Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Fire and lightning fade into a distant memory, and then into nothing at all.

Zuko opens his eyes. 

Calm spreads out from his chest to his fingertips. Zuko has no idea where he is, but where this would usually leave him unbalanced and irritated, today it feels like a minor musical note in a symphony. Far more interesting are the sensations of the padded material beneath his knees, the quiet of the empty room, the cheerful words painted onto the wall opposite him:

Welcome! Everything is fine. 

Zuko almost smiles. 

A door creaks to his left, and Zuko is surprised to find that the vision from his left eye is perfectly intact. The whole word is in-focus. It’s almost like Zuko can see too many details. He lifts a hand to his face and feels that the scar is still present, but it doesn't ache or obscure his vision anymore. 

The young man in the doorway smiles. 

“Hello, Zuko,” he says, his voice as serene as everything else. “Come on in.”

Zuko follows the young man in the monk robes into a large room, and they kneel across from one another. Between them lies a tea set. Zuko has never much cared for the taste of tea, which usually represents false propriety across a table, thinly-disguised threats, and the knowledge that one misstep could cost him his life. 

Today, the smell of the tea reminds him instead of Uncle Iroh. 

Zuko accepts a cup from the young man. It is warm in his palms. 

“I’m Aang,” the monk introduces himself. “I’m the architect.” 

Zuko glances around them again. They’re in some kind of meeting room. It is minimally decorated, but every clean line and warm colour seems deliberate.

“Where am I?” Zuko asks. “I don’t remember getting here.”

In his glancing around, Zuko’s eyes catch on his own sleeves. He’s wearing muted greys and dark blues. These are colours Zuko sometimes wears when he dons his Blue Spirit mask, colours aimed at blending in with the darkness of night. Why is he wearing this in the clear light of day? 

And why is Aang openly wearing the warm colours and blue tattoos of the Air Nomads? The only Air Nomads Zuko has ever met were careful to blend in with the Earth Kingdom in order to avoid being hunted down. Their identifying robes and tattoos are a thing of the deep past.

“Zuko,” says Aang, with a serene gravity in his tone, “you are dead. Your life in the physical world has come to an end, and you are now in the next phase of your existence in the universe.” 

Zuko blinks. “I don’t remember dying.” 

“We remove the memories, in cases of traumatic deaths,” Aang explains. “Just know that you died well and for a good cause. You can regain that memory later, should you like to.” 

Zuko isn’t sure why he would want to remember dying. “I thought I would be reborn?” Zuko asks. He’s never had much interest in the spiritual, aside from the situation with Zhao and the Moon Spirit, but Zuko is certain he wasn’t taught to expect a waiting room and a monk after his death. 

“That's what normally happens,” Aang explains. “Sometimes, someone steps off the wheel of rebirth. When they do that, they end up here, in the Spirit World.” 

“This is the Spirit World?” Zuko asks. He lifts one hand from his cup and looks at it intently, checking his own solidity. 

Aang chuckles. “These neighbourhoods are built for humans. You will still interpret yourself as solid. It turns out humans really enjoy the physicality of their existence. It’s so weird!”

“You’re not human?” 

“I’m an Architect,” Aang explains. “I’m a spirit who was brought into existence for the sake of maintaining these neighbourhoods. I built this one - it’s actually my first! I’m really excited.”

Aang’s honest enthusiasm eases the faint anxiety that had bloomed in Zuko at the idea of being in the Spirit World.

“Why did I step off the wheel of rebirth?” Zuko asks. 

“People leave the wheel for two reasons,” Aang explains. “Either because they reached their moral potential, and they’re ready to ascend - or because they, uh, hurt people badly enough that they can’t continue.” Zuko looks up at Aang, alarmed, and Aang continues: “Don’t worry, Zuko. You’re here for the good reason.” 

The tension eases. “Oh,” Zuko says, confused. 

“Welcome to the Good Place.” 

Aang takes Zuko walking through the neighbourhood. 

Zuko grew up in a palace of cold marble. Everything around him was expensive and deliberate and beautiful, but it always felt untouchable, and it always made Zuko feel misplaced and flawed. 

The neighbourhood is completely different. It’s more like the towns that Zuko would travel through while in exile, but without the inevitable scars of war and poverty. The buildings are mismatched. The people are laughing. The sun is shining down on them. 

It’s warm, in every sense that Zuko understands the world. 

“There are other neighbourhoods in the Good Place, run by other architects,” Aang explains as they walk. “It’s possible to visit them. But I designed this neighbourhood to bring together young people who died early because of the war.”

Something squirms uncomfortably in Zuko’s stomach. 

Zuko reaches up to fidget with his hair, only to find that it has been styled into a topknot. There’s more of it than before; his post-Agni Kai style has grown out. Zuko’s father never let him wear a topknot, because it was a symbol of honour that Ozai was adamant Zuko had never earned.

“I don’t understand why I’m here,” Zuko says, his discomfort twisting into genuine anxiety. 

Aang collects a packet of fire flakes from a stall and passes them over to Zuko. 

“People come to the Good Place when they have lived truly extraordinary lives,” Aang explains. “You lived an extraordinary life, Zuko. You brought so much good into the world, and completely against the odds. I wouldn’t be surprised if your actions and your legacy end the whole war! Though we’ll have to wait to watch that unfold, I guess.”

Zuko frowns, confused by Aang’s suggestion.

Zuko may have lived an extraordinary life, being born a prince and granted important missions in the war, but it was not extraordinary in a good way. 

Something isn’t right here.

“What… What about the other place?” Zuko asks, forcing himself to continue walking down the path with Aang without stumbling. “The place souls go to when they’ve hurt too many people?”

Aang hesitates. “The Bad Place,” he says after a moment. “You don’t need to worry about that.”

“What happens there?” Zuko asks, because he definitely needs to worry about that.

Aang shrugs. “Torment,” he says, “but… it’s really only for the worst of the worst, Zuko. It’s very rare that anyone goes there at all.”

Aang hasn’t called him ‘Prince Zuko’ once. 

Zuko isn’t wearing clothes that belong to him. They’re similar colours to his Blue Spirit disguise, but not the same items; this clothing is softer and more comfortable. 

Zuko’s hair is in a style he has never worn before, not even once. 

“Aang,” Zuko starts, the words bubbling up through his fear, “do you think there’s a chance--” 

“We’re here!” Aang announces with a flourish, gesturing to the small house on the corner. “Oh, sorry, I interrupted you.” 

Zuko looks up at the house. The whole thing is painted dark blue with white swirls, a pattern that seems distinctly Water Tribe. 

“Are you ready to go inside?” Aang asks when Zuko doesn’t finish his sentences. “There’s someone important you need to meet.”

