lowered her voice too. “They only started appearing, oh, a span or so ago. No one will admit to engineering them.”

“And…?”

“I just don’t trust them,” she said. “I don’t think they’re native. Don’t you know the legends? Portents that looked just like them appeared when we Southerners were ripped apart from the Northern Water Tribe.”

That was so long ago they didn’t have chips to record the memory yet: just songlines, legends passed down generation to generation. The consensus was that there was once no distinction between North and South in the White Tiger of the West, then one fateful day a great bridge opened in the fabric of space and sucked half the community away. “I don’t remember any birds in the legends.”

“Maybe a different version,” sniffed Omik.

“See,” said Hama, “this is what I keep telling you about those chips, they’ve made us too reliant when we could be training our memories organically, it’s what I’ve told the girls—”

“Anything besides birds that you’ve noticed?”

“Not to mention,” Hama added, “they keep shitting on the clothesline—”

“Granted,” said Omik, a little boredly, “that’s normal bird behaviour.”

“Riiiight,” said Sokka. He made excuses to go fetch another bucket of rice and did not return.

“Radio for one esteemed general of Jade Well IV,” said Teo, doing a loop around Sokka in the hoverchair before pulling up to hand him a light scroll. Sokka took it with mild apprehension, which dissipated into relief when he opened it and saw the alphabet inside.

“Never had that come through the radio before,” said Teo. “Just a bunch of beeps and clicks. So we transcribed it and… well I hope you can read it.”

Sokka could: he had helped develop this writing system, a syllabic alphabet of simplified shapes that was just so much easier and faster to write than the characters that some ye olden Earth Kingdom time-rich genius had come up with. The other plus was the writing itself could be transmitted through radio. Aang rarely used it, still preferring the humble voice message, and Sokka’s pulse leapt at the implications—did he have some top secret information to divulge, for Sokka’s eyes only?

Hang in there, Sokka! He’ll come around. All going well here. Kids send their love. Aang.

Sokka screwed it up and shoved it deep into the pocket of his parka.

So when Sokka had the good fortune to finally catch the seneschal landing the great dragon Druk in the courtyard, he hastened to follow. Zuko billowed up the temple steps, something cloth-bound clutched in his hands, nodding to passers-by and turning prayer wheels as he went. He walked with purpose; Sokka was panting when he finally crested the stairs.

Ahead of him, Zuko beelined towards the main shrine. And as Sokka made towards it, a horrifying sight stopped him in his tracks.

Materialising into view, in Zuko’s wake, came apparition after apparition.

Rail-thin elderly ascetics garbed in yellow. Bald-headed boys with red, blistering arms. Others were less intact, burned to the bone, flesh blackened or missing altogether, robes trailing into tatters. And on the seneschal walked, heedless of the horde that followed him into the shrine.

Sokka’s blood ran cold in his veins. His feet took him backwards. There was no time for it.

He sprinted up the temple staircase. He was flagging by the time he reached the top but when he regained his breath, he crept down the hallway, past his own room, down to Zuko’s doorway at the end.

The door was open. Sokka, at the threshold, cast a glance around and inside. There was nobody. He stepped through.

Little had changed since his first and only time inside the antechamber where Zuko had served him tea. He twitched aside the curtains, rifled through the drawers beside the seating platform. It was all unassuming, filled with bundles of firewood, spare sheafs of paper and brushes, or half-used bricks of tea.

A screen separated the antechamber from Zuko’s room. Sokka stepped around it.

The bed took up most of the space: curtains half-drawn, blankets bunched to the side. Double doors led to the balcony. Opposite the bed was a set of shelves, so Sokka started there. The codices were packed onto them, labelled—he realised—not by galactic spans but by years, the natural orbit of the planet around Emptiness. Sokka pulled out the latest, last year’s.

It was a ledger. That much was obvious. A detailed list of resources sown, cultivated, mined, genetically regrown. A census of the population: manpower. The surplus, the storage, the stockpile. He flicked through the older ledgers. Same story. The picture was building in his mind. Not only was this an extraordinarily well-resourced planet, but it was one that was resourcing in anticipation of something. Of war. But Zuko had refused his every probe…

And then, more chillingly, was the recurring line in the oldest books. Sokka sank to his knees. Bones—and tallies. Every time. Bones: 53. Bones: 46. Bones: 80. Bones: 2.

He set down the final book, the oldest, and looked about, running helpless hands through his hair. That was when he saw the crate under the seneschal’s bed.

He eased it out.

Inside were lengths of red silk embroidered with gold thread. Then he moved the bundle aside, and a shiver shot cold down his spine.

There, amid the cloth, lay the mask of the Blue Spirit.

Sokka had never seen this figure in person. But in the early spans of their wanderings around the galaxy, with him and his sister and Aang and eventually Toph, he had seen the wanted posters and heard a tale or two over the radio, the clandestine channels you had to tap the password to access. A myth come to life, come to do good—or evil, depending on whom you asked. But he’d saved Aang once from the Fire Nation’s Pohuai Stronghold, and that was good enough for Sokka.

And now his face was snarling up at Sokka, in the possession of Zuko. The long-lost son of the Phoenix King.

Of all people.

So he should’ve noticed the footsteps, should’ve heard and vaulted out the balcony. He could do it; he had done it many times before. But when Zuko found him he was still kneeling on the rug in his bedroom, ledger books open all around him, and the Blue Spirit mask in his hands.

“What,” hissed Zuko, “are you doing?”

The hand he had on his divider screen was shaking, but Sokka was not going to back down now. “I should ask the same of you.” He waved a hand over the ledger books, their incriminating pages. The surplus, the storage. Bones, bones, bones. “You’ve hidden everything from me. Your preparations, your capabilities? I’ve seen the Mechanist’s weapons designs too! They look pretty Fire Nation to me! Discipline and mental fitness my ass.”

“You have no right,” said Zuko, voice shuddering. “You have no right to riffle through my belongings—”

“What, so I wouldn’t see everything you’ve kept from me?” Sokka pointed the mask at him like a finger. “And this! You sick fuck, you murdered the Blue Spirit! And kept his mask as a trophy!”

Outrage flashed across Zuko’s face. “NONE of this concerns you.”

“Well I think it does!” Sokka gritted his teeth, stood up, squared up. “I’m preparing for a war that could wipe out my entire people, and you’re the only one in my way!”

“It is up to ME to reveal my plans when I am ready.”

“You’ve been preparing for war this whole time. Against whom?!”

“That’s none of your business. I am the seneschal of this planet and I make the decisions on whether we mobilise as I see fit!”

“I knew it,” said Sokka, shaking the mask in his hand. “I knew you couldn’t be trusted. Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, huh?”

Zuko’s face twisted, ugly. “All the hospitality I’ve shown you, and this is how you repay me.”

“Hospitality,” said Sokka, “or throwing me off the scent?”

The smell of smoke. The wood crumbled under Zuko’s hand. “Get out.” He flung the fistful of ash away. “OUT!”

Sokka didn’t need telling twice. He threw the mask at Zuko’s face and shoved past him. His feet took him back to his room. Zuko was down the hallway. Too close, too close. Then he glimpsed the view outside: the mountains and then the sea, sparkling in the distance. The call of home. His adrenaline-shaking hands scrambled for his glider rucksack, strapping it on.

He leapt out of the window.

Chapter Text

Jade Well IV’s achingly slow rotation produced gloriously long dawns and dusks outside the permadarkness of winter, painting the sky in all the colours of the rhododendron blooms on the tundra. Not so on Emptiness II. When the sun decided to set here, it set fast.

It started with Emptiness dipping under the glider wing and into Sokka’s sightline, making him wince and squint. Then it slid lower, painting the snowcaps a fetching pale gold. Then the pinks and purples set in, and Sokka realised he was fucked.

The temple had long been left behind, the shroud of night dropping over it. Overhead, the stars were starting to prick through the darkness. With shaking fingers, he managed to light a flame for the little lantern dangling in front of his face, and then everything under him became black.

“Shit,” said Sokka. “Shit shit shit.”

He had developed a passable enough grasp of the night sky to recognise the cardinal directions. The temple was somewhere towards the direction of the monkey and he managed to swing the glider back round, but not a speck of light materialised. He felt keenly aware of the mountains all around him, hulking pillars of rock he wouldn’t see until his tiny dangling lamp got close enough to shatter against them.

That’s when he saw it.

The apparition rushed towards him, clad in full armour with scales like a tigerdillo, visor shields down and glowing too bright to see the face inside. A pair of curving blades were splayed on each side; the pheasant feathers at the crown of its helmet streamed behind in an invisible wind. All around it was a flapping rush of black and white wings. “My love!” it cried, its voice tinny and warped. “Look out for the birds…” and then it stuttered away.

Sokka plunged after the vision, panting. But its ghost-light was gone, the darkness under him had returned…

“General!” And then louder— “GENERAL!”

Sokka chanced a look down. Right under him was a blob of light, moving in the gloom.

“I can’t land!” he cried.

“You’re not far above us,” said the blob, which was starting to sound familiar. “Pull the left-wing lever, lean into it…”

Sokka pulled. He felt a swooping drop in his stomach. He jerked his hand back and the wing tilted back upwards in the currents. “Shit!”

“You have to do it, General,” said the blob. “You can’t wimp out. The glider won’t drop you, you have to believe. Try it again.”

Well, what choice did he have? There was a firmness in the voice that made him obey. He pulled the lever again, bracing for the drop. It came, but the descent was not as steep as he had feared. “Good,” said the voice. “Lean left, let it veer you down towards me…”

The light was growing bigger, and he could make out the figure it illuminated now. “Osha.”

“That’s right,” she said, encouraging. “You have to land. Think you can do it?”

“I don’t—I don’t know.”

“Come towards me.” The lantern bobbed, heading in the direction of the ox. Sokka thought back to barrelling through the doors, Osha surrounded by the diorama of his own battle. “We freshly tilled this earth, you’re close enough to the ground to make a soft landing.”

“I don’t—”

“You can do it,” said Osha. “All the little kids manage it. That’s solid ground under your feet. OK?”

“I— How?”

“You just need to close your glider. OK? I know you can do it, General. On the count of three—”

Out here in the dark, with only her voice as a guide, what else could Sokka do? He closed the glider and braced. The ground came up fast; his mechanical knee took the impact but it was softer than he had expected, as Osha had promised. The glider whirred as its great wings folded themselves back into the satchel. Sokka stood hunched over, panting with his hands on his knees, for a good while.

“Come inside,” said Osha. “You’ve been out there for a long time.”

Where else could he go? He let his feet stumble after her to the farmhouse, some ways ahead. The light glowed from inside; warmth enveloped him when he stepped over the threshold. Osha came back with a blanket, draping it over his shoulders after she eased the glider satchel off. “Honey,” she called into the house, “some hot water for the tea, please?”

“No, I really—” said Sokka. “I shouldn’t impinge on you. I need to get back.”

“Nonsense,” said Osha. “You can barely fly, let alone in the dark. Was that your first time?”

Certainly his first untethered. Sokka made an apologetic face.

“Oh, you,” she tutted. “What happened?”

He shrugged. “Got lost. Got dark faster than I expected.”

“Happens to the best of us. The sun sets fast in the autumn this far south. Oh—bless you.”

The latter was directed to a formidable figure darkening the doorway, steaming cup in hand—

“Toh-ki?” said Sokka. “Fancy seeing you here.” Then he put two and two together. “Wait. You’re—you two?”

Toh-ki put the cup down, allowed her elbow to be squeezed by Osha, and disappeared back down the hallway. Osha laughed. “You only realised?”

“I’ve barely been here for one half-orbit of your banged-up moon!” Sokka protested.

Osha shook her head. “Come on, drink up. It’ll make you feel better. I can get Toh-ki to reheat some food too.”

Sokka drank. This too was unlike any tea he had tasted before, rich and hot with spices. He felt its warmth in his chest and took a second gulp. Osha looked at him with satisfaction. “My mother’s recipe. Extra kick with that pepper. It’s very Fire Nation. We grow all the spices ourselves, right outside.”

“It’s good.” Sokka drained the cup. “I should get back.”

“It’s too dark for that,” said Osha, “especially with your lack of experience. We can put you up for the night, it’s no bother. I can send the seneschal a mess—”

“No need for that,” said Sokka quickly.

Osha paused. “If that’s what you want…”

“I just don’t want to concern him,” said Sokka, as disarmingly as he could. “Just—” Then the memory, brushed aside by the euphoria of being saved, returned. “The apparitions, do they ever talk?”

“Not that I know of? Did you encounter something?”

“I, uh—” Sokka shook his head. “No, just curious. Sorry, tired from all that stress-flying.” He smiled at her, as winningly as he could. “I’ll stay. Thanks, Osha.”

“If you insist,” said Osha. “Let me show you to bed.”

When Sokka woke up, he found Osha outside weeding. “Where’s Toh-ki?”

“Back to the smithy, of course.” She turned to face him, tipping up her chin to look at him from under the brim of her hat. “Slept well?”

Sokka looked over the horizon, through the misty layers of the peaks, to where the temple perched. Now that Emptiness had risen again, he could see it wasn’t too far by flight. But there waited Zuko, and there waited his treachery, and the shock and rage that had coloured his face when he’d seen the Blue Spirit mask in Sokka’s hands. What would happen now? How would he get home?

Osha seemed to sense his hesitation. “You can stay for a bit. Could do with a young’un helping me uproot the old plants.”

So what if she were in on it too? Sokka needed to stay alive long enough to get off the planet and she wasn’t booting him off a cliff yet, so maybe Zuko hadn’t yet contacted her. “I could hardly be called a young’un these days,” said Sokka, then found himself digging into the ground with a pitchfork.

Agriculture was not the forte of any Southern Water Tribesman hailing from the frigid desert settlements of Jade Well IV, and the silence now of the past lives in his head was a testament to that. Still, Sokka gave it as good as he got, shucking the parka and pitting his battle-worn muscles against the soil. All the hospitality I’ve shown you, and this is how you repay me, said a nasty voice in his head. He banished the thought. What he’d done was right: for his people and for the galaxy. If Zuko wasn’t going to help them—indeed, if he was going to work against them using his furtive preparations—then Sokka had to cut out the cancer before it spread.

The one thing he regretted was Aang’s sorrow that would come when his longtime friend’s duplicity was revealed. He was a trusting guy, he believed in sappy shit like second chances and seeing good in everyone. Sokka would radio him the second he got back to his ship and deliver the blow: clean and quick.

But he’d understand. Sokka, alongside Katara, was his most trusted general. It was a moot point, a dead end. Sokka could have the satisfaction of knowing that he had done the best he could with Aang’s orders, but at the end of the day the Phoenix King’s son could not shed the loyalty of his blood. He would not fight his father, and Sokka would not exhaust himself against these battlements.

For all his uncertainty over her loyalties, he was grateful when Osha finally called him inside, bone-weary and famished from the labour. She had made him some millet flatbread, flaky and greasy with bison butter, for him to dip into a rich spicy sauce that made him gasp for water, and made Osha laugh at his weak palate.

“You did good work,” said Osha. “You’re better at it than he was when we first arrived.”

“At what? Who?”

“The seneschal.”

Sokka said, casually, “What about him?”

Osha smiled—not at him, but at some distant memory replaying in her mind. “He really had no clue how to fend for himself. Laughs about it now, and we make fun of him for being such a spoiled princeling. Back in the day, though, he would get so offended. Easiest way to set him off and if he exploded, oh he exploded.”

“Osha?”

She shook her head. “Sorry, you don’t want to hear an old woman’s rambles…”

“No,” said Sokka, “I’ll indulge you. You fed me and put me up for the night. For you, I have all the time in the world.”

“You,” said Osha, “are a real flatterer.”

“My honeyed words have set many a trap for the Phoenix King’s forces,” said Sokka. For good measure, he flicked his fan out of a pocket and snapped it open.

Osha cackled when she saw it. “Your fan! I could barely contain myself when you first took it out. I can’t believe I have the Sokka of the Southern Water Tribe in my own kitchen right now, and that I put him to work pulling out our old crop on my own property.”

Obligingly, Sokka fanned himself; it set her off again. “Your story now, madam. I insist.”

Osha sighed, giving him a long, indulgent shrug. “What can I say? Where to begin? Started off in the Phoenix King’s legions—he was still Fire Lord, back then. I went through my training like everyone else, then they unleashed us upon the Earth Kingdom. I saw things I couldn’t stomach. I did things I wonder if I could ever atone for. I couldn’t take it anymore after what we did to the nebula settlements in the Room mansion. What they tried to make—” Her breath hitched. “I just… packed up all my things, stole a tiny gun ship, and hightailed it out of there.”

She put her hands around her teacup, as though to ground herself with its warmth. “I wandered for spans across the Azure Dragon, scrapping together whatever living I could make for myself. That’s when I met the seneschal. He was scrappy back then, like you wouldn’t believe. Hair all shaggy”—she gestured a kind of fringe over her forehead with her fingers—“skinny as a twig, moonlighting as a terrorist. He recognised me as a fellow Fire Nation citizen at once. And we’ve stuck together since, right through the Avatar offering him this planet.”