The someone important is a young man from the Water Tribe, with a wide smile and bright eyes, who looks at Zuko with an urgent kind of joy.

“This is Sokka,” Aang says, “your soulmate.”

“My… What?” Zuko asks, glancing between Aang and the impossibly handsome man in front of him. 

“Soulmates are kind of rare; it's what happens when two souls keep finding each other through enough lives that they impress it into destiny,” Aang explains. “But sometimes things get in the way. Like early death and war. You and Sokka were supposed to meet, but…” 

Sokka laughs at whatever expression has taken over Zuko’s face. “I was pretty surprised soulmates are real, too,” he admits, reaching up a hand to scratch the back of his head. The sides of his head are shaven in a Water Tribe style. “It seems crazy, right? That we really lived over and over again?”

Water Tribe. Zuko had been trying to tell the Fire Lord about the Northern Water Tribe before he died, hadn’t he? 

“Sokka, this is Zuko,” Aang says. “Zuko is still getting used to everything, so…” 

“Yeah, yeah, don’t tell him about the time knife,” Sokka responds. 

“Don’t tell me about the what?”

“We’ll be fine, Aang. I’ll show him around,” Sokka insists. “Thanks so much for bringing him here.” 

“And if you need anything…” Aang starts.

“I know, I’ll ask Momo,” Sokka finishes, all but pushing Aang out the door. “Bye, Architect Aang!” 

And then Sokka - Zuko’s soulmate, who is from the Water Tribe, and died young because of the war that Zuko’s family raged on the world - turns to look at Zuko with the most dazzling smile Zuko thinks he’s ever seen.

“Um,” Zuko starts, unsure of how to handle any of this whatsoever.

“You’re here!” Sokka bursts. “You-- I’ve been waiting for you for… not that long, actually. Aang said it might be lifetimes before you stepped off the wheel, but I only died a few months ago, and here you are! Wow.” 

Zuko asks as it occurs to him: “Am I here because of you?”

“What? No, you’re here because you were obviously awesome,” Sokka explains. “Sorry, I guess I interrupted Aang’s welcome speech. He came by earlier to tell me you were on your way in, and I annoyed Katara so much she actually just left me here.” He laughs, then, and Zuko realises that Sokka is nervous. Nervous to meet Zuko. 

Zuko, who is beginning to suspect that something has gone horribly wrong here. 

“Can I…?” Sokka asks. “I know this must be a lot to process right now, and I don’t want to overwhelm you or anything. But can I give you a hug?” 

There’s no real reason to decline, with the sole exception of the fact that everything here is wrong, so Zuko nods once and allows himself to be embraced. 

Sokka’s arms fold around him gently, and some tension deep in Zuko relaxes incrementally. 

It’s somehow the best thing Zuko has ever felt. 

Soulmates, he thinks, sinking into the embrace. Sokka feels right against him, strong and warm and comfortable, and Zuko feels like he’s home. Not ‘home’ the way he had known it in life, with its cold marble and strict discipline, but ‘home’ in the way that he saw in families on his journeys. It’s like… It’s like the way Sokka smells is from a kind memory, but there’s no such memory in Zuko’s mind; it’s buried instead in his heart. 

Soulmates are meant to find one another in life. 

Sokka’s life ended early because of Zuko, in a roundabout way. 

Zuko pulls back eventually, guilt gnawing at him for how much he’d allowed himself to enjoy the moments of being close to Sokka. And when Sokka smiles at him now, it’s different; Sokka’s eyes are a little misty. He looks like his happiness cannot be contained by his body. (Though Zuko is unclear on the details of whether they really have bodies here at all.)

“Can you tell me about your life?” Zuko asks, grasping for anything to hold onto that isn’t Sokka. 

Sokka sits down and gestures for Zuko to follow. 

“Yeah, of course,” Sokka says, and clears his throat. “We’ve got a lot of time for that, and for anything else you want to know about this place. You must have a lot of questions.”

Zuko’s arms come up around himself before he can remind them to stay still. “That’s kind of a lot,” he admits. “Can we just start with you?”

Sokka starts talking, and Zuko lets himself lean back and breathe as he listens. 

Sokka and his sister Katara were born in the Southern Water Tribe. 

(Zuko never travelled that far south. Nothing was politically important to him down there. But Zuko knows about the Southern Water Tribe, knows that it was kept crippled to stop the southerners from ever rebelling against Zuko's family.)

Katara was the last of the Southern waterbenders, but her craft was lost to years of murder and pillaging. Katara eventually decided that she needed to learn, and that she needed to use her powers to fight against the Fire Nation, so she and Sokka had attempted to travel north. 

(Zuko got closer to the Northern Water Tribe than Sokka and Katara ever did.)

On their way north, they found themselves in many smaller struggles against the war. And in their last days, they had even found their father - but they had been forced to choose between going to their father and fighting for an Earth Kingdom village. They had chosen the village, even knowing that they were likely forsaking ever seeing their only living parent again. And Sokka and Katara had both died in the process. 

“I don’t actually know exactly how we died,” Sokka admits, lowering his voice as his story comes to a close. “I know the basics, and Momo could show me if I asked, but… I don’t want to see Katara die, even knowing that we both ended up here.”

Zuko nods. “You lived a very good life,” he says, and means it. 

Zuko understands how Sokka and Katara stepped off the wheel of rebirth. Their every decision was to protect other people. Even when they had been given the opportunity to make one selfish decision, a choice that nobody would have faulted them for choosing, they still decided to give up their happiness to protect other people. And then they gave up their lives for it, too. 

“What about you?” Sokka asks. “How did you end up here?”

And isn’t that the million gold coin question? 

Zuko knows exactly what kind of life he led, and it was one of dishonour and failure. He stood up dishonourably against his father’s general in a war room, and as a result, an entire division was sacrificed and Zuko was burned and exiled. And then Zuko spent years travelling the half-destroyed world on his father’s demands, breaking into the bases of enemies of the Fire Nation in order to report back, and eventually giving over information about the Northern Water Tribe that-- 

Information that would anger the spirits, Zuko realises, as the truth dawns on him. 

Zuko had solidified his own fate when he had realised what the koi fish were and taken that information to Zhao. And his fate wasn’t supposed to be here, sitting with Sokka from the Southern Water Tribe in a cozy home in the Good Place. 

Zuko had stepped off the wheel of rebirth. And for some reason, he went in the wrong direction.

“I don’t know exactly how I died, either,” Zuko says, feeling wooden and empty and suddenly very tired. “The last thing I remember is…” 

Zuko remembers walking into the throne room for the first time in years, holding his shoulders straight and his head high, ready to tell the Fire Lord exactly what Admiral Zhao was planning to do with Zuko’s information in the north.

Azula was there, watching Zuko with faint amusement and the headpiece of the crown princess. 

Fire Lord Ozai seemed to loom above Zuko, and Zuko thinks he remembers the smile slipping from Azula’s features… 

And that’s all Zuko remembers. 

“I tried to tell my father something he didn’t want to hear,” Zuko admits. He shrugs. “I guess I should have seen that coming.”

“Did you say your father?” Sokka asks, alarmed, and Zuko immediately looks to change the subject.

“Who is Momo?” 

Sokka looks at him for a long moment, and then shifts so that they’re sitting closer together. Zuko can feel the warm line of Sokka’s bicep against his own. It feels soothing. And Zuko feels awful for taking comfort in that.

“You haven’t met my buddy Momo yet!” Sokka says, and then calls: “Momo?”

A flying lemur drops down onto Sokka’s shoulder.

Zuko jerks away, surprised, and Sokka chuckles and scratches Momo’s head. 

“Momo is the spirit who keeps the whole neighbourhood running,” Sokka explains. “There’s a Momo in every neighbourhood. You can ask him for anything at all and he’ll get it for you, and he knows everything there is to know. Here, let’s try - what do you want to know?”

Zuko shouldn’t ask anything personal from his own life, or this flying lemur might realise that Zuko has stepped off the wheel in the wrong direction. 

(Stepping off the wheel of rebirth is weird.) 

But Zuko also can’t help himself. 

“Is my mother alive? Is she… in the Good Place?” Zuko asks a flying lemur, and is surprised to find himself expecting an answer. 

Momo tilts his head, and then there’s suddenly a book in Zuko’s arms. 

The book is old and dusty, and opened to a middle page. 

Zuko draws in a deep breath. 

On one page, laid out in the kind of careful characters that Zuko’s mother used to write in, are details about Ursa. She’s alive, living in the Earth Kingdom, raising a daughter. 

On the other page, a picture of Ursa works in a garden. The lines are simple and crisp. They’re also moving. Zuko watches her pull a vegetable out of the ground, watches a little girl stumble toward her with a flower clutched in a chubby fist. 

Zuko has another sister. 

He closes the book. 

This is too much. 

“I think I need to…” Zuko says, scrambling to stand up. Momo blinks, and the book disappears from Zuko’s hands. “I’m just going to…”

“Sure,” Sokka says, unfazed. “I know it’s hard to adjust. Why don’t you take a nap? I’ll be here when you’re ready.” 

Somehow, Sokka knows exactly how much space to give Zuko. Because he’s Zuko’s soulmate, maybe, or because he’s actually the kind of person who was fated to end up in the Good Place. 

Zuko disappears into the next room and curls up in the blankets. 

Zuko lies there for hours. 

This is a bed, which implies that people can sleep here, but apparently Zuko can’t. It doesn’t surprise him. Clearly, something is broken. 

(Zuko’s mother is alive. She ran away and started a whole new family, and never reached out to Zuko or Azula again. She left the two of them with their dad, who ended up banishing Zuko and eventually killing him, and only Agni knows what happened to Azula in her years alone with the Fire Lord.) 

Zuko pulls his hair out of the topknot. It spills across the blue pillow. 

It hasn’t escaped Zuko’s notice that nothing here is in Fire Nation colours. This is Sokka’s home. Maybe it’s even a home designed for Sokka and Sokka’s actual soulmate. 

Zuko’s heartbeat kicks up as he wonders about that. Maybe there’s another Zuko, someone who died at the same time and also stepped off the wheel, and they got mixed up? 

Maybe someone is being tormented in the Bad Place right now in Zuko’s stead. 

Queasiness spreads in Zuko’s stomach and the base of his throat at the thought. But Zuko is also too selfish to immediately do anything about it. He’s too selfish to admit that he doesn’t belong here - and isn’t that proof that he doesn’t? 

Eventually, the light streaming in through the window starts to dull, and Sokka comes into the room.

“Hey,” Sokka says, voice soft even though he can clearly see that Zuko’s eyes are open. “You okay?” 

Zuko nods. “I’m fine,” he lies. 

Sokka sits down next to Zuko, closer than is reasonable for someone who has known Zuko for only a handful of hours, but somehow still not close enough. “You know, Katara and I were really overwhelmed when we got here, too. She cried like four times that first day.” Sokka hesitates. “That’s a lie. She cried once. The other three times were me.”

Zuko chuckles. He looks up at Sokka properly, only to find that Sokka’s expression is so painfully open that it makes the guilt crash back in.

“I need to tell you something,” Zuko says, and moves to sit up. Sokka shifts a little to let him rise, and then looks at Zuko patiently. “I…” 

I don’t belong here is on the tip of Zuko’s tongue, but then he thinks about Aang casually saying torment and it’s only for the worst of the worst, and Zuko’s words die in his chest. 

“I’m from the Fire Nation,” he goes with instead. It’s a part of the truth, even if it’s not the whole thing. 

Sokka blinks, and then frowns. “Okay?”

“After everything we did to the Southern Water Tribe...” 

“Zuko, you didn’t do those things,” Sokka insists. It would be comforting if it was true. “I’m not going to hold the actions of a whole nation against you. I promise.” 

Zuko nods. He doesn’t feel even the slightest bit better, because he can’t seem to force himself to admit the truth to Sokka. Sokka, whose soulmate might be stuck in the Bad Place right now. 

Sokka glances around the room. “We should probably redecorate in here, right? Katara and I designed this place, but… I mean, you don’t have to stay here if you don’t want to. Or we can get you another bedroom, easy. But we can also reorganise things, add whatever you want.”

“Red and blue don’t go well together,” Zuko points out. 

“Then we’ll decorate in purple,” Sokka suggests with a grin. “Purple is obviously a superior colour, anyway.” 

Zuko huffs. “I like blue,” he admits. “Does Katara live here, too?”

“Yeah. She’ll be home soon,” Sokka warns. “We were going to see our friends tonight, before… before we found out you were on your way here. So you have some options.” He holds up one finger. “I could cancel and stay here with you.” A second finger joins the first. “You could start slow and just meet Katara tonight.” A third. “We could go and meet my friends.” Sokka puts his hand down this time, landing on Zuko’s hand and squeezing slightly. “Or I could go out and give you some time to be by yourself. Whatever you want.” 

Zuko’s chest aches at how understanding Sokka is being. It might disappear in an instance, once Sokka realises that Zuko isn’t really his soulmate, but for now it’s like stepping into a warm bath at the end of a long day. 

“I can come meet your friends,” Zuko agrees. “Is there anything I need to know?”

From Sokka’s description, Zuko had expected Katara to be a lot more like Azula: a natural prodigy and beloved younger child. But Katara has nothing of Azula’s ruthlessness, or perhaps she has no sense of competition, because everything about her exudes affection. She hugs Zuko immediately without even a word. When she pulls away, there are tears in her eyes, like she’s as happy to see Zuko as Zuko should be to be here. 