“I can’t imagine him looking like that,” said Sokka, picturing against his volition a sleek wet fall of black, and droplets of water sizzling off a firm chest.

“Oh, you wouldn’t believe!” Osha laughed. “We’re presenting you our very best version of the seneschal now, General, and believe me when I say it took a lot of work. He’s a skilled fighter but he was so clumsy in the fields, never had done an honest day’s work in his life. The number of times he stabbed himself with the farming tools… And the tools he broke, or, or melted, that one time. Anyway, that’s how I met Toh-ki. She was making new parts to repair all the ships coming in and here I was with the pitchforks our dear seneschal had bent out of shape…”

“I suppose he’s grown a lot,” Sokka offered.

“He has. He really has. And it was no easy journey, not for any of us. I had run away from the army. I was all alone in the galaxy until we found each other, and then came here.” She sipped absently at her tea, wading in memory. “And it was an awful place at first, charred and ruined, wild weather from the mangled currents. Full of reminders of what my ancestors—we—had done. But then, isn’t it right for me to be part of its recovery?

“Anyway, he came to think so too. He took to the task. He directed it. He really came to appreciate what had been lost on the planet and it became, I think, his penitence. We had to learn everything about this planet from scratch and restore it. Our earthbenders regenerated the soil, we gave the spark of life to the genetic codes in faunal remains, the twins rebuilt the glacier in the lake where we landed when they were only nine… We wanted to become one with the land, just as the Air Nomads before us were.”

“They’re still hanging around,” said Sokka, thinking about the ghosts. “Did that creep you guys out?”

“They were everywhere in those early days,” said Osha. “And… they’d been monks, so they weren’t malevolent, per se. But they didn’t like us.”

“They like you now?”

“When we arrived,” said Osha, “there were bones everywhere. Strewn all over the slopes. Skeletons all the way down to the littlest scattered shards, bleached white under Emptiness. Big femur bones all the way down to little babies’ unfused skulls. You couldn’t walk ten feet without feeling a crunch underfoot. That was how the Air Nomads buried their dead, you know.” She nodded towards the window. “Bodies left to the birds on the peaks, returned to the landscape that gave them their life. But these bodies were exposed because they died where they fell. And we have our superstitions about the dead.”

Sokka didn’t hold himself to be a superstitious person. But some taboos ran deep. “They need to be put to rest.”

“So the seneschal put together a massive undertaking. Out of all of us, he corralled teams of twenty. We rotated, but the seneschal was the one constant. And he led each team, tirelessly, to pick up the bones and their fragments, and inter them in great, purpose-built urns. So each day we came out to the slopes and picked up bones. It was backbreaking, tiring work. It is a custom of the seneschal’s forebears back in the Fire Nation to pick out the bones from cremated ash with chopsticks. And that’s what we did. It took years. Spans, even.”

Bones, bones, bones. The porcelain urns at the shrine. Sokka looked at his plate until the chickpeas swam.

“I think that, if anything, changed him the most,” Osha mused, like it was a theory she had been sitting on for some time. Then again, Sokka thought, she hadn’t met anyone new in a long, long time. “Not the farming accidents, although he’s improved markedly. No, I think he learnt something about leadership out there. All of us came out of the experience changed. But the seneschal became someone different.”

“Better?”

“I think so,” said Osha. “Then again, I’m biased.”

“And what about the”—Sokka gestured—“on his face? Fell into Toh-ki’s furnace?”

“Oh no,” said Osha. “That was a gift from his father.”

Sokka sat uneasily. He drank his tea. Then he stood up. “Osha, I—I have to go back.”

Her face was serene, serene as though she knew—had known all along, without needing to be told—why he had come. “Of course.”

He stumbled out of her door, grabbed the glider satchel. He could see, silhouetted in the burning sunset, the shape of an approaching bison. “Toh-ki’s coming back,” said Osha. “She can take you—”

“No. I can make it.” He flashed her a smile. “Now that I know how to land.”

And with a pull of the lever, the glider’s wings snapped open.

Sokka landed in a crumple of half-closing wings in the temple courtyard. The sun had long slipped behind the mountains but Sokka fixed his path upon the temple settlement as it blazed alight in the dark and it had guided him true. He shrugged out of the satchel and pelted up the stairs.

The lower levels were full of commotion: dinnertime. Sokka jostled through. “Oh, General, you’re back!” people were saying. “Hungry? We’ve got barley porridge tonight, a bit of mock turtleduck with it…”

No one seemed to have known the true reason for his disappearance, the falling out. “Where—” Sokka paused to chew as someone slid a piece of mock turtleduck into his mouth, which was surprisingly delicious though he had never tasted the real thing. He swallowed. “Where’s the seneschal?”

“Haven’t seen him all day,” said Ling.

“He might’ve been out doing inspections.”

“He’d be back before dark.”

“I think,” said Omik, shuffling past, “he actually hasn’t left all day. I think he’s still upstairs.”

Guilt, like a tendril of smoke, curled up Sokka’s throat. “Give me a bowl. I’ll take it up to him.”

Then, when he was out of their line of vision, he took the stairs two at a time, as fast as he could with the sloshing porridge in one hand and the exhaustion setting into his flesh leg and flesh lungs in the final few storeys.

At the top of the landing, an apparition awaited him.

The monk was meditating, back towards Sokka in the lotus position, skin and flesh melting off in gruesome chunks. And looking now upon his exposed bones, Sokka wondered whether Zuko had picked them up, whether they were interred now in one of the great urns at the altar below.

Sokka stepped past him, towards the doorway at the end of the hall.

“Zuko?”

The door swayed forwards; a beckon in the breeze. Sokka stepped inside, wary. It was dark, not a lamp in sight, no moon to provide light. But behind the screen that separated Zuko’s bedroom he spotted a streak of light.

“Zuko?”

He stepped past it. The porridge was left upon a table, where Zuko would find it congealed in the morning, and reheat and eat it anyway. Beyond the bed, the double doors to the balcony had been flung open and Zuko stood there, back towards him, encircled by gossamer threads of firelight. Sokka’s breath caught in his throat. The latitudinal and longitudinal lines orbited Zuko, the shapes of constellations Sokka had never seen before fired the silver in his hair to pure gold. At his feet was a golden disc, the pole from which the firelight issued. Zuko’s fingertips, red-stained, leafed through the lines as though plucking the strings of a tautirut.

Sokka came up behind him; he did not turn, but seemed aware of Sokka’s presence. So Sokka stepped inside the sphere of light, and the light zapped the ends of his hair. A faint singed smell. Then he took out his own device from his pouch.

It was a handful of meteorite metal, four parts magnetised together for portability. He spread them out into four corners and fed each with a sip of water from his skin. Then the drops began to levitate, making their familiar grid of criss-crosses across the canvas that Zuko’s globe had laid out. In the old days, the sky-sailors of Jade Well IV had made these out of long strips of bone, intersecting to represent where the stars lay.

Zuko said nothing. He hovered upon a planet Sokka realised belatedly was Emptiness II—here, it was in another constellation altogether, then with deft fingers traced a line of fire from planet to planet, star to star.

Sokka splashed a line of water through his path. The fire fizzled. Zuko’s eyebrow raised, then he forged on. The path zigzagged out of the constellation, hopped eastwards through the galaxy’s north. Hiss. Hiss. Sokka met him each time with a streak of water. Zuko pressed on, building rhythm with each star he joined up.

He could do better, Sokka was sure. He rebalanced the magnets of his map, then drew the droplets through Zuko’s glowing lines. Stubborn Zuko, steadfast Zuko—he was steadfast, Sokka could admit that now—drew on, tracing from the archer, the ploughman, unbound woman, while Sokka drove streak after streak of water through his lines until their sleeves were soaked and singed, and the suspended water glowed too with fire. It was a dance, it was a duet.

When they finally plotted their way into the heart of the Fire Nation—for Sokka the crossroads of three water-lines, for Zuko at the many-headed serpent—the product of their labour hung about them: the globe impaled by the criss-crossing star map, aglow and illuminating their faces flushed, gasping, grinning in spite of themselves

“Show me where you come from,” said Sokka.

Without protest, Zuko spread his fingers wide; he magnified their destination. “Celestial Premier I, in the Star mansion. But not according to our ancestors’ maps.” With a wave of the hand he set the globe spinning about them. “My mother taught me how to use the astrolabe.”

Sokka watched it turn, showing off the detailed figures representing the constellations and the etchings in a beautiful, unintelligible language. “It’s beautiful. The Fire Nation doesn’t use these anymore?”

“When my father banished me, I used to pull up the galactic maps, find my way home. I wandered the stars of our quadrant every night, the Vermilion Bird, tracing all the places I missed and could never return to. And in my quieter, guiltier moments, I would pull out this one.”

“You must’ve been young, then.”

“Very young, and very stupid.” His lips quirked with a hint of irony. “I was the Blue Spirit.”

“I—” Sokka sighed. “I should’ve realised.”

“My father tasked me to capture the Avatar and bring him back as a trophy. But on the other hand, I was excising my—ah—teenage angst upon the military apparatus of the Fire Nation. It’s a long story. But Aang got under my skin.”

“He has a way of doing that.”

“I always knew he would come back to cash in the favour one day,” said Zuko, “but I can only thank him for his mercy, that he didn’t come to ask himself. If he had, I could have never refused. Like this, he let me think upon it.” Zuko’s eyes met his briefly, a flash amid the glowing map-lines. “Not that it has been very easy.”

“I had,” said Sokka, and it took a lot out of him to say it, “completely misjudged you.”

“If I were in your shoes,” Zuko said in a rush, “I might have done the same. I should’ve been more forthcoming with you. War against the Fire Nation your whole life, your people—your family—stripped from you, then meeting the son of the man responsible for it all.”

“No, but I had judged you only on that. It wasn’t fair. And my… preconceived notions blinded me. Aang, Katara had vouched for you. Osha told me everything—”

“There’s nothing more that needs to be said between us,” said Zuko.

“The bones—”

“They’ve been laid to rest. The ghosts recognise me, they come to me in peace. Look around you.” He smiled, bittersweet. “Life has come back to Emptiness II. The cycle of rebirth has restarted.”

“Zuko—”

“No.” Then he walked to the edge of his balcony, leaning against the railing and into the night sky. Their moon-fragment was dark tonight, the sky black save for the great river of amassed starlight that slashed the night: their fractious galaxy. Sokka watched as he gathered a flame in his hand and deposited it into a waiting basin.

The flame burned red, burned high. The basin must have been filled with oil, Sokka thought distantly, and then a second flare of light in the darkness below caught his attention.

“Wha—” Sokka hurried to lean over the rail. Another flare was lighting, then another, and another. A constellation, spidering out from the epicentre that was Zuko’s beacon across the mountaintops. And as Sokka watched, a dark spot in the sky started to flicker with its own distant speck of fire: the moon base.

He whirled around. Zuko, lit from below by his flame, looked like a vengeful god. “What did you do?”

“I lit the beacon.” He moved away from the fire, back under the eaves of his own chambers. “Get some rest, Sokka. The war council will convene tomorrow.”

Chapter Text

Zuko spoke before the council, and he spoke like a war-worn general. Then again, Sokka supposed, he had become quite adept at speechmaking in the last few months.

“I have asked much of you,” he said to the gathered council. All faces had become familiar to Sokka: Osha and Teo, Doctor Song and the Mechanist, Hama and Omik. “All our livelihoods, the war you escaped, and the peace you’ve found here. That’s going to be shattered, and for my part I apologise again for bringing it to your door.

“But the expansion of this long war could stop with us. We’ve been preparing all our lives for the day war would come to our doorstep”—he gave Sokka a sideways glance—“and now we will demonstrate our capabilities.”

Zuko ran through their plans. Sokka had a hunch the Fire Nation would send an expedition through to scope out the route and gauge the resources available in the Black Tortoise. The radio map had picked out the fleet soon enough: brash and loud, signals unmasked, trampling through the graveyard of the Air Nomads their forefathers had massacred. They would meet this expedition tomorrow, ambushing them on the outskirts of Emptiness’s star system in a furious clash of rock and ice. It was a plan they had hashed out in laborious detail over many moons and the council nodded with approval as Zuko, for the first time, connected the moving pieces before them.

“Any questions?”

The councillors eyes swivelled to Sokka. They were decision makers, but Sokka was the one with the thirty spans’ expertise in fighting—and hoodwinking—the Fire Nation. He offered Zuko a short, sharp nod.

“We’ll consider this settled. The troops are ready.” Zuko’s features relaxed into a smile. “Then, as a final point of order, and on a lighter note, the council has a gift to present.”

A gift? Sokka narrowed his eyes, trying to catch Zuko’s gaze. What gift? That wasn’t on the agenda. But Zuko was now busily looking in the other direction, looking at Osha as she pulled something out from behind herself—a basket, OK—and she got to her feet and came around to Zuko, and then both of them were turning to look at Sokka, smiling, and everyone else in the room had turned to stare at him too. Sokka leaned backwards as though he might duck out from under their observation but Zuko said, in a carrying voice, the bastard, “General Sokka, please,” and Sokka got reluctantly to his feet and shuffled up to him and Osha.

“General,” said Osha, “the community is exceedingly grateful for everything you’ve done for us in the past few months.”

I’m visiting war upon you, Sokka did not say. Beside Osha, Zuko was looking at him with an arresting expression, one Sokka did not want to begin decoding now. She continued, “The fame of your wit and cunning preceded you, but I think all of us were pleasantly surprised to see how well you integrated yourself into our little community, and how earnestly you’ve come to share our struggles.

“So this is but a small gesture of our thanks.”

She gave him the basket. Sokka looked away from Zuko to take it from her. He pulled out a pile of cloth: thick and warm-woven, elaborately embroidered with motifs of sea creatures and the stars, dyed blue a touch darker than the indigo-kelp they used back home on Jade Well IV.

“Robes,” said Zuko, superfluously, “like the ones we wear. They’re woven from bison wool, Omik and Hama provided the dye, Doctor Song’s daughter and Nur did the embroidery together. Winter’s on our doorstep, you’ll need something warm for it.”

The daylit summers on Jade Well IV were probably comparable to Emptiness II’s winters. But Sokka heard the implicit, You’re one of us now. He bit his lip. There were so many eyes upon him, and everyone was smiling. “I—” he started. He felt heat crawl up his neck. “I’m—um. Thank you. It’s beautiful. I’m really grateful to you all and…” Well, after all these years, even among familiars, he was no great orator. Leave that business to Zuko. “Yeah. Thanks.”

Later, he knocked at Zuko’s door and hovered upon the open threshold. Footsteps. “Who is it?” Zuko came out from behind the screen to his bedroom. “Oh,” he said.

“Thought I’d try it on,” said Sokka, striking a goofy pose to mask his awkwardness. “I don’t think I tied the outer robe on correctly though…”

Zuko ushered him inside. The brazier in the middle of the seating platform was roaring with fire and his hands were warm through the wool garment as he adjusted the outer robe. “Much better now. It looks good on you.”

Sokka wished for a mirror. Zuko fiddled more. “You can put the other sleeve back on if it gets cold, but I like having it down to get airflow through the back.”

“It fits very well.”

“We can take in anything you need, but it’s a forgiving garment.”

“It’s perfect.” Sokka smoothed his hands down the front, to give his hands something to do. “Thanks. Again.”

“Come. Let’s share some tea before we retire for the night.”

“You,” said Sokka, “have a mission tomorrow.”

Zuko shrugged. “The anticipation will keep me up. A cup of tea and some company, though…”

“One cup. One.”

It had become something of a ritual between them while they had plotted over these months; unspoken. Sokka sipped the tea, which had grown on him. “Nervous for tomorrow?”

“Nervous? When I have the greatest general of his generation on my side?”

“Flatterer,” said Sokka.

Zuko leaned back against the cushions of his seating platform. The fire between them made the air shimmer; his image wavered. The teacup dangled from his fingers. “I’m returning to my roots,” he said, wry. “Blue Spirit days. A spontaneous attack here, a skirmish there.”

“You haven’t done anything like this in twenty-five spans.”

“No.” Zuko’s eyes glittered in the firelight. “But we have prepared. Quite thoroughly. You drilled the soldiers. You drew the battle plans. You saw the account books.”

“Licitly, too.”

Zuko sipped, smiling.

“You are awfully sanguine about your first conflict in two and a half decades,” Sokka said.

“I trust you.”

“We should go over battle plans. What would you do if—”

Zuko laughed. “We’ve gone over them ten thousand times.”

“What if something goes wr—”

“It won’t.”

Sokka pursed his lips, then leaned back against his own set of cushions. Zuko refilled their cups and toasted Sokka with his. “Tell me who you are, Mr Mystery. Who am I fighting for?”

“You’ve known me for three of your months.”

“I could stand to know more.”

Like this, the hair escaping from his stern topknot, the frog loosened at his collar to expose the cleft of his throat, he looked like something Sokka should not be looking at. He cleared his throat and looked harder, in defiance, or something. “Like what?”

Zuko traced the rim of his cup. “Anyone waiting for you back home?”

Sokka shrugged. “Katara, Aang, my dad. Kya and the nephews.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you,” said Sokka, “begin.”

“What do you want to know?”

“The Blue Spirit. Is that how you met Aang?”

“Of course,” said Zuko. A glinting smile. “I broke him out of the Pohuai Stronghold in the Horn Mansion.”

“That was your first encounter?”

“Mmhmm.” Zuko was sporting a rather self-satisfied expression. “No one knew it was him, and that slimeball Zhao was so embarrassed that he let slip the Avatar. It was the kind of cover-up rivalled only by a nun shrinking away from a suntan.”

“The stories always said it was just the one infiltrator,” said Sokka. “But that entire compound was watertight, radio scanners and Yuyan sharpshooters on every corner—there must’ve been a team.”

“No team. Just me.”

“Alright,” groused Sokka. “Show-off.”

“Would never have worked with a team,” said Zuko. “Too many variables. You need to make yourself as small as possible to slip through the cracks.”

“And how did you?”

Zuko shrugged. “I’m good at climbing things.”

“Sounds like a massive understatement,” said Sokka. He heaved himself off the cushions. “K, let’s see it.”

Zuko looked up at him: exposed throat, loosening hair, breath filling his chest. Then he got up.

They drew great rings into the rug circling each other. Zuko moved first in bursts of energy; suppressed fire sizzled at his knuckles when Sokka dodged his punch and moved towards the soft tissue of his stomach. He was an offensive fighter. No returning block, he simply leapt back to give himself enough space to aim a kick at Sokka’s encroach. Fire shot across his vision. When Zuko’s foot landed he bounced, shrugging off his outer robe, shaking his sleeves back. Sokka caught the next punch between his wrists. He wrenched Zuko’s arm away.

“I’m not seeing any climbing,” said Sokka.

So Zuko ricocheted himself from the adjoining wall. Sokka ducked. The impact hit him from the side and he rolled away. The outer robe tangled around him; his foot connected with Zuko’s shoulder, then he flung the robe over Zuko’s head.

Zuko emerged smirking from under the fabric. His topknot was slipping. Steel glinted in his eye. A swipe of flame in Sokka’s direction, which he dodged easily; the next one came out of nowhere, blistering against his cheek and crisping the ends of his hair. Sokka jabbed his fists, one-two, pulling back when fire bristled before him again. Pull back, reassess. Zuko prowled before him, feet feinting over the rug, sparks playing at his fingertips. His attacks went all in, but he favoured his right; the defence of the left—Sokka tested it now—was a hair slower.

Well, there was his opening.

Sokka rushed forwards, angling in hard. He’d anticipated it: Zuko reached out, fist gathering fire. His left leg reached back, a counterbalance—

—and caught the edge of the seating platform.

He might have caught his balance if Sokka did not put his foot out. When Zuko hit the floor the teacups clattered down with him: one shattered, one rolled under the brazier. Sokka pinned him down. He felt the pulse of each staccato breath under his sock. Zuko did not look too put out. The firelight shivered over his scarred eye. The exposed cleft of his throat bobbed. “You win.”

Sokka stepped back, then held out a hand for Zuko. “Not bad. You could’ve taken me down faster if you’d been more aware of your left.”

“Nothing for it. My vision and hearing there just aren’t as good.”

“You know you can get that fixed, right?” Sokka tapped his mechanical knee. “This, but for your eyes and ears. Common enough among the impaired and elderly at Jade Well IV.”

Zuko shrugged, returning to his seat. “It’s not something I could get on board with myself.”

“The surgery doesn’t hurt, trust me. You don’t feel anything under anaesthetic. And—well, I guess healing is faster if your sister is a master waterbending healer…”

“It’s not that,” said Zuko. “I just—I don’t think it would feel right. For me.”

Sokka pursed his lips. “I don’t understand.”

“In the Fire Nation—well, among some of the ethnic groups there, we believe the body should be unmodified. You’ve probably seen something similar around the Earth Kingdom.”

Sokka, whose body had been rather modified with piercings, tattoos, and cybernetics since a tender age, said dubiously, “Right.”

“I don’t think it’s wrong in other cultures,” Zuko hastened to say. “Even within the Fire Nation, you have some groups that—”

“Go on.”

“We believe the body is the gift of our parents. To modify it would be disrespectful.” He took down his topknot, letting his hair tumble over his shoulders. “That’s why we even keep the hair long. We cut it, obviously—split ends are a nightmare—but it’s a symbol—”

“I didn’t realise you respected the Phoenix King so much,” said Sokka.

“I still have a mother.”

He held Sokka’s gaze with one eye given by both his parents, and the other eye given by his father. He was suffering rather needlessly for this, Sokka felt, to prove a point.

“We should sleep. You,” said Sokka, “should sleep.” He drained his tea, now cold, and got up, tripping a little over the unfamiliar swathe of robes around his legs.

“Thanks for the company, General.”

Zuko looked quite serene, reclining upon his cushions and slowly relishing the last of his tea. Sokka paused at the door. “You’re ready.” He’d wanted to say it with conviction. “I know you are. All those months ago, the way you navigated that map—it told me you wanted to fight.”

“Did it now?” said Zuko with faint amusement. “Your navigation told me that you were lonely.”

“Now this is where the magic happens,” said Teo. “Nice robe.”

“I daresay,” said Sokka, daringly even, “the magic’s happening up there, what with the guys who move asteroids with their brains and the coupla chicks who turn water into ice, all led by the guy whose hands can shoot fireballs…”

“You have no appreciation for the finer things, General,” sighed Teo. He spun his chair back around and fiddled with the radio controls until the sound of static faded. A kid was in his lap, pulling at his wispy excuse of a beard. “There we go. Seneschal, Teo to seneschal…”

“Seneschal to Teo, copy,” came Zuko’s reply. “Battalion ready to exit planet.”

The signal cut, as was usual, as the fleet powered out of the atmosphere. After those moments, in which Sokka’s breath quivered in his lungs, Zuko’s voice crackled back on air. “All contingents passing through the debris field now.”

“Good, good,” said Sokka. “The target is passing through the outskirts of Emptiness’s system. Tracking their signal.”

That was a mere hop and skip away, thanks to the retrofitted solar sails that all the ships on Emptiness II were decked out with. They were there in no time. “How’s it looking?”

“Target within range,” said Zuko. “Formation in place, all checks coming through clear. How’s the space junk on your end?”

“Ready to roll, sir,” said Teo. Before him he had pulled up the radio map, the signal supplied by the old Air Nomad radio tower in the vicinity of where they had laid their trap. Their own fleet was practically invisible, transponders off to cloak themselves as best as they could from the approaching force. The Fire Nation’s ships lit up all over the map.

“Good. Twins, you’re up.”

Sokka sat back, fanning himself. The plan was his brainchild, textbook General Sokka with his hallmark weaponisation of the environment. The twins would throw up a wall of ice shards behind the Fire Nation fleet, disrupting their navigation sensors the same way that had kept the Fire Nation out of the White Tiger for the last decade. It really was a testament to Siqiniq and Taqqiq’s sheer power that they could even do this between just the two of them.

“Gottem,” said Zuko. “The formation is in place, and they’re headed right into it.”

It was hard to ignore the anticipation in his voice. This would be his first proper skirmish, Sokka realised, against the Fire Nation—no longer behind a vigilante’s mask, now with his motivation honed like a blade. Sokka checked the time. “The second ship should be moving up now.”

Zuko repeated the order through his short-range radio. Out there on the edge of their star system, where lingered only clusters of asteroids and lumps of ice, a shipful of earthbenders was heaving an asteroid into the flank of the Fire Nation’s expeditionary force, that arrow trying its best to fly into the heart of Sokka’s homeland. His fingers dug into the edge of Teo’s radio setup. Well, it was his plan; he wanted to be there to see it unfold. But today was Zuko’s moment to shine.

“Zuko, how’s it looking?”

“They’ve done as I ordered. Second ship was behind our planted asteroid, they—”

“Just the result will do.”

“Never imagined I would have General Sokka himself bossing me around right in my ear,” Zuko muttered.

“It’s a privilege,” said Sokka. “Without delay, please, seneschal.”

Zuko huffed. “Successful, of course. Asteroid smashed into one of the Target’s ships, clipped a second one. No good visuals on the impact of the debris, but all the ships around are floundering.”

“Good.”

It was an elaborate trap, one they had set and choreographed with a calligrapher’s precision. The earthbenders had pulled the asteroids into a great labyrinth, funnelling the Fire Nation force into its spiralling pathway. Nothing that would look too unnatural for this kind of galactic terrain: just a regular asteroid field, nothing to see here, folks! But Siqiniq and Taqqiq had closed off the entrance with a cloak of unnavigable ice; the ships would have no choice but to venture deeper and deeper into the maw. Zuko rattled off his orders and after some delay, the asteroids inched across the radio map—at the earthbenders’ instigation—right into the enemy ships.

It was a small fleet by Fire Nation standards, which meant it was still several magnitudes greater than their own: twenty ships, a half-dozen of which were full-size empire-class battleships. Still, it was satisfying to see them flail, scatter, and flicker out of their time-delayed radio map.

“Launching one of our zombies now, General,” said Teo at his elbow.

“That’s a terrible thing to call them,” said Sokka, and gave the signal. The so-called zombie, a wreck pulled from Emptiness II’s debris ring and fitted with a remote controller, flickered to life on the map. It would show up on the Fire Nation’s radio, but not for long before colliding headlong into the ships. About ten of these were stationed around their little snare.

“Well done, Teo,” said Zuko drolly. “Right on the mast of that one.”

They were picking off the scattered ships: that was the plan. Bringing up the rear, the twins would drive spears of ice through the hulls. The earthbenders would smash their hunks of rock into the ships. The zombies flared bright and disappeared, sending the radio signals of the Fire Nation haywire. Sokka tapped his fan against his chin, feeling the swell of victory in his grasp.

“Hmm,” said Zuko. “They’re regrouping.”

“We’ve planned for this,” said Sokka, ruthless. On his and Teo’s map, with the few seconds’ delay, he could see the remnant ships stutter back into formation. “Keep up the attack.”

“They’re turning… back?”

“They won’t get past the twins. Fire won’t burn in the vacuum. Zuko, focus. We’ve practised these scenarios.”

Zuko hummed. Distantly, Sokka heard him communicating with the twins’ ship, the whir and hum in the background of the flagship. Teo set off another two wrecks, but they seemed to have little effect on the Fire Nation’s formation.

“Shit,” Zuko muttered.

“What?”

“No, no, no, no, no.”

A sudden alarm blared in Sokka’s mind—not because of whatever might be transpiring out there, but he was seized with the need to be out there, helming the operation himself. “Zuko?”

“They’re going for the twins,” said Zuko. “They’re spreading out around the ice, they know—” and inevitably, like the scratchings on an oracle bone, the image was stuttering into view on their planetside radio map. Around the disrupted frequency of the Siqiniq and Taqqiq’s ice wall, the remnant Fire Nation ships were spreading out, the asteroids that had been fencing them in all scattered by now—

“We’re going after them,” said Zuko.

“Are you insane?” said Sokka. He snapped his fan shut so it became a rod of bronze in his fist. “The earthbenders can handle—”

“They’re scattered and regrouping, but it’s too slow,” said Zuko. Sokka heard him barking an order to his crew, muffled away from the microphone, and clamoured for his attention again. “No, no. They’re our most proficient waterbenders, I can’t—”

Sokka saw, after a few moments that stretched for too long, a speck separate from a blob on the map and inch towards the fleet. “What the FUCK do you think you’re DOING?”

Teo winced. “I think he’s trying to rescue them.”

“Teo, ram one of your damn zombies into the target. Zuko? Zuko, listen to me. This is a fool’s errand. The rest of us can handle—”

“I think it’s working,” said Zuko in a terrible voice. “They’ve noticed me.”

It was messy after that: Sokka hollering with no response, Teo flipping through the channels, the toddler jolting awake to start gibbering. They had limited weapons on board; Zuko had a bunch of earthbenders on board, they were meant to use the environment as their weapon, dammit. Onscreen, the delayed dots flickered back and forth. The edges of Sokka’s fan bit into his hand—the other one was flying over the controls, sending whatever zombies he could after the enemy.

“Hey,” said Zuko after a while, breathless.

“What’s going on?” Sokka shouted. “You weren’t responding—”

“We were engaged,” said Zuko.

“And you’ve now… disengaged?” The map was no help, the dot of Zuko’s flagship in apparent pursuit of one of the Fire Nation ships.

“No, they’ve hooked tethers onto us. But it’s OK, I’m going to deal with it.”

“Zuko? Zuko!” Sokka barked. No reply, except for some huffing and grunting from the radio. “Shit. Fuck. Teo, get me the flagship comms.”

Teo twisted the dial. “Teo to flagship.”

“It’s the General,” said Sokka, wrenching the microphone to his mouth. “Can someone tell me what the HELL your seneschal is doing?”

Silence.

“That’s an order.”

“Um,” said someone, voice wavering, “he’s thrown himself out of the airlock?”

Sokka swore, so elaborately Teo had to clamp his hands over the toddler’s ears. He reached over Teo to crank the knob himself. “ZUKO! You fucking numbskull, do you have a death wish? Get the FUCK back inside!”

“Relax, Sokka. I know what I’m doing.”

“Stick to the plan! The plan!”

“This was not in the plan. They need help.”

“Zuko, get your ass back in the ship or I swear to—”

“Eugh,” said Zuko, “you sound like your sister.” And then his channel turned to static.

For a moment Sokka stood gawking at the radio. It took Teo nudging the channel back to the flagship for him to shake himself back into action.

“Flagship,” he snapped, “do we have eyes on your idiot seneschal?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And he’s still connected to your comms?”

“Yes, sir. But he’s not saying anything.”

At least he wasn’t a total fucking idiot. “Give me a blow by blow,” said Sokka.

“He’s going to break the tow lines apart. He’s taken a handful of grenades and he’s propelling himself over now.”

The kind of tethers that towed ships were made of steel and attached onto hapless spacecraft with powerful magnets. They could be broken apart, if the weak points at the joints were hacked apart. “How far off is he?”

“Seventy feet by the radio map. Fifty. Thirty. Ten… I think he’s blown apart the first one.”

“How many are there?”

“Three. Propelling over to the second now, General. Aaand… he’s got it.”

“This is a fool’s errand,” said Sokka fervently.

“Onto the third. Ah, wait.”

“What?”

“I can’t tell by the…” The speaker hummed. “Something shifted? Seneschal! Hey! Oh, and he’s yelling. He’s boinged back on the map. Oh, look there’s another body signature. Oh. And another one. And another…”

So they had sent people out to fight him. Sokka wanted nothing more than to sink his head into his hands. Even Teo looked worried for once, fiddling with the knobs to try and regain contact with Zuko. Sokka pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Pull him back.”

“Sorry? G-general.”

“He’s connected to the tether, right? Pull him back.”

“But he said—”

“I,” said Sokka, “am the right hand man of the Avatar. I outrank the seneschal. Pull him back.”

The voice on the radio said, mulishly, “Copy.”

And right then, a long flat beeeeeeep issued from the radio.

“What’s that?” said Sokka, even though he knew. Teo’s stricken face was enough. He grabbed the microphone. “FLAGSHIP!” he roared. “FLAGSHIP, DO YOU COPY?”

On the radio map screen, the flagship blazed bright, then vanished.

Every nerve in Sokka’s body ran cold. Zuko out there, right as he was being yanked back, the attackers, the ship, the tow lines, the vacuum of space—

“There’s a signal incoming from the tower out there,” said Teo, scrambling over the controls. And when he hit the channel, the voice that came through was big, bombastic, and wholly unfamiliar.

“Whoever you are, you clever clogs,” it sneered, a voice raspy and curdled with venom, “thinking you could ambush us in this ruin of a quadrant, you won’t be celebrating for long. You think it’s just us? Think again. The Phoenix King, ten thousand years to him, is going to turn your dusty wasteland into the galactic superhighway that will give him the Water Tribes. And he will come on our heels with a fury, unmatched in all the mansions—”

And then that line, too, exploded into static.

Chapter Text

The incense stick burned through a nail-biting quarter before the remnant of their fleet reestablished communications with Teo. It took another half before their returning force blazed back through the atmosphere. Sokka ran out into the courtyard, Teo hot on his heels. Half the community was there. High above, a ribbon of red twisted out of the clouds, then landed with a thump among them.

Everyone rushed to their seneschal. Sokka found himself buffeted by the crowd, unable to push through.

“Let me pass!” cried a woman’s voice. “I’m the physician, I need to—”

A huge cloud of smoke. The crowd lurched backwards, taking Sokka with them. Coughing, he waded through the bodies, eyes stinging in the white. A wave of terror threatened to surface at the smell of burning—he pushed it down. “Where is he?! What’s wrong with him?”