Suki mostly just rolls her eyes at how Sokka won’t leave Zuko’s side, but she also offers Zuko a sweet drink and a heartfelt: “Welcome to eternal freedom. I think we deserve it.” 

Suki has been here the longest, Sokka explained. There are empty spaces in this house where she’s waiting for a soulmate to join her, someone Suki had known in life but was reborn. 

Toph punches Zuko in the arm, and then says: “Hey, loser. Took you long enough.”

“Didn’t Sokka only die a few months ago?” Zuko asks.

“Well yeah, but he’s known he has a soulmate for months and hasn’t shut up about it,” Toph declares. “We all figured you’d live some more lives before showing up. So thank you for putting us all out of Sokka’s misery.” 

Zuko rubs his arm. “Why did you punch me if you’re thanking me?”

Toph grins. It’s only now that Zuko realises she’s blind. Her aim is nonetheless impeccable. “That’s how I show affection.” 

And finally, and most worryingly of all, Architect Aang is here. 

“Hey, Zuko!” Aang greets him. “How are you settling into the neighbourhood?”

“Fine,” Zuko replies, thinking that it’s best if Aang doesn’t know that he spent most of his day mildly panicking in Sokka’s bed. 

Toph tilts her head. “Ah, finding it kind of a lot?” she asks. 

Zuko sends her a sharp glance, which she obviously does not catch. 

“Right,” Sokka interrupts. “Sorry, I forgot to explain: Toph can tell when people are lying.”

Zuko’s heart thumps in his chest. 

How is it possible that this just got worse? 

“What?” he asks, faintly. 

“I’m the best earthbender who’s ever lived,” Toph explains. “And I’m definitely the best earthbender who’s ever died and come to the Good Place. I can see using my feet.” She wiggles her bare toes. “And I can tell when people’s heart rates pick up. Like yours is right now. Do you need to sit down?”

Zuko does, indeed, need to sit down. 

He nudges the conversation away from himself and his lying by asking Toph about earthbending, and then hopes that she isn’t paying attention to Zuko’s heart, because he is struggling to force it back to normality.

Zuko is here, surrounded by laughter and friendship, in a place that he doesn’t belong. And with him are a supposed soulmate, a spiritual architect, and a human who can read lies. 

This, he realises, is not going to last long.

Katara insists on spending the night at Suki’s, but it doesn’t take Toph’s skills to understand that she’s trying to give Zuko and Sokka space. 

“What do you think the Bad Place is like?” Zuko asks as they approach the blue house on the corner. 

Sokka throws him a curious glance. “I tried asking Momo once, but the book he gave me was pretty heavily censored,” he explains. “All I got was ‘torment’ and ‘punishment’ and something about Koh’s lair? Whatever it is, doesn’t sound fun.” 

He opens the door and steps back to let Zuko in first. Zuko tries not to be charmed. 

“Is there someone in particular you’re worried about?” Sokka asks. 

Zuko nods. “Yeah,” he admits. 

“Well, I doubt you need to,” Sokka insists. “It’s really rare for anyone to go there. They have to basically be so bad that they break the system. The whole idea is that people end up here eventually.” He offers Zuko a smile, and Zuko’s heart sinks. 

How bad a life did he lead, if he broke the intended system? 

“Zuko?” Sokka asks, stepping closer. He lifts his hands to Zuko’s face, familiar in a way that they aren’t and never will be, and Zuko flinches away a little. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m wrong!” Zuko admits, the words bubbling over. A stab of fear shoots through his gut, but it’s out there, now; doesn’t Sokka have a right to know? “I’m wrong, Sokka. I’m so sorry. There’s been a big mistake.”

“What?”

“Something… Something went wrong,” Zuko insists, stumbling a step backwards. “I’m not who Aang thinks I am. I’m not supposed to be here.”

Zuko finally runs out of words and looks up at Sokka, awaiting his verdict. 

Sokka stares at Zuko, his mouth a little open like he was on the verge of saying something before he got distracted. A line appears between his eyebrows. 

“Wait. What?” 

Chapter Text

“Then… who are you?” Sokka asks, still staring at Zuko like he’s a puzzle to be solved. 

“My name is Zuko,” Zuko explains. “They got that right, but everything else is wrong. I don’t normally dress like this,” he says, gesturing to the dark greys and blues of his outfit, “I never wear my hair in a topknot, and everything Aang thinks I did in life is… incorrect.” 

“How is that possible?” Sokka asks. “That shouldn’t be possible. Momo?”

Momo appears, flying down to land on one of the chairs. 

“No, Momo, go away,” Zuko insists, and in the blink of an eye the flying lemur is gone. “I know we need to tell Aang, but I’m just trying to figure out… what happens now.” 

Oh, spirits, how selfish is Zuko to spring this on Sokka and then not let Sokka turn him in? 

“It isn’t possible that you’re here by mistake, Zuko,” Sokka insists, his voice gentling. “Are you sure you didn’t do what Aang said you did?”

“Am I sure that I didn’t live an extraordinarily moral life?” Zuko asks, unable to contain his volume from rising. “Yes, Sokka, I’m sure! I wasn’t a good person. I wasn’t even an okay person. I fell off the wheel of rebirth and came in the wrong direction somehow.” 

Sokka sits down heavily. “I’m telling you, Zuko, that shouldn’t be possible.” 

“And I’m telling you that it happened, because I’m here.” 

Sokka pinches the bridge of his nose for a moment, his eyes screwed up like he’s thinking hard, and Zuko takes the moment to steady his own breathing.

What now? What does he do now? 

“Okay,” Sokka says eventually, sitting back to look up at Zuko. “So who are you, and why did you deserve to go to the Bad Place, where only the worst of the worst go?” Zuko swallows, hesitant to explain. “Were you a serial killer? An arsonist? Did you bully small children in your spare time?” 

“My name,” Zuko says carefully, and then clears his throat. Sokka raises his eyebrows. He clearly has no idea where this is going. “My name is Zuko, son of Ursa and Fire Lord Ozai, Prince of the Fire Nation and heir to the Dragon Throne.” 

The silence is thick and uncomfortable. 

“At least, I think I was still an heir,” Zuko admits. “I was never formally disinherited, but my younger sister was assuming the position of the next in line.” 

Sokka holds up a hand. “I need a minute,” he says, not looking at Zuko. 

Zuko’s knees are shaking, so he sits himself down far away from Sokka and waits. 

“Okay,” Sokka finally says, looking back up at Zuko. “Okay, that was… a lot. You were a prince. Prince of the Fire Nation. This house must seem… non-ideal, considering what you were used to.” 