“I don’t know,” said Doctor Song. She appeared amid the smoke, a dark shape with an arm flung over her head. “He won’t let me close.”

Then the white curled away from Druk and Sokka saw the prone body clutched in his great claws. A horrible jolt went through his spine.

“What does he need?” he said, voice steadier than he felt.

“I need to get up close to check his meridians,” said Song. She took a small jar from her bag. “This should stabilise him for the time being.”

Sokka pursed his lips. He looked up at the great draconic face looming above him, hissing protectively over Zuko. “Easy, Druk, easy,” he murmured. He held out a hand for Druk to sniff, resisted the urge to flinch when the great dragon snorted burning steam over his hand.

There was a gasp behind him, quickly shushed. He ignored it. “Druk, it’s me. You know me. You know all of us. You’ll let me see him, right? He needs our help.”

The dragon bared his teeth. Sokka couldn’t flinch before him, he couldn’t show hesitation or weakness; he bit his tongue. The long whiskers flicked. And—out of the blue—Druk’s tail swept up from behind and sent him tumbling into Zuko.

Sokka reached for him at once. It was warm in Druk’s coils. A reptile emitting its own heat, Sokka thought distantly, then turned Zuko over.

It wasn’t a pretty sight.

The helmet had already been ripped off, probably by the crew that had rescued him. His hair was flattened against his scalp on one side, a bruise blossoming over his cheekbone, his lips deathly white. Sokka tamped down on the wave of horror that threatened the walls of his composure.

“Zuko?” He put a finger under the seneschal’s nose, rested the back of his hand against Zuko’s cheek. A puff of air, a touch of warmth. Sokka could have sobbed out of relief, and when he registered the emotion it frightened him.

“He’s alive,” Sokka choked. Then, louder, “Alive. I think Druk’s warmth is restorative for him.”

The gathered crowd moved at once, like a breath let out after being held for too long. Sokka patted Zuko’s cheek. “Hey, hey. It’s me. Sokka. Zuko? Wake up, can you wake up?”

“General.” Sokka looked up. It was Doctor Song, edging closer, holding out her jar. “Can you…?”

Sokka took it from her. The medicine was ink-black and pungent, still warm as he took a sniff. Then he cradled Zuko’s head up and urged the liquid past his bloodless lips.

Nothing happened at first, and Sokka worried that Zuko would choke on the medicine and die all over again. Then he coughed.

Dark beads of medicine, spit, and blood splattered against Sokka’s gifted robes. It was disgusting. He couldn’t help it. He laughed, and it was out of incredulity, out of relief. A ragged cheer went up among the gathered well-wishers.

“Let me take him,” he beseeched Druk. “I’ll look after him, I’ll give him back to you. He’s in good hands.”

Druk’s great yellow eye stared down at him. The slit of his pupil, the slow blink of his two eyelids—the thin membrane sliding sideways, the scaly lid clamping down after it. The smoke curled around his body. Sokka held his gaze, stood his ground.

And the dragon released his grip.

Zuko started awake on a chill morning, some four days after the tits-up skirmish. “Did they— Did they make—”

Sokka, keeping vigil by his bed, turned a page of his book. “Can we test your language comprehension abilities, seneschal?”

“Sokka… Did we recover—”

“Can you tell me what the words follow the plan mean?”

Zuko screwed up his eyes, flopping back into his cushions. Sokka snapped his book shut. He looked pathetic, dark hair streaming over the sheets around a pale, drawn face. When they peeled the spacesuit off him, they’d found his body bleeding and bruised, a rib or two cracked. His room was now stuffed full, dangling charms and baskets of fruit, silk sachets of strong smelling herbs, wind chimes tinkling in the chill breeze on the balcony: the well-wishes of everyone on the planet who loved him. It had become harder and harder each day for Sokka to navigate through the piles to his seat. Like this, it was hard to stay angry at him for long. Sokka was determined to try.

“Take your medicine,” he said, brusquely tilting Zuko’s head back to tip Song’s latest concoction into his mouth. “I have to call for the doctor, she’s gone out to run errands—”

“Wait,” said Zuko. Sokka, in spite of himself, stopped halfway out of the room. “Tell me what happened. Please. I need to know.”

Sokka hesitated.

They’d tried to piece it together from the reports of the survivors and the rest of their force. The Fire Nation force, apparently deciding their captive ship was too much trouble after Zuko had gone out to destroy their tow lines, had hit the flagship with a missile. Three of the crew were recovered, adrift in the vacuum and heavily injured. All were making their own slow recoveries back on the planet. The rest were missing, presumed dead. Sokka thought they’d be lucky to find the bodies intact. With the seneschal out of action, Osha had conducted their funerals so their souls might be laid to rest.

“And the twins?”

Zuko’s diversion had indeed saved them. Siqiniq and Taqqiq spent the first anxious night by Song’s side, siphoning blood from his wound and staunching the flow. Sokka had grilled them for more details after: they’d heard the mysterious radio broadcast too, as they flung themselves into retreat. Then the debris of the flagship crashed into the radio tower. After that, even the Fire Nation scouts retreated; this much high-velocity debris in a vacuum was even more of a death trap than the one they had planted.

This he related to Zuko, bland and dispassionate. There was no way, he knew, to spare him the details further down the line and Zuko understood at once the price that had been paid. “Who were they?” he asked, and Sokka told him; names he didn’t know but were imbued with meaning for Zuko; Zuko turned his face away, his private grief; and Sokka’s heart seized when he heard the hitch of pain the movement produced. He busied himself with reheating the thin congee Song had left for him earlier in the day.

“Hey,” he said when it was done, perching on the edge of the mattress, “you should eat now.” He propped Zuko up, lifted the spoon to his dry lips. Ignored the hastily wiped tears.

“I’m not hungry,” Zuko mumbled, and ate anyway.

Teo came back that afternoon. “Got that tower working again,” he told Sokka. “We’ll need to do supplementary repairs over the next few weeks to keep it in shape, but at least the signal works again. We did also recover some… y’know, remains.” He wiped his greasy brow. “I’m gonna need a noodle soup, a bath, and a lie down for the next five spans. I don’t suppose you’ve met my second-oldest…?”

Sokka wasn’t sure but nodded as the child next to Teo bowed; this one was lanky in the way the Emptiness II youths were and had a bunch of tools strapped to their belt, so it really had to be another one. “Appreciated, Teo.” In an undertone, he added, “He woke up too, just this morning.”

Teo became alert at once. “He did? I’ll go see him.” Then his chair took him, quite rapidly, up the stairs while the child wandered off in the direction of the dining hall. Sokka, thinking he may as well take advantage of the repaired radio tower, went to the radio room.

“Hey Aang,” he said, then leaned back in his chair so only the rear two legs stayed on the ground, “you’re not gonna like this…”

Knowing Aang was listening on the other end, it was easy to let the brave face slip. With Zuko out of action, he knew the community was looking to him as leader. He told Aang about the plot, the failure, Zuko out of the airlock, Zuko blowing the lines, Zuko attacked. The ship blowing up. The truncated threat over the radio. The silence. The silence, the silence, until someone, blessedly, someone hit their frequency range and screamed that they were coming back, they’re coming back as fast as they can, yes General yes we have the seneschal, will someone please open the gate in the orbiting debris?

“Zuko’s recovering, they picked up three others. We took out about ten of their ships but we’ve lost—a whole group of skilled earthbenders, talented pilots… There’s a lot of them on this planet but shit, not enough against whatever the Phoenix King’s going to launch at us. Even if we could field every single person of military age on this planet…” He scrubbed a palm over his eyes. “He was trying to save the twins, they’re our most competent waterbenders.”

He let the silence drag, breathing heavy into his hand. Then he reached over and flicked the radio off.

The remains were not all identifiable and too gruesome to be displayed before the community. Sokka, as the architect of their excursion, felt it his duty to bear witness. He washed them as best as he could, insofar as they could be washed, and arranged them in a hastily-fashioned casket. The blood had all floated away in the vacuum. Osha conducted the funeral with all her gravitas, Toh-ki cremated the casket, and Sokka went upstairs and found Zuko on the floor of his bedroom.

“Are you shitting me?” said Sokka, running to lift him. “We leave you alone for ONE incense time—”

Zuko hissed through his teeth as Sokka hoisted him, not ungently, back onto his bed. “Where the HELL did you think you were going? Your pocket radio is right here, if you needed anything you could’ve called—”

“I needed to go down there,” said Zuko, with difficulty. “Two funerals and I couldn’t attend a single one.” He attempted to rear up again, making Sokka shout before collapsing back against his cushions. “What kind of seneschal does that make me?”

You’re recovering,” said Sokka, exasperated. “You can’t go down, no one’s holding it against you, now will you please”—he had to push Zuko back down—“stay here and try not to break your ribs again?”

There was little else Zuko could do. Sokka checked his bandages and wounds; one of the stitches had started bleeding again, and he tutted as he disinfected his hands and closed it back up. Zuko bore the pain gallantly.

“They died because of my failure,” said Zuko. His eyes were unseeing, glazed with the image of the powder-sprinkle snow outside his balcony. “The best I can do is see them off.”

As a general who had been fielding armies for the last few decades, Sokka knew a thing or two about people dying under his watch. Mostly that, it happened. It was war. “Don’t say that,” he said. “You can’t think like that.”

Zuko closed his eyes. “I know you’re angry I went off-script.”

“Well,” Sokka said with a touch of irony, “thank you for acknowledging my feelings.”

One eye reopened to glare at him. Sokka scowled back, as good as he’d got. Zuko broke first.

“Don’t give me that. I had no choice. It was either do nothing, or sit by and let us the twins get butchered. Let us all get butchered. People under my custodianship. So I put on my damn helmet and I got out of that airlock and propelled myself with my own damn hands—”

“You are fucking insane.”

“I’m insane and I blew two of those lines off. We could’ve gotten free if not for those—”

“You could’ve died.” Sokka turned his face away. Died, and then where would we all be?

“I should’ve seen them coming,” said Zuko. “They came in from the left, I didn’t—” He screwed up his eyes, the unblemished right one, the burned left. “They got me right in the side, knocked me away from the last one.”

Sokka’s fingers drifted down to his side, restitched and rebandaged. He hadn’t seen that blow coming; he had no time to even flinch. And when he realised what he was doing, he snatched his hand back as though burned.

The Mechanist found him in the workshop later that night, doing his rounds to lock up. “Oh! General! I didn’t see you there.”

“Sorry…” said Sokka blearily. “Lost track of the time. Do you need me out?”

“You can stay. It’s very dark though.” He hobbled over despite Sokka’s protests and lit a few more lamps. The glow settled warm over the scrap of benchtop Sokka had cleared out. “Ah, there we go. What’s this?”

Sokka covered it abortively, then slid his arm back to show the old inventor. “I’m not very good at drawing…”

“Ooh,” said the Mechanist, leaning in to squint in spite of the several stacked lenses on his spectacles, “cybernetics, are they? You’ve made them before?”

“A couple of times, yeah,” said Sokka. “I designed the current one in my leg.”

The sketch was rough, the graphite-lines splintered like scattered hay. The Mechanist traced the lines with a spindly finger. “These aren’t for the leg though… It’s an eyepiece?”

“Yes,” said Sokka. “One for the eye, the other for the ear. They’d require a bit of surgery to implant but should be fairly seamless once inside…”

The Mechanist hummed. “Very interesting! Well, as they say, three feet of ice do not form in a single day. I’ll leave you to work, General.”

The flex of her thigh under your hands. The pucker of her nipple. The memory-glow at her temple winks when she smiles at you, and her eyes crinkle, and she breathes your name, Sokka. It always sends a flutter through you. You kiss. You are drooling down your thigh, drooling onto the skins. Her legs part for you with a sound like lips smacking. You press her wetness to yours. The slide, the grind, the way her moans fog the air. Your clit stutters over the folds of her cunt, the rasp of pubic hair. Your breasts bounce painfully with the force of your lovemaking. Your fingers in the meat of her leg, a weight on your shoulder, silver-streaked hair a waterfall upon the sheets, the arch of her throat, the ivory beads sliding off her collarbones and clattering, your hair a mess over your face, sticking to the sweat, the scars littered white upon her heaving breast, teeth biting into her bottom lip, the wet gape of the hole you’re pumping into, fucked into the shape of your cock, scarred eye a slit of pleasure, lips parting to moan— Wait.

Sokka fought his way out of the layers of his blankets, heartbeat in his hands, blood pumping between his legs. Sokka, the voice had said, deep and raspy, and he tried to claw back the ghost-memory, to chase the remnant of the flutter that had roused him, to vivisect its contents under the harsh eye of wakefulness—but wakefulness had come, and the image of the dream would not return to him.

Doctor Song’s look, when she saw him come into Zuko’s room, was almost one of dismay. “General.” She cast a stern look at him over the rims of her spectacles. “I do believe your visits coincide with moments of distress for my patient.”

“Aw doc,” said Sokka, wounded, “I’ve even stitched him up for you!”

“Yes, I did notice,” she said. “You’ve done a fair job, I will give you that.”

“I’ve seen my fair share of battlefield scrapes.”

“I’m right here too,” Zuko sniffed.

That he was. But the good doctor was checking his wounds and the bandages were off, and Sokka was finding it suddenly difficult to look for too long. “I was coming in to seek Doctor Song’s advice, actually.”

“Oh?”

“Would you judge the seneschal well enough to receive some… unfavourable information?”

“Oh for Heaven’s sake,” said Song, and Zuko said, “Tell me.”

The two traded a look, then Song sighed. “The seneschal’s recovery is going well. As long as it won’t give him a heart attack—”

“No, no,” said Sokka, “no heart attacks, I swear. Perhaps for ordinary men”—here, Song gave him a look of alarm—“but not for the likes of our hallowed seneschal—”

“Finish up, doctor,” said Zuko. “The General is clearly impatient.”

Sokka took a seat on the edge of Zuko’s bed and jiggled his knee while Song rewrapped the bandages. When she left, Sokka took out his portable radio, flicked replay. It was a message he’d listened to over and over again while waiting for Zuko to wake up, one he’d memorised by now. The sneering old man’s voice, Whoever you are, you clever clogs… the hypophora, You think it’s just us? Think again, the abrupt end when the bits of Zuko’s flagship smashed into the radio tower.

And Zuko listened, a little frown creasing his brow, and he said, “I know that voice.”

Sokka had been expecting dismay, concern, maybe even no small fury that he hadn’t shared this earlier. He said, “What?”

“That’s Admiral Zhao.”

Sokka pursed his lips. “Remind me?”

“Pohuai Stronghold?”

“Him!” Sokka exclaimed. “That was decades ago. He’s still around?”

“Apparently so,” said Zuko grimly. “Sounds a lot older but I’d know him from anywhere. He was always leeching up to my father. A real thorn in my side during my years in exile.”

“What do you know of him?”

Zuko shrugged. “I haven’t heard the name in decades. When he discovered the ship my uncle and I were travelling in, he made it a personal mission to hinder us as much as he could.” He pursed his lips. “My father, when he exiled me, tasked me with capturing the Avatar.”

Sokka scoffed. “Great job you did there.”

“Back then, I didn’t free Aang out of any generosity towards him. I wanted to prevent Zhao from claiming my mission for himself.”

“So he’s petty,” Sokka mused.

“Vindictive too,” said Zuko. “Holds a grudge.”

“You don’t think he’s lying about the Phoenix King’s forces? Trying to spook us?”

“I don’t know that he has the cunning,” said Zuko. “He’s a brute force kind of man.”

“So they are coming,” said Sokka. He shoved the radio deep into the fold of his robe. “And soon, it seems.”

Aang’s reply to Sokka’s report on the skirmish was succinct and coded, as he had taken to communicating since Sokka’s arrival on Emptiness II.

Distressing news. We are thinking of the lost. Hope Zuko has speedy recovery. Request further resources if necessary. Kids send their love. Aang.

Sokka sent off his own reply by voice, updating him on Zuko’s gradual recovery. “And,” he added, “he recognised the voice on the radio. It was Admiral Zhao, the guy whose prison he broke you out of? Any intel on him? Zuko thinks he’s not lying about a greater force to come in the near future. The Phoenix King isn’t letting us off easy.”

He wrapped up the message there, hardly in the mood for listening to his own voice nattering away about inane matters. Then, with only the humble light of his lamp to accompany him, he started on the long route back up to his room on the top floor of the temple. Then he hit his landing.

In the dim light of the jagged moon’s waxing crescent, a shape was moving at the far end of the hallway. Sokka lifted his lamp.

Then light flooded the hallway, brilliant blue.

Sokka stopped in his tracks. The shape was a tall figure—no, not tall, but wearing a tall headdress—veiled, garbed in rippling red as though an invisible wind were buffeting around them. It was an apparition he had glimpsed before, but not like this, never this clearly; these were Fire Nation reds, they were not garments of war. Not a single burn mark or wound to be seen. In an outstretched hand was a palmful of fire, the brilliant blue of—

The light went out, and the apparition was gone again.

“Are you sure?” said Sokka. “We can do this another day.”

“I’m sure,” said Zuko, exasperated. “This is the third time you’ve asked.”

“OK,” said Sokka. Then, “But if you’re really not sure—”

“As much as I appreciate the concern, I will wallop you off the balcony if you ask again.”

“I’d like to see you try,” said Sokka, “seeing as I am acting as your human crutch right now and you have the strength of perhaps four—no, maybe five—midges— Owwww! Fuck!”

He glared at Zuko, rubbing the spot he had pinched with worryingly lethal force. “Save that for your Zhao, why don’t you?”

Zuko offered him only an innocent smile, then blew a stream of fire into the air. Sokka watched, then shook himself. When Druk came twisting out of the skies and roaring in, he braced.

“Hi baby,” said Zuko happily. He put his forehead to Druk’s great snout, breathing in. The dragon’s eyes fluttered shut. It was exceedingly intimate.

Sokka helped him climb aboard, then clambered behind him. “You can’t still be scared,” Zuko said, amusement lacing his voice as Sokka’s fingers dug into him. “It’s been months.”

“Someone has to make sure you don’t fall off,” Sokka grumbled. The dragon flung itself into the sky. “And I wasn’t scared.”

Druk landed with a thwump in the middle of the temple courtyard. It was filled with people: the snow cleared out, the community packing in to see their seneschal’s first outing after his recovery, kites swooping in the breeze, the smell of roasting chestnuts. At the front were the three survivors from Zuko’s ship, seated, variously bandaged, and swelling with pride. Zuko slid off Druk’s back and stumbled. Sokka caught him. A look passed between them, and they made their slow way to the middle of the throng.

They cheered for him, loud and ardent. And Sokka was right there with him but he felt himself fade away, become one with the outpouring of genuine love for the seneschal. He was their symbol of hope and renewal and they had feared he would be forever gone, and now he was back. They could go another day.

Zuko bore the attention, then held up a hand for quiet. It came after a few more attempts at applause, and a few rounds of conspicuous shush-ing. He had that gravitas. He cleared his throat.

“I must begin by acknowledging the sacrifice made by those who shared my ship. Nam-soo, Beishi, Zhan, Chek Kiu, Min-min, and Ngai Ha, I can never atone enough for my lapse that doomed you, nor apologise enough for not being there to see your souls into the next life.” He turned to bow towards the temple, formal, hands folded in front of his body and bending—Sokka knew, with enormous pain—his body at the waist.

He turned back to the crowd. “What we have feared for so long will come to be. The Phoenix King knows we’re here now, and he is on his way. We are but a mere roadblock to him—a roadblock to the conquest of the whole of the White Tiger.” He curled his hand into a fist. “But he should find our humble settlement a much bigger hindrance than anticipated.”

He hesitated. Sokka squeezed his arm. They had rehearsed it: I am sorry to ask for more from you. But the galaxy needs us. The time for detachment is over. We have bided our time, we have prepared our forces. It is my wish to commit greater forces— But it was always something he was loath to do, to ask too much of the people under his care.

“Seneschal.” Zuko looked up. The voice had come from the front of the crowd, the three survivors. One of them had hobbled forwards, reaching towards him.

“Sit,” said Zuko, alarmed, “please sit.” But she was determined.

“Seneschal, we’ve hidden away long enough. Despite the sacrifices, we prevailed against their much larger force. I’m proud of the role I played. I would do it again.”

Zuko started. But others were stepping forwards, adding their voices: male and female, young and old, bender and nonbender.

“We’ve prepared for so long, seneschal, it’s time.”

“It’s time we revealed ourselves and gave back to the galaxy.”

“It’s time we used our full capabilities.”

Zuko staggered back, as though each word were lancing through him anew. Sokka’s grip on him tightened, supporting his weight, feeling the rich softness of the woven bison fur and rubbing soothing circles into it with his thumb.

“Seneschal.” Now, the twins that he had endeavoured so hard to save had shouldered their way forwards together. “We’re ready for war.”

Under his hands, Sokka could feel Zuko’s muscles loosen, flooded with relief, moved to the bone by the spirit of the community he had nurtured himself. The willing sacrifice they saw the crew on Zuko’s flagship make, and would make themselves too. When Zuko spoke again, his voice was bittersweet. “Then there’s nothing else to say. Emptiness II is mobilising for war.”

Chapter Text

Emptiness III was the third planet orbiting Emptiness. It was a large desolate place, just far away enough for all its water to turn to ice, save for the tidally locked circle of forest that faced the cold sun for all hours of the day. The line of its orbit ran close to its much faster-orbiting sister, so much so that when their paths crossed the shadow of Emptiness III was imprinted into the sky, waxing and waning like the moon.

That, Sokka and Zuko surmised, was where the Phoenix King would put the base of his operations. His pompous ships were already approaching the Emptiness mansion, all fanfare, no attempt to conceal their tracks. They watched first from radio maps, the cloud of dots so large, so dense they gave the appearance of a nebula, lighting up a streak through the Black Tortoise—then they watched from their long-range spyglasses as the fleet entered the mansion.

The planet became a flurry of activity as they prepared for war. The residents from the most remote settlements on the planet started to flock to the temple, and it grew busier than ever. The lanky youths drilled their forms in the courtyard to the thud of the drum. On occasion Osha would shuttle them into space to train in the conditions of battle: weightlessness and artificial weight, piloting manoeuvres, ship formations, all while she barked orders over the radio. Her crop of commanders was coming up strong, poring over historical battle maps late into the night. Sokka would find one or two wandering the halls late at night, pale as the resident apparitions, reciting battle plans into cups of strong tea. Teo and the Mechanist holed themselves up in the workshop, scribbling reams and reams of designs; these they ferried over to Toh-ki at the furnaces, which belched smoke day and night as the firebender smiths sweated over their creation. During a rare free moment, Teo dusted off his huge pair of mechanised boots and showed them to Sokka, walking (miraculously!) and even blasting off from the ground by a few feet. When Sokka flew out to visit Doctor Song’s beyul, he found even that slice of paradise busy with production. Still preternaturally green, speckled now even with the impossible colour of wildflowers. Her trainees had all flocked here, drying, pounding, fermenting herbs; a few of the more talented earthbenders had enriched a patch of winter soil to force more herbs to grow—and at double speed too, if Sokka’s eyes weren’t mistaken.

Zuko was at the centre of it all.

They set up shop for him in a hall outside the sanctuary, a daybed fluffed up with bison wool that let him recline and give orders without the unlucky souls of Emptiness II hiking it up the ten thousand flights to his room. There, he sipped his medicine and fielded requests all day, and once in a while Osha or Sokka would come in and make him eat his vegetables. When Song gave him leave to be more active, he became a menace, losing himself in the infinite hallways of the temple. When he got like this, only Osha or Sokka could reliably fish him back out.

This was one such night; Sokka coming back after a long day drilling light-armed combat techniques to take Zuko up to bed, and finding his post empty. When he finally found Zuko he was three floors up, two turns down the corridor, through a disused meditation chamber and past a drifting legless apparition, right at the end of the hallway. The window was flung open, he was silhouetted in the window against the gleaming night sky. “Zuko… Come back in. Close the window, it’s cold.”

“My sister’s out there.”

He sounded faraway, his voice joining the place where his thoughts lay. High above, gleaming through the scattered clouds, was Emptiness III, its curve a cruel sickle or a wicked smile. Sokka trod towards him, his hunter’s feet picking out the steps as though he were after a resting tiger-seal. “How do you know?”

“I don’t.” Zuko half-turned now, towards him, so the fine-wrought line of his profile faced him. “Call it instinct, I suppose. There are a lot of ships. It’s a big operation and she plays a key role in the apparatus of the Fire Nation.”

Sokka shored up beside him. They were both encircled by the window frame. Zuko was incredibly close, his face turned down and away so Sokka could see the downward sweep of his eyelashes. “Do you miss her?”

“I…” Zuko pursed his lips. “She was a… difficult person.”

Fire Nation royalty? That checked out. “Right…”

“She was talented, a perfect firebender. Way better than I ever was, a specialist in the craft. I was always jealous of her, when we were children. She could bend lightning from age six, even her flames were a different colour. Looking back, I think she wasn’t very, ah, stable. Neither was I,” Zuko added ruefully. “I’ve kept tabs on her over the years, best as I could. As far as I can tell, she’s the sole heir. She always had his attention.”

“He’s done a good job shutting that information down,” said Sokka. “Even our best spies have no intel on the succession. Just theories.”

“Paranoid old man,” said Zuko, with unexpected venom. Then, “She joined the Sagehood a few years after I left.”

“She’s… spiritual?”

“Not the Azula I remember.” Zuko sent a narrowed look out the window, at the thin crescent that “Not if she’s on campaign with him now. It’s a custom for the royal family to legitimise itself through the consent of the spirits. That’s her role, I imagine, as Sage. My father’s throughline to the spirits.”

The ghostly monk passed behind them. Sokka shivered. He put an arm around Zuko and shut the window against the cold. “Come on. It’s time to sleep.”

The Phoenix King’s ships made their first landings on Emptiness III. The residents of Emptiness II, still behind in the orbit, tracked the growing tumour of their camp on the surface of the planet. The sleek galleys formed an iron-black square over the planet’s atmosphere; a strange kidney-shaped craft, almost camouflaged in space thanks to its reflective surface hovered on the outskirts; then, the pièce de résistance came, the many-spired pagoda that could only be the Phoenix King’s mobile palace, his seat of power.

It was a full scale invasion headed towards the White Tiger, bigger than even Sokka had ever seen. Emptiness II was a mere bug to be crushed underfoot on the way. A grim determination set in over the planet, worsened all the more by the Fire Nation’s gruesome gift. Sokka was planetside when a message from the moon came for him.

“General?” It was a squeaking voice that practically bristled with hormonal acne. “Radioing for further instructions.”

“Yes?”

“A box came floating our way from the Phoenix King’s camp, the scan told us there was organic matter inside. And there was short-range radio, when we got close enough the people inside—”

“People?!”

“—yes, people, told us they were captives of the Fire Nation, they’re finally free, they’re really sick, we could see their bones looked weird on the scan—”

“Tell me you ignored them.”

A beat. “We took the box in?”

Sokka screamed at them over the radio. Then Osha heard him screaming and came over to give them a piece of her own mind for good measure. When she was done, Sokka snatched the radio back.

“Do not move,” he snapped, “do not open the box, do not touch them, leave them where they are. If I come back and find that you’ve—” He spluttered through a few abortive threats, failed to find a fitting one, then hung up.

“That was quite noble of them,” said Zuko when Sokka marched up to the daybed to report the security breach.

A vein, somewhere behind his eye, threatened to burst. “Sometime during the early reign of your grandfather,” he said, “the Fire Nation left a mysteeeerious cargo container behind after a retreat. We thought it was booty. And thirty firebenders jumped out and razed half the settlement.” He tapped his temple. “The second-last Sokka on this chip has it recorded right here.”

“These people are evidently ill.”

“That’s the thing,” Sokka hissed, bracketing with his hands for emphasis. “What do you think they’re ill from? Let’s say we believe their little story. Captives? Zuko, they worked on the reactors. They’re full of the uranium poison, it’s even in their bones. And the Fire Nation has shot them towards us.”

Handsome, stupid Zuko, bane of Sokka’s existence, said, “I think we could help them.”

He felt responsible, Sokka realised. He felt responsible for them because they were his father’s victims, and he wanted to save them. Ever the idealist. He snapped his fingers in front of Zuko’s face. “There’s nothing we can do. Nothing. It’s a death sentence. We’d be wasting our resources and getting ourselves sick in the process.”

“Then what would you do?” said Zuko, batting his hand aside. “Let them succumb slowly and starve?”

“No,” said Sokka. Then, “You won’t like this…”

“Tell me anyway.”

“We could make it quick for them. And no one has to touch them. Atmospheric entry.” He winced at the incredulity dawning on Zuko’s face. “I said you wouldn’t like it…”

“No,” said Zuko, “no, no. I am not burning them up in our sky.”

Let it be known that Sokka applied his veto. But Zuko insisted he could not be vetoed, he was the seneschal of this planet, he could do whatever he liked, and Doctor Song went up quite willingly too. Sokka, as the sole responsible adult on this forsaken planet, followed her up to the moon, helped her set up a wing to be leakproof as possible, and watched from the next room.

It was a trap. It had to be. When they’d opened the box they’d found it signed, Compliments of Zhao, Admiral of the Horn and Winnowing Basket mansions, the bookends of the Azure Dragon. So much for subtlety. Sokka had wrinkled his nose, and Doctor Song had taken precautions (not anywhere near adequate, Sokka worried), sporting a pair of goggles, cloth over her face, a heavy leather apron that covered her front and back, and leather gloves. Now that he could see the people, Sokka confirmed his suspicions: they were emaciated, covered in sores and tumorous lumps. And Song washed and cleaned their sores, and fed them medicine from the locked drawer in her pharmacy, the one that would take away the pain.

They did start to die, not long after. “I’m going to perform an autopsy,” said Song; she wasn’t really asking for permission. Sokka wasn’t interested in looking, but Song called him over midway through and he’d seen worse.

“Come in,” she said. “In. I mean it, General. Past the threshold.”

“I don’t know how you could be near the sickness,” Sokka complained. “You don’t know what it is.”

“I do now.” The cadaver’s skin had been peeled back to reveal a great black lump. “It’s not contagious at all, General.”

He edged closer. He could see where she had sliced the lump open and its veins were webbing out from its centre, a great malevolent spider. “What is it?”

“It’s cancer.” She shook her head. “These people were working on the ship’s engines and weapons’ stores. The prolonged exposure to uranium appears to cause—accelerate—some form of cancer.”

Sokka returned numbly planetside. When he landed, his radio crackled. “Hey, big guy,” said Teo on the other side. “Problem here. Dad and I ran the numbers and—well. We really won’t have enough long-range weapons to use against these guys.”

Sokka looked back up into the sky. The moon was hidden behind the cloud cover, the reactor labourers were taking their last breaths in a drugged, painless haze. He said, “I’ll get you some.”

Tonight, Emptiness III hovered just over the jagged shape of the mountains, its shape sketched full tonight, fully illuminated by their sun. Up here at the Heaven-Union Shrine, the view through his spyglass was unobscured by lamplight. It was a lonely little sanctuary straddling two peaks high above the main air temple, the two halves joined by an arcing bridge. He observed the hulking black that had been spidering over the surface of Emptiness III, flattening the untouched equatorial forest and mowing down the tundra.

It wasn’t a surprise when he heard footsteps at his side. “What do you suppose that mirror orb is?”

Through the spyglass, Sokka traced the mass of the Fire Nation fleet silhouetted against the illuminated surface of the planet, then found the reflective kidney-shaped craft Zuko had pointed out hovering at the outskirts. “I don’t think Doctor Song would be happy about you walking up a mountain.”

“I’m not here to talk about the physician.” Sokka felt the warmth at his side. He put down the spyglass. Zuko was leaning back against the railing of the bridge, planetlight sloping down his haughty nose.

“I suppose you’re here to say I told you so.”

“No,” said Zuko. “I’m here to hear you admit you were wrong.”

“You’re insufferable,” said Sokka flatly. Then, “Fine. You were right, I was wrong, people are worth saving, the uranium poison isn’t contagious, O seneschal thy mercy and compassion is an example unto us all—”

Zuko scoffed and plucked the spyglass from his hands. Their fingers brushed. “Alright,” said Sokka, “I’m sorry I tried to euthanise them by burning them in the sky. Based on the data I had, it was the best way.”

“The best way,” Zuko echoed.

“And my data was wrong. Obviously.”

“Without care for one another, do we lose the essence of our humanity?”

“I’ll get you those damn weapons, seneschal.”

Zuko turned around, lifted the spyglass to his eye. “Tell me what we’re fighting for. Tell me about your planet.”

“Katara never told you?”

The faint light of Emptiness III picked out the silver strands in Zuko’s hair. Like the threads that falling stars drew through the night. “I want to hear it from you.”

Sokka pressed his hands to the railing of the bridge, the worn stone that had survived centuries and an inferno. “Where I live… Where we live, it’s cold. But the rest of the planet is barely inhabitable, practically impenetrable.” He huffed a laugh. “We’ve explored more of the galaxy than our north.”

“What’s up there?”

“One of the earliest Sokkas I have implanted remembers sailing up and up and up. She sighted land—or she thought it was land—but the crew was chasing it for days and days to no avail. It led them right into the storm of a lifetime.”

Zuko put down the spyglass. “It’s all storms?”

Sokka nodded. “Every sailor heading north had the same thing to say. None of our boats could withstand it, even as technology improved. When we took to the heavens we saw it for ourselves.” He could access that first vision if he wanted, but it was a sight he was already familiar with from all his comings and goings. The pang of homesickness that hit him when he flew back, when he looked past the radio map and peered out of the crystal sliver of his ship— “Swirls, a belt of stormclouds roving across the belly of the planet. Some of those storms are centuries old. And they would toss around clumps of floating algae, big as islands, big as continents. Sometimes they’d move aside enough to let you see what creates them: the depression of that dried-up ocean at the equator, whipping up staggering winds that would pulverise you if you stepped in them—”

“But what about where you live?”