It’s a strange place for Sokka’s mind to go, but at least he isn’t yelling and dragging Zuko to Aang. 

“No, it’s… I like it,” Zuko replies. “I haven’t lived in the palace for years, anyway. And I can’t say I liked it much when I was a kid.” 

Sokka nods, his eyes very wide and not quite catching on Zuko. “Uh huh. Uh huh. Prince Zuko.” And then he stops and shakes his head once, abruptly. “That’s… a lot to think about, but it isn’t an answer to my question.” 

“What question?”

“What did you do that was so bad you broke the wheel and you’re on your way to eternal torment?” Sokka asks, voice strengthening. “You said you were a prince, not a mass murderer.”

Aren’t they the same thing? Zuko thinks, but what he says is: “My family--”

“-- are not you,” Sokka interrupts, pointing a finger at Zuko. “Try again.” 

When Zuko latches onto Sokka’s line of reasoning, it almost feels worse than needing to admit who he is. 

“You don’t understand,” Zuko says. “I’m not the person Aang was talking about. He was expecting someone else. Someone who might be in the Bad Place instead of me.” 

“Zuko--”

“You want a list? Fine, I will give you a list,” Zuko snaps, losing his patience. He balls his fists in his lap. “When I was thirteen, I interrupted a war council to try to stop them from sacrificing a division of new recruits. But I did it stupidly, and dishonourably, and they all died as a result. And then I spent the rest of my life going on covert missions for my father, the Fire Lord, to try to make up for it. I tried to do one good thing, Sokka, and I did it so badly that they all died, and then I spent the rest of my life hurting other people.” 

Sokka looks honestly shaken at this. 

Zuko isn’t finished. 

“And then, at the end, I gave up a piece of information that put spirits in danger. If everything else wasn’t bad enough to put me in the Bad Place, was just regular ‘awful person’ stuff, then that was what tipped me over.” 

“You--” 

“I was a bad person, Sokka,” Zuko insists, beginning to run out of wind. “I was a bad person my whole life. I tried to be good once and I was bad at that, too. I’m not whoever Aang thinks I am. And that means…” Zuko draws a deep breath to fortify himself. “That means your soulmate is probably in the Bad Place because of me.” 

“No.” 

Zuko looks across the room at Sokka. “No?”

“There isn’t some other soulmate waiting for me,” Sokka insists, his voice firm. “I don’t know how to respond to any of the rest of that, Zuko, but you are my soulmate.” 

Zuko wants to melt into the floor. He hangs his head. “You don’t know that.”

“No, but see, that’s the thing: I do know that.” Sokka stands up so abruptly that Zuko almost jumps, and then he crosses the room and kneels in front of Zuko. “Look. I don’t know enough about you or the Spirit World to really respond to the rest of it - which is why we should ask Aang,” Sokka says, and then reaches out. He touches Zuko’s fist where it’s curled against Zuko’s knee, and the warmth of Sokka’s skin seeps into him. “But this part I’m sure about.”

“I don’t…” 

“You can feel it too, can’t you?” Sokka asks, gently coaxing Zuko’s hand open so that he can slip his fingers between Zuko’s. Sokka’s palm is warm and dry. And Zuko gets that feeling again, like he’s recalling a happy memory but can’t quite grasp it.

Zuko nods. 

“So,” Sokka goes on, “you’re my soulmate. Whatever else is true, I completely believe that.” 

“But what if I’m not? What if every second that I’m here, your soulmate is actually in the Bad Place?” Zuko’s voice trembles, and it’s only then that he realises that his whole body is shaking a little.

Sokka looks up at him with very serious eyes. “Listen to me. Whatever is happening, this is real. I promise.” 

Zuko closes his eyes and breathes, focusing on the connection of their hands. 

“Okay,” he says. “Okay.” 

“I have an idea.” 

In the light of day, things feel a little less awful. Yes, Zuko is just biding his time until eternal torture, and he’s now aware that he’s probably going to break Sokka’s heart on the way there, but… at least he gets this house and this neighbourhood and this soulmate for a day. It could be worse. 

Zuko walks from his brand new, Momo-made bedroom into the shared area of the house, where Sokka is standing with breakfast ready and what looks like a large writing slate propped up in the middle of the room. 

“Okay?” Zuko takes a bowl from Sokka, and then sits where Sokka ushers him to. 

“So, your theory is that you were on your way to the Bad Place, right?” When Zuko nods, Sokka adds: “We’re disqualifying the idea that you were mixed up with someone else. Aang knew enough to bring you to me, which means there wasn’t some other Zuko.” 

“There could still be someone in the Bad Place because of me,” Zuko points out, tapping his chopsticks against the side of the bowl in a way that would have had him punished as a child. 

Sokka shrugs. “We have no real reason to think that’s the case. When we tell Aang, we can make him check if you want, but… Aang knew you were you. You just think he was wrong about…” 

“My overall quality level,” Zuko finishes.

Sokka winces a little. “That.” 

“But even if there isn’t someone else in my place, I still need to tell him,” Zuko states. “I might not be the only person affected by this. What if people have been mistakenly going to the Bad Place, like how I’m mistakenly here?” 

Sokka watches him for a long moment. “So you’re saying: even if there’s no immediate problem with just lying low and staying safe, you think you should still endanger yourself so that Aang can check that this mistake hasn’t hurt anyone.”

“Exactly,” Zuko responds. 

Sokka hums. “Because you’re a bad person.” 

“Yes,” Zuko replies, sounding unsure. “What’s your point?” 

“Nothing!” Sokka smiles. “So my idea is this: if we need to tell Aang to double-check that everything’s good in the Good Place, then we need to be in a position to argue that he shouldn’t send you to the Bad Place. Right?” 

Sokka turns around and writes near the bottom of the slate: Convince Aang not to send Zuko to the Bad Place. 

“The question is just how we do that,” Sokka explains. 

Just above Convince Aang, Sokka writes: Tell Aang about the “mistake”. 

Sokka moves up again: Zuko becomes less likely to end up in Bad Place. 

“Oh,” Zuko says, putting the pieces together. “You want me to try to be a better person here, so that Aang lets me get back on the wheel.” 

Sokka looks back from the slate. “Well, actually, I want Aang to agree to let you stay here.” 

Zuko sighs pointedly, because Sokka’s optimism is beyond the pale, but he ultimately lets it go. 

“So how do we do that?” Zuko asks. “How can I make myself a less awful person?”

Sokka grins at him. 

“Well,” he says with a flourish, “lucky for you, your soulmate knows all kinds of things about being a good person.” 

Chapter Text

“So lesson one on being a good person,” Sokka says with a flourish, “is: what kind of person was Zuko-heir-to-the-Dragon-Throne?” 