“Oh,” said Sokka, “ice everywhere. Days and nights that last for months, and when the sun came back up and everything just… bloomed. Sundogs on the horizon. The plankton moss, the rhododendron we harvest for tea on the tundra. I love the dawn and dusk, when the colours heave themselves back over the horizon and paint the sky with the most incredible colours.”

“And… anyone waiting for you back there?”

“I was married once. Suki, Kyoshi Warrior. What a weapon she was. She gave me this.”

He touched his fan, in its customary place at his hip.

“What happened?”

There was no way to say it without sounding bitter. “She couldn’t fit me into her life.”

Zuko said nothing; a divot pressed between his eyebrows.

“I had to stay at Aang’s right hand. Suki—she just wanted to kick Fire Nation ass. We had that in common. In those early days, that was all we did. One of our greatest early victories I’d won with her and Toph. ” He smiled a little, at memory. “And then our little revolution grew bigger and bigger, and we—I had to think about things like resourcing and logistics and alliances…” He cleared his throat. “Just didn’t work out.”

Zuko’s hand, brazier-hot, found his wrist and squeezed. They’d booked a room at a space station equidistant from their locations, spent the night defiling every surface, and, a little dehydrated, signed the divorce papers the next morning at the registry. “It’s so long ago,” said Sokka. “It was—mutual.” The kind of mutual that had him living in Aang and Katara’s spare room for a whole Jade Well IV day, clutching his then-toddler nephew and bawling, and growing a beard he hadn’t shaved off since. The bronze of the fan bit into his palm. Not one of his finest moments. “Enough about me. What about you? Tell me about where you grew up.”

Zuko wrinkled his nose. “In a crusty palace on a crusty planet. Then some wreck of a ship my uncle scrounged out of fuck knows where.”

“Aw, tell me about it. I told you.”

“Haven’t you been there?”

“Only the outskirts of the Vermillion Bird. Before we put the barrier up.”

Zuko huffed. Then, petulant, “Our planet’s a dump. They’ve dug up half of it, and half our moons too. Then the next planet over. Then the next mansion over. Then the Earth Kingdom colonies. They started with ore, then coal, then crude oil, then lithium, then uranium. Our palace was set high up in the remains of an old volcano, away from everyone else, but the smog floated up…” His lip curled. “It’s pathetic, how much I used to yearn to go back.”

“It wasn’t always like that.”

“Well, of course not. Not before my great-grand—”

“No, wait.” Sokka shook his head. Why did he blurt that? But the image was coming clearer into his mind. He closed his eyes and honed in. Chasing the thread through time, through the generations and generations and— “The sixteenth span of Avatar Hye-woo. A delegation from Jade Well IV circling a small, hot planet…”

“You’re seeing it,” said Zuko, stunned. “You saw it?”

“We land on the equator, on the long archipelago wrapping around it. They give us beautiful clothes to change into from our heavy sealskins. A texture like nothing I have known, like running water against my skin. Dyed blue with the indigo-seaweed we traded with them spans ago. It’s hot when we step out. Hotter than anything I have ever known, hotter than the tundra when the south tips back towards our sun, hotter than the inside of a snow house when the fire is crackling and warm bodies are laughing, feasting in it. A heat so pure I am lanced with it. I am sweating, liberally, dripping down my forehead and down my back. The sky is golden with sunlight. Midges that can fly buzz around us. Great eels that twist through the clouds—they call these dragons. Plants taller than buildings, birds of all colours screeching in them. Trees, that give wood. It is my first time seeing them. They carry us up in boxes of wood, and I can’t stop touching the material. The city is packed, colourful and lively. People and animals all about. The mountain is lush, and the palace emerges from the greenery. Grand, imposing, with its black rock-bricks and golden roof ornaments, tongues of flame curling into the sky—”

A pressure on his wrist, warm. A lifeline tugging him back. Sokka looked up.

The planetlight swam in Zuko’s eyes. “The chip showed you all that?”

“Yeah.” Sokka blinked the vision away. He didn’t get like this, most of the time; it was something he avoided, losing himself in a namesake. But Zuko… “Yeah, everything from the previous Sokkas is stored in there. And the memories can just surface.”

“It sounds beautiful.”

It was… something he had always found hard to reconcile. Was he doomed forever to be one Sokka in an infinite line of Sokkas? A vessel for someone else’s preferred version of himself, what his niece was to his sister? But when Zuko looked like that, he couldn’t say it. So he shrugged. “It’s everything my ancestors left to prepare us for the future.”

Zuko’s finger came up, then curled back into his fist. Sokka thought he might’ve wanted to touch the glow at his temple. “Does it fascinate you?” he said. “The way my body has been modified?”

“I could never imagine it on myself,” said Zuko. “I suppose you think it’s stupid. I’ve renounced so much of my ancestors, why not my body too?” He turned away, holding himself, arms crossed over where his ribs had been broken. He was thinking of the eye, Sokka knew.

“General. Burning the midnight oil again?”

Sokka’s head shot up from the workstation. He rubbed his eyes. “Mechanist. That late already?”

“‘Fraid so.” The Mechanist hobbled over, keys jangling from his fingers. “What’s got you so frazzled?”

The contraption was no longer confined to the realm of paper. Clutched in Sokka’s hands was a frame of metal and loose wires. “Trying to make it so it won’t need to be surgically implanted. I can’t work it out.” He fiddled with the wires and sighed. “I just keep thinking, this one should plug into the optic nerve and then we could feed a signal into the—ugh. It comes so naturally to us in the Water Tribes, I never learnt how to do it another way.”

The Mechanist switched his myriad lenses and leaned in to peer at it. Behind him, on the windowsill, Teo’s mechanised boots glinted. “You made Teo those boots, right?” said Sokka. “What was it like? To make cybernetics for someone you love?”

The Mechanist straightened up, as much as the wizened prawn of a mad old genius could. Behind the lenses, his magnified eyes danced with excitement. “Oh, boy oh boy,” he creaked. “I could tell you everything, if you wanted to know.”

“I,” said Sokka, “have all night.”

Chapter Text

“It’s all clicking into place, Aang,” Sokka murmured into the radio.

It was indeed. Song had given Zuko the all-clear. He used his newfound freedom to cremate the cancer patients with his own flame, sifted through the ash for their bones with his chopsticks. He inducted his new suite of officers and commanders under the cold sky. And today—today, they would be farewelling their children and the elderly, the ones who need not stick around for the horrors of war. What would the Avatar do if he were here? He had been offering his short replies, consistent if separated by a few days’ lag due to the distance. Sokka found himself missing his optimism, missing Katara too, his niece and nephews.

Outside, the courtyard was packed with families and luggage. Tears flowed freely as they kissed each other goodbye. The snow drifted down, stark white against the children’s hair, piling up in the corners of the courtyard. “Ah-kong, I don’t wanna go without you!”

The voice was familiar. Sokka turned; Teo’s gliding child was holding the toddler’s hand, rubbing a snotty nose with the other. Before them, the Mechanist had crouched down as low as his joints would let him go.

“An old man like me doesn’t need to go with the youngsters,” said the Mechanist. He pinched their ruddy-cold cheeks one by one. “Lots of tinkering for me to do, still!”

“B-but,” gibbered the child, “what if we never—” A fresh round of tears bubbled over her words.

“Ah, child.” With a quivering finger, the Mechanist pointed above them to the magnolia tree above, bare-branched save for the pair of birds huddling together against the cold. “Hush. You see them?”

“The-the magpies?”

“Yeees, exactly. Magpies.” He nodded sagely. “Do you know what the old legends say about magpies?”

Through the tears, the child began to perk up, eager for a story. “No…”

“Well, the stories say, when the magpies appear, they can bring even the most distant people apart. They could be on the next planet, the next star system, the next mansion, even the next quadrant.” The Mechanist caught Sokka’s eye suddenly, and winked. “But if the magpies sense the love between us…” He touched his arthritic fingers, with their little mechanical joints, to their hearts—the older, the younger, and his own. “If they sense that the love is strong, they will bring us back together.”

“But how can they do that? They’re just birds.”

“They’ll gather in a biiiig flock. Huge!” The Mechanist spread his arms wide. “And they’ll line up one after another, and spread their wings. They’ll make us a great bridge. And we can walk across on their backs to find each other again.”

Grandfather and grandchildren embraced. Sokka turned away, seeking out Teo in the crowd. He was surrounded by concerned parents, but they parted easily for Sokka.

“General!” Teo’s usual chirpiness had given way to a frazzled energy; in his hands were two open notebooks he kept switching between. “We’re locked and loaded, ready to start shuttling the kids and olds up to the ships.”

Sokka considered telling him about his family’s farewell, then decided against it. “Teo, I want to thank you for all the preparations you’ve made, and for volunteering to take them to safety.”

Teo’s eyes narrowed. “You’re being nice,” he said. “Are you buttering me up for a favour?”

“It’s not a favour if it’s an order, Teo.” Sokka crooked a hand, gesturing for him to follow somewhere away from listening ears. “Keep up.”

When Sokka, box in tow, found Zuko that evening, he was leafing through diagrams on his raised platform, absently eating tsampa congee with liberal helpings of chilli oil in front of the roaring brazier. “Preparations all set then, General?”

“You would question me?” said Sokka.

“Others, perhaps. Not the great general.” Zuko’s eyebrow twitched upwards, a challenge. “So it’s settled. The refugees safely delivered, and a hundred bastard missiles in my stores tomorrow.”

“And I recall there was something you were quite keen on out there,” Sokka prompted.

Zuko’s eyes glittered. “Zhao’s head.”

Sokka took a seat opposite Zuko, putting his box next to the abandoned congee. “A return of the Blue Spirit, then?”

“No,” said Zuko. “The Blue Spirit is no more. I want him to know it was me.” He looked Sokka in the eye. “Both him and my father.”

The intensity forced Sokka to break first. He busied himself with the cushions. “The solar flares are set to be the most powerful at the hour of the snake. Hopefully we won’t miss out on the light show at night. I think our latitudes would be southern enough to see it.”

“So?” said Zuko. “How are you going to do it?”

“Easy.” Sokka spread an arm out against the back of the seating platform. “I’ll borrow them.”

“You’ll borrow them.”

“‘Course. Don’t worry, I’ll give them back.” Sokka winked.

“What makes you think they’ll let you have them?”

“Oh trust me, they will.”

Zuko indulged him with a smile. “What are you here for, Sokka?”

Sokka’s own grin faltered. He swallowed. He’d thought about what to say on the way in, maybe a suave, You know how you got me a pre-battle gift last time, thought I’d return the favour. He’d recited it under his breath. But now he clutched at the box with damp fingers. Simple, unadorned wood. If Sokka had all the resources of the galaxy at his fingertips, he might’ve opted for gleaming lacquer inlaid with mother of pearl. A dragon motif too, why the hell not.

“Sokka?”

He got up, came round to Zuko’s side of the table, knelt. Zuko looked up at him, open and bewildered. Then he took the box from Sokka.

“What is this?”

He twitched in surprise when Sokka lifted it out, pressed the feedback sensors around the socket of his eye. “It might not fit perfectly,” said Sokka, rambling a bit, once he got started it was hard to stop; “I was just guessing, we can readjust. Really hope I’m not overstepping? I thought, when you said…” The two thin panels framed his burned eye above and below. “Just”—he held out the little bud of the earpiece—“put this in your ear?”

Zuko did. Sokka fiddled with the feedback sensors and hooked the earpiece into place. At once, the contraption started to glow, the same blue that emanated from Sokka’s own temples. “Blink. Feels good? You can hear me better?”

“Yes.” said Zuko. “Oh, I see…”

“Good.” Sokka pressed around his temple, fiddling with some of the switches on the side. “How’s this?”

“It’s… good.”

“How does it look?” Sokka urged. “Picture’s clear?”

“Not as clear as my right eye, but it’s…” Zuko blinked experimentally, titled his head.

“I can make some tweaks,” said Sokka. He twisted his fingers into his robe. “It’s a prototype for now.”

“You don’t need to plug…”

“Nothing surgical,” said Sokka. “That’s fine, right? It sits on top of your eye, doesn’t change anything except how you see—”

“It’s good.”

“I mean—” Sokka breathed out noisily. “You don’t have to keep it. I was just fiddling around, I know you’re not into… Anyway. Sorry.” He laughed. “Just— Look, don’t mind—”

And Zuko’s hand snaked up to his collar to pull their mouths together.

When they pulled back Zuko was breathing hard; when Sokka rested his forehead against Zuko’s he took in a great shuddering breath.

“Zuko…”

“I’m not dreaming, am I? You feel it too.” And Sokka held his cheek in his palm, he felt it trembling, felt the warming metal of the cybernetics under his fingertips. Zuko turned to press his lips to Sokka’s palm, and then Sokka was leaning back in to kiss him again. Zuko’s mouth was hot against his, his hair silken as Sokka tucked the strands behind his ear and followed the length to grip the base of his skull and tip his mouth up, take control of the kiss. He felt the warmth in his mouth, the way Zuko’s clung to his as though afraid to let go. When they separated again Zuko quivered so prettily, lips glistening with saliva. “For me,” he whispered. “You made it for me.”

It would be mortifying to say it; Sokka would be flaying himself alive to reveal all the bones within. “I want you to be safe.” He kissed Zuko again; how easy it had become. The rasp of his beard against Sokka’s cheek a growing familiarity. “I want you to prosper.” Kiss. “I want you to stay—” His voice caught. It was easier when Zuko was too close to look him in the eye. “To stay by my side.”

“It’s perfect. I love it,” Zuko whispered against his mouth.

“You’re trembling,” said Sokka. “Why are you trembling?”

Zuko chuckled, an exhale over his cheek. “You have no idea, do you?”

“No idea about what?”

“How much I’ve wanted this since you stepped foot on this planet, idiot,” Zuko breathed.

He reached for Sokka. There was no finesse. That made Sokka fall harder, made him bully his way into Zuko’s lap and force his tongue inside his mouth. Zuko’s chest heaved, his hands were hot through Sokka’s clothes, hot on his waist and sliding up his back, and Sokka’s fingers were tracing the path of skin down his neck, over his vibrating, moaning throat, thumbing open the mandarin collar to—

—and a strange cackle came from behind.

Sokka whirled around. “Wh—” But Zuko started to laugh.

“It’s the magpies, silly,” he said. His palm, so impossibly warm, came up to cradle his cheek; his thumb brushed from cheekbone to temple. He was looking at Sokka. Had he ever looked like this before? “They started nesting in my windowsill.”

Sokka caught a glimpse of the tops of their heads, burrowing into each other. “Why do they sound like—”

“Sokka, Sokka. Stop. Let them be.” And Zuko was smiling, so big it pushed into his cheeks and up into his eyes. Tugged him back. When he looked like this, how could Sokka resist?

“You’re right,” he murmured. “I do have better things to worry about.”

Things like a hundred missiles.

“Sitting comfortably, Osha?” he called, with what he thought was a quite swashbuckling spin of his ship’s wheel.

“Could be more comfortable if I knew what the hell was going on,” said Osha, sitting with both hands gripping the edge of the passenger seat like Dad did when Sokka started flying spacecraft, “and why we’ve strapped a dozen magnets to your ship.”

“And the zombies too. Don’t forget.”

“I haven’t…” Osha, no doubt, had an eye on the radio map. Even amid the swirl of the solar flares, the remote-controlled zombie ships lit up the map like flares. That was intentional, of course: We’re here! Come for us!

Somewhere on the other side of the planet, facing away from Emptiness III, Teo was leading their fleet of refugees towards the Azure Dragon of the East. And somewhere on Sokka’s left flank, Zuko was leading the charge on his own covert mission against the egg-shaped craft marring the perimeter of the Fire Nation camp. His voice crackled now over the radio.

“Got my missiles yet, General?”

The radiation storm had warped his signal, but something frivolous inside Sokka leapt at the sound of his voice. “Patience, my dear seneschal.” He steered them easily into the gulf between the two planets. “You would doubt a resume like mine?”

“Seeing is believing,” Zuko crackled. “What’s the penalty if you fail?”

“By military law,” said Sokka, “you can have my head.”

“Is that so? I’ll hold you to that.” Even through the butchered signal, Sokka could hear his smirk. So could Osha, if her rapidly raising eyebrow were anything to go by.

“And you? If you don’t get me Zhao’s head?”

“Why, the same, of course.” His voice went low, rumbling deep in Sokka’s gut. “You can have my head.”

Then his signal flicked off. Sokka positioned himself and his skeleton fleet before the Fire Nation ships. He was in his element, back in his own ship, amidst the flurry of battle. The fate of the battle at his fingertips. He plopped himself across from Osha and pulled out a board. “Pai sho?”

Her eyes boggled. “Are you mad?”

“It’s hard to play by yourself.”

“The army’s coming!”

So they were. On the radio map, a handful of signals stuttered towards them, then paused. “A storm can hide an ambush,” said Sokka. “They won’t come any closer. That reminds me—” And then he flicked the signalling beat on.

Osha threw herself at him. “They’ll know we’re here!” she hissed as Sokka twisted out of her reach, fiddling with his remote control to manoeuvre the zombies into position as though they had pilots, and those pilots were responding to the beat. “What’re we gonna do?!”

Sokka pulled out his fan and cracked it open. “We reap.”

They couldn’t see the first one until it was thirty miles away. On the map it streaked out of nothingness towards them. Osha yelped. The impact jolted the whole ship, making her flinch and scattering the pai sho pieces Sokka had been laying out.

She was still for a while, tensed and body braced for impact. Then she opened an eye, patted herself down to check her limbs were all in one piece. “We’re still here.”

Sokka smiled and fanned himself.

The second impact sent them tumbling against the machines. They did not blow up.

“Wait,” said Osha. “Wait, if they’re hitting us, but we’re OK, and they’re not exploding…”

She got gingerly to her feet. The next impact shook her but she pressed on, holding onto the wall. Sokka hid his smile behind the fan. It might’ve been less of a hassle to move around if he’d turned off the artificial weight on the ship, but he did want a cup of tea later and that would be a bitch to make if the water were floating…

Osha made her way to the crystal sliver and pressed her eye to it, peering out into the vastness of space. She made a noise of triumph. “I see it! Right there, port…”

“Magnetised,” said Sokka. “They won’t detonate until they hit something solid. Then we’ll get these back to the Mechanist, who can defuse them.”

“You’re a genius, General!”

“I get that a lot.”

“Same with all the zombies! I see now,” she said, tapping her chin. “The Mechanist had a hand in designing these, or at least an older model. So he knows how they work.” She gave him a sideways look. “They were blackmailing him.”

“I suspected something like that,” said Sokka: the Mechanist’s shameful past he had been so tight-lipped about, coupled with his Fire Nation-esque weapon designs and surprising insight into their arsenal. Privately, he thought that was why the Mechanist had opted to stay on Emptiness II: his atonement. The ship jolted as another round of missiles fired towards them. Osha flailed for the closest piece of furniture. “It’s come in handy now.”

The port side of Sokka’s ship—and their assorted zombies—filled rapidly with missiles. Sokka let Osha toy with his remote, flicking their radio signals off and on. They pictured the confusion on the face of the Fire Nation commander shooting them (was it Zhao? Let it be Zhao) and laughed.

“Right!” said Sokka. “Starboard now.” He broadcasted the signalling beat again, pumping it loud into every radio channel within reception range. “Let’s give them something to aim for.”

Their shambolic fleet, its paucity cloaked by Emptiness’s disruptive flares, offered the Fire Nation its starboard. They did not disappoint. Osha hooted now for every jolt they felt, tracking the progress on the zombies’ sensors. Sokka even had the good grace to flick off a few of their radio signals. Let the Fire Nation think their targets had found their mark.

“Ninety-eight… ninety-nine… aaaand a hundred!” Osha crowed. She gripped Sokka’s shoulder with a strength that made him wince. “You did it! Oh, you madman, you did it! The General Sokka, indeed!”

“And you doubted me,” said Sokka, wagging a finger. “As a student—nay, disciple—of my tactics—”

“Oh psh, it was the adrenaline speaking. I always trusted you.” She tapped the side of her head, grinning. “I knew the General himself would never let us down. To see the master himself at work, what a privilege. Let’s get these back to the Mechanist.”

There was a new storage shelter on the moon base. The Mechanist, too old to be spending much time outside an atmosphere, had commandeered a crew of, uh, mechanics to defuse each hard-won warhead. As a precaution against the uranium poison, each of them had earth packed over the shell of their spacesuits and were using long rods to defuse the missiles at a distance. The Mechanist insisted on double-checking each as they stacked the warheads into waiting jars, embedded deep into the ground of the moon.

Sokka and Osha were observing the process when the airlock hissed open. Not a warhead—Zuko and his crew strode in. Sokka fought the urge to throw himself upon Zuko, remembered that this was permissible now, then considered it might be gauche to do that in front of everyone gathered. The result was a very dignified twitch in his direction, then ear to ear grinning.

Zuko approached him. He was wearing the cybernetics around his eye and ear. He looked unruffled in a way that made Sokka want to mess him up. He wanted to point at the cybernetics and say, I made these, so everyone around them would know his mark was on Zuko. Instead, he said, “As you requested, seneschal.”

“Uranium-powered warheads, Mark-55s,” said Zuko. “Playing with fire.”

Sokka thought of the last time he was here on the moon, the palliative ward, the spidering tumour. It sobered him up. Had those souls put these very warheads together? He would do them the honour of launching them back at the Fire Nation. He said, “Then how fortunate I am to have a firebender at my disposal.”

Zuko’s hand, gloved, squeezed his wrist. “I can feel its heat. The uranium.” The hand retreated as quickly as it had come.

Sokka swallowed. “And you?” he said. “How was your mission?”

“We approached that strange craft,” said Zuko. “Our instincts led us in the right direction. It was heavily guarded.”

“Always a sign of something afoot.”

“Especially when a big enemy fleet is approaching on the other side, no?” Zuko raised his eyebrow. “They engaged us. We had spare space rocks, the twins brought over daggers of ice. I’ll spare you the sordid details—” (“When you know how much I love the sordid details?” Sokka said.) “—but in the bout, the craft was damaged. And all these… things came floating out.”

“I do love a floating thing.”

Zuko tapped his wrist, not ungently. “Be serious, General.” He ignored Sokka’s answering pout. “The guards rushed towards the breach. We managed to secure one before they chased us away.”

He gestured. The twins jogged forwards, carrying a huge gleaming box between them. Motifs were painted all over it, coiling indiscernible patterns over each other. Sokka inspected them with morbid curiosity. “Are those… dudes with snake bodies?”

“Celestial beings,” said Zuko, “with bodies of serpents. The realm of the spirits, the immortals.”

“Why serpents?”

“Dragons are a kind of serpent. They’re sacred to us.”

Druk’s legs, Sokka thought, begged to differ. “Right…”

“And look here.” Zuko’s finger hovered over the box. “Black and red feathers, symbols of immortality.”

Something about it made Sokka shiver, as fine as the craftsmanship was. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say this looks like a coffin.”

“Funny you should say that.”

Zuko hoisted its lid and Sokka reeled.

Inside was a body in repose. Well built, well muscled—the normality ended there. Its nose and lips had been cut off. Part of its scalp of lustrous black hair had been removed, its pectorals too, the quadriceps of the left thigh. The hips looked strangely deflated, as though the bone holding them up were missing. “What the hell?”

“A gruesome discovery for the crew,” said Zuko, wry.

Sokka’s finger hovered over the missing parts, tracing the lines. “These are surgical cuts.” They were indeed, straight and precise, healed well.

“Dozens of these boxes came floating out,” said Zuko. “What if they all contained…”

Sokka shuddered. “But why are parts missing? Who are they? More—” He met Zuko’s eye. He couldn’t bring himself to say it. But he knew Zuko understood: those enslaved cancer patients, their bodies mutilated by the tumours… “Was—is?—he alive?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe his life source was on that mysterious craft, and it disconnected during the breach.” Zuko circled the body. “I can’t put my finger on it. There’s something familiar about it.”

“You say they were guarding it—”

“General!” It was Osha pelting in through the airlock, as fast as her bouncing moon-steps would let her. Then her gaze slid over to Zuko. “Ah, shit.”

“Well, Osha?” said Zuko. “Let’s have it. How many warheads?”

Her look told Sokka everything. He felt the bottom of his stomach drop. There’s no way. “Ninety-nine,” she said.

How could he have missed it? He was so sure, he and Osha, the sensors, they’d checked, oh snow and fucking sea, he should have double checked. They should’ve collected spares, backup. Zuko was smirking. “Only?”

“Oh come off it, seneschal,” said Osha. “It’s just one short.”

“One short is still short,” said Zuko. “I suppose that leaves me with no choice but to have your head.”

“Seneschal—!”

“You’re right,” said Sokka. “That is the military law.”

“General—!”

Zuko leaned in close. “Shame,” he murmured for Sokka’s ears only. “I was looking forward to retiring my conjugal aids.”

Conju—what?! Sokka’s head reared up so fast he could’ve given himself whiplash. “Now wait a second,” he said, but Zuko was already turning away, radiating smugness. Osha’s eyes slid back and forth between them, a divot deepening below her bindi in the space between her eyebrows. Then the airlock snapped open again.

It was the Mechanist himself. Behind him, two mechanics in earthen suits ran in, a missile bound with earth hovering between them. “For heaven’s sake!” cried Osha. “Where were you? Lives were at stake!”

The mechanics blathered their apologies, rushing to slot the final missile into the waiting jar. Sokka could have fainted from relief. “This one went wide,” the Mechanist panted. “These two detected it coming towards the debris ring and took a ship out to catch it.”

Went wide? But Sokka was sure all hundred had been netted by his zombie fleet. “Thank you, thank you for all your work,” said Osha. She hurried up to the Mechanist, supporting him by the shoulder. “Great job. We should get you back planetside, old guy…”

Sokka turned back to Zuko. “Got my hundred.”

“Good for you.”

It was Sokka’s turn to smirk now. “I’ve held up my end of the deal. But… I’m still not seeing Zhao’s head.”

“Well spotted.”

“You know the penalty.”

“Oh General, he was just playing around!” Osha cried. “Weren’t you, seneschal?”

“Then,” said Zuko, “I’ll give it to you right now.”

He jammed his helmet on and marched out of the airlock. Sokka chased after him. The hubbub cut out as soon as they left the air, replaced only with the sound of Zuko’s breathing that came through his earpiece. The moon base was full of ships, the distant stars speckled all above in the silent black. Zuko swept towards the cluster of zombie ships, denuded of their missiles. Then he sprang up.

It wasn’t quick: Zuko with no flame in the vacuum, the heat-conductive pad of his glove dragging against the broken hull. When he was done he stepped back to admire his handiwork, the message scorched in huge black characters against the century-old Fire Nation ship:

THANKS FOR THE WARHEADS, ZHAO.

He’d signed it too, the impression of a pair of crossed dao swiped across the bottom. He took the remote from Sokka and shot it towards Emptiness III, glinting beyond the jagged horizon.

“I must thank you for the new eye,” he said, right in Sokka’s ear. “This is one downfall I would relish to see.”

Chapter Text

They were kissing before they got inside.

They tumbled off Druk’s back. Zuko pressed him against the wall and took his mouth. Above them the clouds had let up and the sky was ablaze with the solar storm, painting the night with ribbons of red and green. When Sokka held his face between his hands, his fingers traced the metal lines of the cybernetics.

It was entirely thanks to Sokka’s will that they made their way inside. He pushed Zuko back, surged back to meet his mouth. They stumbled over the threshold; Sokka held him against his bedpost. His lips plotted their way down his neck, over the salt and pepper stubble. He thumbed open the frog at Zuko’s throat, nudged the collar aside to kiss the skin underneath; he felt the gasp against his lips. The blood throbbed in his pulse. And Zuko shoved him onto the bed.

They went down in a tangle. Sokka’s knee was kicked apart, shoved up the mattress. The ribbon in Zuko’s hair came loose, and it sent his beautiful hair cascading loose over his shoulders. The lamps flared to life out of nowhere. It was Sokka who gained the upper hand at last, when he flipped Zuko over and pinned him panting to the bison-wool covers. What a sight he was, flushed, dishevelled, the aurora gleaming in his eyes.

“You still haven’t delivered me Zhao.”

Zuko groaned, thrashing under him. Sokka held him down. “He’s coming.”

“Not good enough.” He swooped down to hiss in Zuko’s ear, the one with the earpiece so he would hear Sokka loud and clear. “I want your head, seneschal.”

Zuko bucked. Something like a sob spilled from his lips. Sokka bit his earlobe. How giving he was with his responses, not a shred of coyness. He was unlike any lover Sokka had had.

“No use fighting it. You’ll get what you deserve.” He let his fingers walk up Zuko’s arm, up his shoulder and neck, up his cheek. “And when I fashioned these specifically for your bout against him…”

Zuko’s eyes closed. He turned his face into the palm of Sokka’s hand, breath burning against his skin.

“Cybernetics, I’ve found,” murmured Sokka, “can be very useful. For one, the one in my leg has sustained me through long periods of kneeling…”

“Kneeling,” Zuko breathed.

“Why don’t I give you a practical demonstration?” His fingers went back to the loosened collar. The next frog went too, the exposed skin underneath summarily kissed, then the next, then the next, until the whole shirt had to be shrugged off. Zuko’s chest, burnished by decades of labour under the light of Emptiness, gleaming now in the lamplight, rose and fell under Sokka’s mouth. The skin was scattered with a constellation of pale scars. What choice did Sokka have but to lave them with attention? This was no clandestine space station latrine, Zuko himself no subordinate agreeing to an ill-advised encounter. Sokka could take his time; he had the luxury.

He closed his lips around one nipple and did not leave it until it grew stiff and wet under his tongue. Zuko was gasping, body buckling. And Sokka bit the flesh of his tit, marvelling at its meatiness between his teeth. “Are you going to—”

“Am I going to what?” said Sokka.

“You know,” said Zuko, and his voice was all breath.

Sokka kissed down his body, feeling the shift of his abdominal muscles. “Teo says you’ve never taken a lover.”

“Teo,” said Zuko, “has a big mouth.”

“Is it true?”

“Of course it’s true,” said Zuko, and derision was woven into his voice. “Someone in my position, everyone on the planet vulnerable as it is, do you think I really cou—”

And Sokka undid the ties of his trousers and sank his mouth onto Zuko’s cock.

His shuddering cry was ecstasy to Sokka’s ears.

“So,” said Sokka on the upstroke, lips grazing the head of his cock, “you’re all mine.”

“Wh-what?”

“You haven’t had anyone else.” And the realisation bowled Sokka over with a wave of unforeseen lust. Zuko untouched except by Sokka, all this territory uncharted, all of it Sokka’s to map. He thumbed the foreskin over the head and mouthed at it, its round weight, seized by the possessiveness that surged when Zuko let out another hitching breath. His cock thrust up against Sokka’s teeth, hardening.

Sokka caught it. He pinched the head between his lips and felt its suppleness. His tongue roved under the foreskin, then he played with it between his teeth. He breathed in Zuko’s scent, concentrated, the way it went all up in his head; he was drunk with it. He tasted the viscosity beading at the slit, and Zuko clapped a hand over his own mouth.

“No,” rasped Sokka, pulling off, “no, I want to hear you—”

He dove back down. It made him splutter. A whimper escaped the gag of Zuko’s palm, then another. By the time Sokka started laving his way down the shaft, following the vein on the underside, Zuko was moaning full-throated into the air. “Yeah, baby, like that, baby,” Sokka was babbling, muffled by his mouthful of cock, nosing his thatch of hair. He pressed his face against the shaft, its weight against the side of his nose, the wet imprint on his skin. It made him gasp. “You sound so fucking good.”

He took the first ball into his mouth. The lamplight shivered. It sat like an egg on his tongue and he worked it gently; then he took the other one, moaning deep in his throat so Zuko would feel the vibration. He met Zuko’s eye. His chest was heaving, breath coming out in thick clods of steam, eyes slitted and woozy with pleasure. His vision modified by Sokka’s own hand, prime seat to the best view. “Yes, yes, yes,” he gasped, “yes,” and Sokka let go with a soft pop to lick the seam between his balls. “Yes,” and Sokka sucked his head back in, and the saliva was seeping out the corners of his mouth and down his chin, and acrid heat spurted onto his tongue.

Sokka watched him as he came—the line of his throat arching back—and worked his tongue to milk each last drop from the slit, breathing hard through his nose. Then he pulled off. “You can keep going.”

Zuko, bleary, said, “Hmm?”

Sokka found his hand gripping the edge of the bed and squeezed it. “You can keep going, right?”

It wasn’t a request. Zuko looked gone, eyes glazed, red dusted over his cheeks and his tits. And he was all of Sokka’s dreams, his filthiest and most desperate, made flesh because he said, “Yes.”

Sokka felt the cock soften in his mouth, worked it with his tongue until his jaw was numb and his human knee twinged. He was so hard it was aching in his pants, and he honed the sensation and poured it into his service. Zuko sobbed silently and Sokka could sympathise—pushing through the oversensitivity, bordering on pain. He was a gem. He did not complain or pull away. This was just him, Sokka supposed: giving and self-sacrificing, pleasured by the knowledge he was giving another pleasure. Sokka, on his knees, knew that all too well. He had made to pull back, give him a break, but a hand tightened in his hair, forcing him back down. And when Zuko started to lengthen again, filling Sokka’s mouth, heaving back to hardness, gagging Sokka on it—it was a triumph.