“Hey Aang, quick question,” Sokka says, dragging Zuko behind him by his wrist. Zuko is allowing this because the sensation of Sokka’s skin quietens something within him that Zuko didn’t even know was loud. 

Aang has a mouthful of custard tart. It doesn’t stop him from saying: “Sure!” 

In the earlier years of Zuko’s life, eating this impolitely would have resulted in physical pain. It’s kind of nice to watch someone with Aang’s young face be free to eat however he wants, even if Zuko knows that Aang is actually much older than he appears. 

Sokka sits down on the grass beside his sister, and tugs at Zuko’s sleeve until he does the same. This puts Zuko next to Toph, who is quickly becoming Zuko’s least favourite person in the afterlife. Just sitting beside her makes Zuko’s heartbeat kick up, and he knows that she can tell. 

“So,” Sokka says, “the whole ‘breaking the wheel by being awesome’ thing. What’s the criteria for that? How do you know someone is good enough for the Good Place?” 

Zuko’s heart pounds in his chest. He casts a nervous look at Toph. Toph tilts her head toward Zuko again, communicating that she knows something is wrong, but she doesn’t put words to it.

“Oh!” Aang responds, surprised but not displeased. “Well, there isn’t really criteria. It’s not like we sit here and add up points for you.” 

Zuko thinks of the writing slate, which Momo has hidden away for them. It has two categories, weighted significantly in one direction: one list for things Zuko did wrong in life, and another for what he did right. Zuko feels like it’s been seared into his mind, and he isn’t even finished; Sokka dragged him away from the board when he ran out of room for his own wrongdoings. 

But Sokka didn’t leave him afterwards. He dragged Zuko out into the sun, pressed sweets into his hands, and kept up an endless stream of nonsense chatter until they ran into Aang, Katara, and Toph. 

It’s probably a good thing that this isn’t a points system. Even Sokka, who just yesterday insisted that he completely believed in Zuko’s right to be here, seems to be panicking when faced with the reality of Zuko’s life. 

“It’s more like… Well, people ascend from the wheel of rebirth by themselves. We’re just here to say ‘hello there’ when you turn up.” Aang grins. “All the reasons are different, as far as I can tell. I like to say it’s because people reached their potential. It’s like you… lived a life that put you at one with the universe.” 

Sokka screws up his nose. “I think I’d prefer points,” he admits. 

Toph tilts her head back. “How did I become one with the universe if that still sounds like spiritual mumbo-jumbo to me?” 

Sokka points a thumb in her direction in agreement and looks back toward Aang. 

“Well, you don’t need to know that you have a good relationship with the universe to have a good relationship with the universe,” Aang explains in a patient voice. “And plenty of people think they’ve reached enlightenment, but it’s actually just self-serving. It’s not about how you feel; it’s about who you are.” 

Toph leans toward Zuko and asks: “Is this making any sense to you whatsoever?” 

“Nothing makes any sense to me anymore,” Zuko admits. 

Sokka pats his knee. If it was anyone else, it wouldn’t be comforting - but with Sokka, it seems that any kind of proximity helps. 

Katara hums, watching Aang with bright eyes. “So it’s about being the best version of you, right?” she asks. “And that’s different for every person.”

“Exactly!” Aang responds with a wide grin. And then he adds: “Sort of.” 

Sokka huffs a laugh and looks at Zuko. “Exactly,” he repeats with a false air of seriousness, “sort of.” 

Aang laughs along with the others, and then tries again: “So Zuko’s actually a great example of this.” 

Zuko immediately goes cold. 

“We all grow up being told who we’re supposed to be, right?” Aang asks, and Zuko can’t seem to take a good breath. “Sometimes, being your best self is about what you do in spite of everyone around you. When Zuko died–” 

“Aang,” Katara’s voice cuts through, unexpectedly firm. “I think you should stop.”

It’s only then that Zuko realises he’s clutching at Sokka’s arm too hard, nails biting into Sokka’s flesh. His heart feels like it isn’t beating right, but– but maybe it doesn’t need to beat at all here, maybe it doesn’t matter? 

“Okay,” Sokka says into the quiet, lifting his other hand to cover Zuko’s. “It’s okay. Let’s go for a walk, huh?” 

“Oh no,” Aang says, his voice quiet. “Zuko, I’m so sorry. You shouldn’t even remember your death. Do you… remember it, somehow?” 

Zuko doesn’t look up from Sokka’s hand. “No,” he manages to bite out. 

Slowly, and with much determination, Zuko loosens his grip. 

“Let’s go,” Sokka suggests, tucking some of Zuko’s hair behind his ear. “Come on, buddy. Come on, sweetheart.” 

Zuko doesn’t look at the others as he allows Sokka to help him to his feet. He feels unsteady, like one wrong breath might knock him over, and– and he needs to be less obvious about this. Aang is going to figure it out and send Zuko to the Bad Place. Zuko should let Aang figure it out; Zuko is selfish and awful for hiding this, and for letting Sokka need to lie in what should be his paradise. 

“We’ll see you guys later,” Sokka says as he leads Zuko away. 

“That did not go well.” 

“It went… fine,” Sokka insists, his voice a little higher than usual. Zuko is starting to recognise this tone as Sokka trying to comfort him with thinly-veiled lies. “We learned something. That’s good.” 

“Did we learn something?” Zuko asks. He crosses his arms as they walk, and he feels his shoulders inch upwards. “I think we just learned that if I want to avoid the Bad Place, I need to improve my relationship with the universe.” 

“We’re focusing too much on the negative.” Sokka slips an arm around Zuko’s shoulder. Zuko relaxes on instinct; something inside him loosens and stretches toward Sokka like a flower toward the sun. “Let’s try focusing on the positive for a while, okay?”

“What do you mean?”

Sokka tugs him around a corner, off the path and onto a wide stretch of grass. “Well. We wanted to list out all the good and bad stuff you did in your life earlier, and you, uh… kind of hopped on the ‘terrible person’ train again. Not that I’m criticising! But you did good stuff in your life, too. Tell me about that.” 

“It doesn’t outweigh–” 

“Aha!” Sokka says, pulling away from Zuko enough to point a finger in his face. “So it does exist, you just don’t think it’s enough. Lay it on me. Come on.” When Zuko only bites his lip, Sokka sighs. “Just something small, Zuko. Tell me about someone you cared about.” 

There weren’t many people in Zuko’s life. For someone who travelled as far and wide as Zuko, he didn't really know many people.

“My sister,” he says, eventually. “Azula. We didn’t see each other for years, until I… came back to the palace. I think she was there when I died.” He clears his throat as they walk, and avoids Sokka’s eyes. “My cousin, Lu Ten. He died in the siege of Ba Sing Se. And my uncle, we– when he came back from the siege, and my father became the Fire Lord, I spent a lot of time with Uncle. Until I– before I was sent away, I mean. And my mom. She left.” 

Sokka stops walking and tugs Zuko to a stop with a hand at his elbow.

“Help me with the timeline here, buddy,” he says. “You told me about being thirteen and standing up for those new recruits. And then…?”

“And then my father sent me away,” Zuko explains. 

Sokka blinks. “When you were thirteen?” he asks, honestly confused. “Where did you go?”

“Well, I was banished from the Fire Nation. I went to the Earth Kingdom while I recovered, and then I started my covert missions. The first was in a Fire Nation colony–” 

“Recovered from what?” Sokka interrupts. 

Zuko gestures to his face. It’s strange, he thinks, that the scar remains - but at least it doesn’t hurt anymore, or obscure his vision. 

Zuko watches as Sokka’s eyes flicker over the scar, and for a moment he feels self-conscious about it - there’s a reason he’s generally hidden behind masks - but Sokka’s expression doesn’t betray disgust. He looks concerned, instead; his mouth flattens out a little, and he puts both his hands on Zuko’s shoulders and squeezes. 

“Okay, I was taking you to the pond because I thought it would calm you down, but I am now sensing that I’m going to need the calm to handle this story. C’mon.” 

Sokka’s hand slips down Zuko’s arm to catch his hand, and that is all Zuko can think about for the rest of their walk.

“Here we are.” 

‘Here’ is not only a pond.

“Turtleducks,” Zuko breathes, moving forward and accidentally dragging Sokka along behind him.

“They’re cute, right?”

Zuko lets go of Sokka’s hand and his understatement, and he sits at the edge of the pond. He reaches forward, and one of the turtleducklings zips forward in the water to butt its soft little head against Zuko’s fingers. 

The turtleduck swims in a circle around Zuko’s fingers, clearly looking for food, and Sokka hands Zuko a pouch of seeds. Soon enough, all the turtleducks have joined them at the water’s edge. A few of them climb onto the grass, their little feet stumbling in the grass to get closer. 

“Okay,” Sokka says, breathing the word on a deep sigh. “I’m ready. Go.” 

“Go?” 

Sokka fixes Zuko with a serious gaze, squares his shoulders, and asks: “How did you get that scar?” 

Zuko looks away and continues to feed the turtleducks. 

“After I challenged the general in my father’s war council, I was told I needed to fight an Agni Kai - a firebending honour duel.” Sokka makes a noise at that, a choked-off sound that seems like it’s about to turn into an offended statement, and Zuko cuts him off: “I agreed to it. Consent is necessary in an Agni Kai.” 

“You were thirteen,” Sokka points out.

“I didn’t fight, in the end. I– I didn’t know that it would be against my father.” 

“It was–” Sokka cuts himself off and takes another audible breath. “Zuko. You know that’s supremely messed up, right? Please tell me you know that.” 

Zuko nods. He still can’t look directly at Sokka. “Yeah, I… I know. It took a lot of time for me to realise it, but… once I said I wouldn’t fight back, he could have won the Agni Kai easily. He didn’t need to punish me like that.” Zuko shakes his head, bringing himself back to the present. “But you wanted to know about good things I’ve done.”

Sokka’s hand finds Zuko’s again. Zuko looks down and watches Sokka’s fingers slip through his, warm and strong and comforting. He tries to memorise the feeling of it. 

“Hey, there’s no rush,” Sokka insists. “We have time. Tell me about what happened afterwards?” 

But we don’t have time, Zuko wants to respond; we’re running on a timer that might run out of sand at any moment. 

“The Fire Lord banished me and told me I could work my way back to the palace by proving I was a loyal son,” Zuko explains. “I spent a few weeks just… healing, and then I got to work. He would send me missions - breaking into enemy bases, mostly. Sometimes he wanted me to check on the loyalty of our own people. So that’s what I did.” Zuko shrugs. 

“For… how long?”

“Just over three years,” Zuko says. 

He finally looks up at Sokka, whose jaw is set and whose eyebrows are drawn in. “That sounds like it was dangerous.” 

“And it wasn’t dangerous for you and Katara to try to go north?” 

“It would have been dangerous for us either way; we had to try something to help with the war effort,” Sokka responds, and Zuko feels a swell of affection grow within him. Of course Sokka and Katara felt that they had to be forces for good in the world. “But the Fire Lord sent you, alone, into dangerous situations… over and over again. For three years?” 

Zuko nods. “Yes.”

“And what was the end-goal? When were you going to be able to come home?” 

“I don’t know,” Zuko responds. Sokka’s hand tightens on his. “Yes, I– I do realise that he was just trying to kill me without having to get his hands dirty for it. I realised that when he gave up and killed me himself.” 

Sokka is doing the deep-breathing thing again, like he was never taught how to meditate but he knows he needs to do something to calm himself down. 

“I’m sorry you were alone,” Sokka says eventually. “I wish I’d found you while we were still alive.” 

His eyes are very earnest and very blue, and Zuko has to look away before it hurts him any more. “I don’t think that would have gone well,” he admits. 

“Nah,” Sokka responds, and there’s a smile in his voice now. He nudges Zuko with his arm. “I’m pretty sure we would have gotten you on our side eventually.” 

Zuko rolls his eyes. He’s glad they didn’t meet in life, not with who Zuko was, but… maybe Sokka’s influence could have kept him on the wheel of rebirth. That would have been nice.

“Okay,” Sokka says, shifting so that he’s facing Zuko instead of sitting beside him. The turtleducks have lost interest in them now that the seeds are gone. Zuko thinks about calling them back so that he has something to look at that isn’t Sokka. “So: best thing you ever did?” 

Zuko winces. He takes his hand back from Sokka’s and winds it instead into the grass. 

He thinks back over his childhood, when he was obedient to the best of his ability, but… Zuko isn’t sure that obedience to his family is a good quality after all, considering what his family did to the world. He combs instead through the three years since the Agni Kai. When he was healing, there was a family who helped him in the Earth Kingdom, and he did some chores for them in exchange for ointments and a bed, but that was transactional. 

Has Zuko done anything in his entire life worth being proud of? 

“Hey,” Sokka says, tapping his fingers against Zuko’s knee. “Stop thinking. Just tell me something. Some time you made a decision you’d stick by now, or that you disobeyed your father, or that–” 

“The Air Nomads.” Zuko clears his throat. “It wasn’t good, exactly, I just… didn’t do something bad. But I did let the Air Nomads go.” 

Sokka tilts his head. “What Air Nomads? I thought they were all…” 

Zuko shakes his head, thinking about Aiguo’s gentle smile and good humour, even in the face of real and present danger, thinking about Yawen’s steady hands and steady trust, thinking about the feel of the infant in his arms, days away from receiving his name in a ritual that should have been long-dead in the world. 