So Sokka was indulging too, who could blame him? He had been bereft too. He had not realised until now. The idle pleasures of taking your time with your lover, the devotion, the worship, making them fall apart. There was no room for intimacy in his space station encounters, only frantic urgency, rutting like animals with the smell of shit all around. But now Sokka could take his time making Zuko lose himself in his mouth, knowing Zuko had not known the touch of another lover in all his time on Emptiness II. Zuko’s pleasure was all his, his, his to take.

And then Zuko was begging, incoherent little whimpers and half-words. Sokka got up; he shoved Zuko back against the blankets and climbed over him, freed his own aching, drooling cock from the confines of his pants. Naked, his hair spread loose around his head, what a sight Zuko was. The lamplight stuttered around them. Sokka lined Zuko’s spit-wet cock beside his, licked his palm, and set a punishing pace.

Being in bed with Zuko was exceedingly comfortable on a winter night.

Sokka had tucked himself against his pillowy chest, listening to the rhythm of his breath and dozing in and out of sleep. He traced idle patterns on Zuko’s skin. Outside, the colours blazed on. “We have these lights in Jade Well IV too, during those long nights.”

Zuko hummed. His thumb was rubbing Sokka’s shoulder, back and forth, back and forth. “We don’t see them much, not up here. Perhaps further down south. Or there’s cloud cover, and everything’s obscured.” He nosed the top of Sokka’s head. “Maybe you were our good luck charm.”

Sokka preened. He settled further into Zuko’s warmth, luxuriating in the sensation. A firebender lover had never been among his fantasies, but the cosiness could not be denied. “Have you had anyone before me?”

Zuko said, coyly, “Depends on how you’re defining it.”

“You know what I mean.”

“It’s embarrassing,” Zuko chuckled. “Just the one. This little terrorist from way back, Blue Spirit days. We hated each other’s guts.”

A sourness gathered in the back of Sokka’s throat. “Then why did you fuck them?”

“I dunno, we were teenagers. We were weird and embarrassing. Ack!”

Sokka had pinched his nipple. Now he rubbed it, with mulish contrition. “I bet they were terrible.”

“Yes,” said Zuko, indulging him, “it was so horrible. I hated every second of it.”

“Ugh. You’re so sexy, you deserved better.”

“Absolutely. Like you.”

“You’re making fun of me.”

“I’m not,” said Zuko. He was laughing. The sound of it vibrated against Sokka’s cheek. He chucked Sokka under the chin; Sokka played at biting his fingers. Quieter, he said, “I enjoyed it.”

That did mollify Sokka.

“You’re one to talk,” said Zuko. “You’re so handsome, I bet you were getting around. Everyone wanting a piece of General Sokka.” His voice lowered to a rumble. “Should I be jealous?”

It was true, a little shameful if Sokka paid it any mind; a testament to his poor post-divorce adjustment. Zuko seemed to detect his hesitation.

“I’m not here because of that, you know—”

“I know,” said Sokka quickly.

“Sokka, I mean it. I’m not some groupie, some—” He pushed back and separated Sokka from his warm pillow, forcing Sokka to look him in the eye. His hand burned against Sokka’s shoulder. “Since you came here, since I came to know you, not a single other person—”

“I know.” Sokka put his hand over Zuko’s, surged up before Zuko said it aloud and destroyed him at the core. “I know, I know.” He kissed Zuko, what a testament it was to the beauty that persisted in this forsaken world, riddled with war. “I know, I feel it too.”

Wakefulness slipped in and out of Sokka’s grasp. He stirred to the natural rhythm of his sleep but something kept pulling him back, skin gleaming in lamplight, a riptide pulling him back out into the easeful undulation of the waves, parted lips puffing heat, enveloping warmth…

When it took him back to the shores of the living, Zuko was there.

“Morning,” said Zuko. He kissed the juncture where Sokka’s shoulder met his neck and Sokka thought, it was a good morning indeed.

“How long have you been awake?” said Sokka.

“A while.” Zuko kissed his neck, his cheek. His beard tickled Sokka’s skin; he leaned back into it, luxuriating.

“Aren’t you needed?” Sokka teased.

“They can wait. Our victory yesterday has made us so weary…” And he pressed something quite turgid between Sokka’s asscheeks.

Well? Sokka was a simple man. He ground back. Zuko put his nose into Sokka’s shoulder and groaned. Sokka reached back for his neck. He sank his teeth into Sokka’s flesh. A hand came around for his cock and it was too dry, much too dry until Sokka licked the palm, and then it was glorious. The radio went unanswered. The morning frittered away.

It was lunch by the time they were scrubbed clean enough of the, well, fluids to venture downstairs. A bright winter’s day, the clouds hadn’t regathered after last night’s light show, magpies flitting from tree to tree outside the windows. A hundred warheads in their stores. Zuko’s fingers ghosting at his elbow. Peace and love on planet Emptiness II.

When they strode through the doors of the dining hall, Osha sprang out of her seat and beelined towards them. “You’re here, finally.” She swept her hands through her hair. “I’ve been radioing you—”

“Just resting after our skirmishes yesterday, Osha,” Zuko said smoothly. “Thanks for your patience.”

She stared at him, nonplussed, then fixed the beam of her gaze on Sokka. He resisted the urge to pat his neck for bruises—the collar of his shirt was high enough, right? Then she said, “Right, follow me.”

“Osha, we haven’t eaten yet!”

She marched over to one of the long tables and snatched two fluffy buns from the steamer. “Eat quick. You won’t have much of an appetite after you see this.”

They trailed after her, chowing down their buns. Zuko met his eye; Sokka winked. Zuko dimpled prettily. She took them outside the walls of the temple, winding down into the village, right down to the sky bison paddock. Toh-ki was waiting on a bench, a large box beside her.

“Oh honey, bless you for waiting,” Osha said. “Alright, you two, come over…”

She gestured to the box, lip curling. Sokka did the honours. He edged towards it, exchanging a look with Zuko. A plain enough box, probably repurposed from spacecraft storage. He used the end of his fan to lever it open.

Inside was a head.

An older gent, wrinkled and grey-headed, some pretty impressive sideburns. His bloodless face was rigor mortised into an eternal grimace. “They sent your damn zombie back,” Osha was rambling. “Your message burned clean off with that horrible fire insignia. Organic matter inside again, they opened it up and found this. The moon guards were freaking out, immediately radioed, whinging the whole time when I told them to collect it and send it down…”

“That’s him?”

Zuko was peering in beside him. The old thorn in Zuko’s side, the master of Pohuai Stronghold: how small, how insignificant he looked now. “I told you.”

“Well, seneschal,” Sokka murmured. His hand tracked down the firm muscle of Zuko’s arm. “Let me stand corrected on my doubts about you.”

After that it was hard for them to keep their hands off each other.

First there was that long, sloppy afternoon they’d spent in Zuko’s room celebrating their victories, where Sokka had made certain that Zuko would never return to his accursed conjugal aids. Sokka remembered to send his report to Aang and Zuko sat next to him, nibbling his ear, touching him through his clothes, generally being a nuisance. Sokka let him know, after, just how displeased he was. Then there were the evenings, when they fell asleep on top of each other, exhausted from the lovemaking. They woke up sore and sticky, hands wandering, the cycle would restart. It was a struggle to stay focused in war council meetings when Zuko was right there, slim red-tipped fingers leafing through the longitudinal lines of his map, Zuko himself stealing glances across at him through the fiery map points amid the gathered attendees. When they disbanded Sokka would pull Zuko up the stairs with an energy he did not anticipate the first time he scaled them; he would shove Zuko into his chambers, bend him over the nearest piece of furniture, and take him with their trousers pulled down to their knees and robes shoved up.

It was on one such glorious occasion, when Sokka was hilt-deep in Zuko splayed over his desk, papers scattered on the floor or singeing under his hands, when a knock sounded at the door.

The first knock was easy to ignore, the subsequent ones less so. Zuko unstuck his cheek from his desk. “Who is it?”

His voice came out distinctly strangled.

“Seneschal? We’ve been calling you...”

Osha. Zuko sprang up, making Sokka’s cock slide out. “Quick,” he hissed; he pulled up his trousers with one hand and pushed Sokka towards his bedroom, behind the divider. Louder, he said, “Just a moment, Osha!”

He started straightening his fallen papers. Sokka darted pantsless out of view and scrambled onto Zuko’s bed. The door opened. “I was out there for ages. Why’d you close the door?” he heard Osha complain amid Zuko’s murmured apologies. “Anyway, all this stuff is happening, all these people, the Mechanist keeps going on about, you need to—” The sound of her footsteps stopped. A sniff. “Is someone in here? Someone else?”

“N…o?” said Zuko. Sokka fought the urge to groan aloud.

“No?” said Osha, with obvious, building excitement. The footsteps started again, towards the bedroom behind the divider, towards him; Sokka panicked and slid behind the bed. “Seneschal, sene-schaaaaaaaal, you and the Gen—”

“Osha!” Running footsteps. “Osha, didn’t you have something urgent—?”

Osha’s footsteps stopped again. Sokka let out the breath he was holding. “Oh. Right, yes. Doctor Song’s been looking for you, she’s done the autopsy on that body in the… box thing.”

“I see,” said Zuko. “I’ll come down shortly.”

Osha’s footsteps strode out. “You’d better come down too, General Sokka!” she sang.

“Osha!” Zuko yelled after her fading laughter.

They took Druk through the powdering snow to the beyul. The physician’s home was hot from all the braziers boiling up medicine. She waved them to a back room where the temperature plummeted; the body sat dissected on a block of ice.

“Time of death quite recent, I would put it at when you extracted it from the craft, seneschal. Cause, asphyxiation—I suspect the subject was kept on some sort of life support system. The brain is completely atrophied, I suspect he’s been brain dead for some time. A long time, perhaps. Certain parts have been amputated, some organs and bones missing. Clean cuts, healed afterwards. Now here’s the thing. Age? It gets stranger. This body would’ve belonged to a fit, healthy man in his twenties. But the genes tell us the subject was in his seventies. That’s not the only strange result from the genetic tests.” Song rounded the cadaver, a scrap of paper in hand. “Seneschal… the subject’s genes are a very close match to yours.”

Zuko took the scrap from her hands. There were all sorts of figures scrawled upon it, but genetics were not any Sokka’s forte. “What does it mean?”

“If I’m guessing, a close relative of the seneschal’s.”

Sokka put a steadying hand on his elbow. Zuko flittered through a handful of expressions, settling on confusion. “In his twenties? A close relative? But the genetics say… seventies?”

“A sibling?” Sokka prompted. “Cousin? Nephew?”

“All possible,” said Zuko. That, perhaps, was what was flooring him: the confirmation that his family was larger than he had thought. How the years had slipped past, what a stranger he had become to his kin.

“But what,” said Song, “is he doing in the box?”

So life ebbed on at the temple; Sokka and Zuko made a little more effort to emerge. The Fire Nation army remained crouched on Emptiness III, the day of the planets’ alignment crept closer. The planet waxed in the night sky. Emptiness II felt quieter these days, without children dashing underfoot or gliding overhead; without the elderly sitting about playing pai sho and doing morning chigong. The apparitions were an almost-welcome substitute for signs of life, these days. The kitchens needed extra hands these days, so Sokka reluctantly separated himself from Zuko’s toasty bosom and rolled up his sleeves to fold momos.

“Coming along nicely, General,” was Ling’s assessment of his ability now when he presented his little packages.

“What can I say? I’m a man of many talents.”

A pair of giggles came from further down the table. Sokka raised an eyebrow. Siqiniq and Taqqiq were looking at him and exchanging poorly concealed whispers. “What, girls? Got something to say about that?”

One whispered in the other’s ear. She said, “Nothing, General. Perfectly executed.”

Sokka harrumphed. “Honoured to have the council’s approval. Must you workshop all your responses?”

Another giggle. “What should it matter? Can the esteemed General tell if we speak separately?”

Sokka tsked. “This again? You girls are so fixated.”

“You can’t tell, General.”

“Course I can.”

“Then… who am I?”

It was the one with pigtails. One of them was… and the other… “Ah-ah,” said Sokka, wagging a wrapper at them, “I’m not falling for that. You’re trying to prove something, you’re trying to test me. You’re trying to make it a big funny joke. I won’t be tested.”

“Then prove it.”

“You won’t get me,” said Sokka. “Trust me, I know the both of you.”

“So?” Ling chimed in as she plopped another bowl of filling down. Traitor. “Which is which?”

“I’m not falling for—”

“Not falling for what?” They looked up. Osha was striding in through the doors, saree billowing behind her, a distinct smirk upon her lips. “Or should I say… for whom?”

“Osha,” said Sokka with a little dismay.

She made for the seat beside his. “Momos, is it?” Wrapper in one hand, scooping stick in the other, she whizzed through her first momo. Her entrance prompted everyone to return dutifully to their wrapping, though with no small amount of sneaky sideways glances sent her way.

“I see someone’s not home with wifey,” said Sokka.

“Someone is speaking a little audaciously, for the sheer volume of relations he’s having right now with our seneschal,” she said out of the corner of her mouth.

“Seriously?” Sokka hissed. “Right here? Now? In front of everyone?”

“It’s hard to get you alone these days, General,” said Osha with feigned innocence, “what with you all holed up on the top floor and—ah—your own room empty—”

“Alright!” A couple of heads swivelled. Sokka lowered his voice. “Alright, alright, I get the picture. Threaten me, say you’ll rip out my guts or call my sister, whatever.”

“Threaten you?” said Osha, amused. “Why would I do that?”

“I dunno, if you think I’ll hurt him—”

“Will you?”

Sokka’s mouth worked. “I—I. I mean, I’ll try not to. But I can’t promise anything. We’re human, it just happens, I—”

“That’s good enough for me.” Osha’s fingers flew over the momos. “He’s like a younger brother to me, you know.”

That Sokka did surmise. “You know I really— You know I’m not—”

She patted him on the shoulder, leaving a floury handprint. “He’s really happy. I can see that.” A smile. “He’s needed someone to share the burden with, even if he didn’t want to admit it to himself. I think it’s sweet. What do you want me to say? Drink water, use lubricant?”

“Osha.”

She snickered. “You’re happy too?”

“M-me?”

“Yeah. I know we’re in the middle of a war and everything but yeah. You, General Sokka.”

It was this, it was a whole bunch of things. After the divorce Sokka had been subject to a host of ongoing one-sided chats with Katara, all sorts of I just want you to be happys and I’m just really concerneds. But here now, with Osha wrapping her momos at lightning speed, him still going pleat by pleat but getting better day by day, the promise of Zuko waiting for him in bed afterwards golden in the lamplight… “Yeah. I’m happy.”

In the end, it was easier to run their errands together. Safety in numbers, or whatever they said. When no one was looking Zuko’s fingers tangled easily with his, as though this were something they had been doing for spans, as though they were not two old men taking coltish steps back into romance.

There were troops to drill, stores to maintain, ships to repair, defences to raise, battle plans to pore over for the inevitable clash. They watched earthbenders move boulders and then asteroids, they watched their handful of waterbenders manipulate ice under the twins, they watched their firebenders adapt their techniques to use in the vacuum of space, they watched the nonbenders hold together the rest of the operations as they trained on the ships and pulled together the necessary equipment. The magpies watched on, fluttering between the bare branches. The Mechanist muttered over his machines and told anyone who would listen about the warheads—he had reviewed the logs, General, he was so certain a hundred, yes one hundred, had been netted in the first round and one had disappeared entirely, winked right off the radio map, but it was hard to tell with all the static from the solar storm…

They had snatched a first victory but the dark mass loomed still above on the surface of Emptiness III. It was a constant reminder of their disadvantage. What a huge army it was. Their orbits would align soon and inevitably the Phoenix King would invade. Size did not always daunt Sokka but the denizens of Emptiness II had never faced anything like it. He itched for his troops but they were mansions away, more than a quadrant away at the border between the White Tiger and Vermillion Bird. Everyone depended on him for a plan—and he needed one fast.

So it was tiring business, and Sokka relished his rest when it came, settling down sated in the little world they had carved out for themselves in Zuko’s bed. But this was Emptiness II, and they were embroiled in war with the Fire Nation. Rest would not last long.

They woke to the buzz of the radio. It was still dark. Sokka hid his face in Zuko’s chest and groaned.

“I better get this,” said Zuko, his words bleary. He reached for it. “Seneschal here?”

“Hey.” It was Osha, sounding breathless. “It’s urgent. The moon base contacted me. A woman’s come over from the Fire Nation.”

The sheets shuffling, Zuko’s body shifting rapidly under Sokka’s cheek. “A… woman?”

“Says she’s your sister.”

A beat skipped in Zuko’s heart. Sokka came all the way awake. Zuko said, a little strangled, “And do you believe her?”

“She knew your name,” said Osha. “And she told us hers.”

“Which is?”

“Azula.”

A long moment of silence, stretching out like the sweet filaments of dragon’s beard candy. Zuko said, “That’s her.”