“Some of the Air Nomads survived,” he explains to Sokka. “They were nomadic, so there were always Air Nomads in the rest of the world. Most of them were hunted down by Fire Lord Sozin. But not all of them.” Yawen had told him many stories on the night he’d stayed in their camp. She had whispered them like secrets she somehow trusted Zuko to keep. Zuko’s guilt ran deep, because Yawen didn’t know who she was trusting; he was known to her only as the Blue Spirit, not as the prince of the nation determined to eradicate her kind. “I met some, once.” 

“And you let them go,” Sokka prompts. 

Zuko wets his lips. “My father had asked me to assess the loyalty of one of his generals,” he explains. “The general was insisting that he’d found Air Nomads to hunt down, which is why he was late on another mission. I was supposed to find out if he was telling the truth, and if he was, to help hunt the Air Nomads. So I went looking for them, and I found them before General Eiji did.” 

Zuko was good at finding information by that point, after almost two years of travelling on light feet and remaining out of sight. Nonetheless, he’d stumbled upon Yawen almost entirely accidentally; she had been away from the camp, holding her child in one arm while trying to retrieve a fallen sleeve of water, when she and Zuko locked eyes. 

They stayed there for a moment, Zuko mid-step and Yawen crouched awkwardly, until the infant slipped from her breast and cried out. The sound broke the spell, but it apparently cast another; as Yawen calmed the child, Zuko found himself picking up her water sleeve and handing it to her. 

And just like that, Yawen had decided that she trusted a masked stranger enough to bring him back to her family. Zuko spent much of that evening hoping that nobody admitted to being airbenders, because the moment he had an answer was the moment he needed to make a decision.

Of course, that hadn’t lasted long. 

“You’re wearing a lot of blue for a firebender,” Yawen commented later that night. Apparently Zuko hadn’t been subtle enough in aiding the campfire after all. 

Zuko bounced the fussy infant in his arms as he considered his options.

“You’re wearing a lot of green for an airbender,” he replied, because Yawen hadn’t been very subtle, either. 

“I was wearing a mask when I found them,” Zuko admits. “I did that, sometimes, when I was… unsure if I wanted word to get back to my father about things.”

Sokka shifts so that he’s sitting up straight, his posture tightening. “What does that mean?” 

“If I wasn’t sure what message I would be sending home, and I didn’t want someone else to contradict my official story, I would wear the Blue Spirit mask,” Zuko explains. “So when I came across the Air Nomads, I was masked - just in case. But it means they didn’t have a way to know where I was from when they invited me in, and… I couldn’t turn them in, in the end. They were just trying to stay alive.” 

“You warned them that they were being followed?” 

They had believed Zuko immediately and earnestly. Yawen had even hugged him before they left, and had whispered something about how he was a sweet child and she knew she could trust him. Zuko is still unsure if she actually believed it, or if she knew how close Zuko had been to bringing them to their deaths. 

“I got them to safe passage, and then I told the Fire Lord I’d seen no evidence of the Air Nomads the general claimed were in the area,” Zuko finishes. He nods decisively. “That’s it - that’s the best thing I did. Or, it’s the… worst thing I didn’t do.” 

Sokka’s eyes are very intense as he watches Zuko, and then a smile blooms on his face. “That’s a pretty great thing, actually,” he says. “You helped keep a bunch of people alive, even though it meant lying to your father.” 

“I didn’t help to get them killed,” Zuko corrects him. “That’s not the same thing.” 

“And the Blue Spirit, denouncing your father, super secret personal missions,” Sokka goes on. He seems to be having a difficult time restraining his grin. “Tell me more about those.” 

Zuko shrugs. “I wasn’t denouncing my father. I just… thought that he didn’t really know what was happening out there, and if he did, he would see that I was making the right decisions.” When Sokka’s smile doesn’t fade one iota, Zuko presses: “I was being naive, Sokka, not good.” 

“Why not both?” Sokka asks. “How many times did you make decisions like that?” 

Zuko glances down at his own sleeves, the dark and muted colours he wore as the Blue Spirit. The tiniest spark of hope ignites. 

“A lot,” he admits. “Not for… half a year after I was banished. But then it was probably once a moon cycle. It wasn’t always like with the Air Nomads - sometimes I was just gathering my own information, or trying to return stolen property.” At Sokka’s raised eyebrows, Zuko explains: “I didn’t believe my father would allow theft, even if it was the Fire Nation who did the stealing.” 

“You thought your father was okay with killing people, but not stealing things?” 

Zuko’s hands tighten against his own knees. “I know it sounds stupid. But I thought… I thought he considered some things necessary because of the war, but I didn’t understand why we would hurt people just for the sake of hurting them.” 

Sokka reaches out again, back toward Zuko’s hair. Zuko lets Sokka push his hair away from his face, and thinks that he should keep wearing it down for this small moment of contact. 

“You did that all on your own,” Sokka says, his voice quiet and firm. “Your family tried to teach you right and wrong backwards, and you still did that all on your own.” 

Zuko spent so much time alone in recent years. The idea that Sokka will still be here tomorrow, that he doesn’t need to pack up his few things and leave for another mission immediately, is overwhelming. Zuko knows that he shouldn’t believe it, because he might be sent to the Bad Place at any time, but even the idea that this could be a reality claws at him. 

I’m glad I got to be here, Zuko thinks about saying as he watches Sokka’s face, as his eyes trace the freckles across the bridge of Sokka’s nose. I’m so glad I got to meet you. 

But it’s the kind of truth that he shouldn’t speak. This is the kind of thing Zuko shouldn’t encourage. Sokka’s hand is still hovering by his neck, the backs of his fingers are still brushing against Zuko’s hair, and he thinks they’ve both stopped breathing as they watch one another. 

Zuko should avoid this. This will all make it more difficult when Zuko needs to go, even if he’s lucky enough to be reborn. 

After a moment, Sokka swallows, and Zuko finds himself automatically swaying a little closer. 

And then the strangest thing happens: 

Between one breath and another falls a sense of dread so thick it’s almost tangible. 

Sokka feels it too; Zuko can see it on his face. They pull away, both struggling under the weight of the wrong in the air. 

“Something happened,” Sokka comments, grabbing for Zuko’s hand. “Come on.” 

The feeling of Sokka’s skin is the only thing keeping Zuko moving; he wants to curl up somewhere and hide.

“Katara!” Sokka waves down his sister. Katara and Toph are standing in the middle of the road, staring off into the distance. “Toph! What’s wrong?” 

Katara turns toward her brother. She looks grey around the edges. From a distance, Zuko thinks that she’s only affected by the unease - but as they approach, Zuko reads the stunned expression on her features, and he knows that it’s worse. 

Katara opens her mouth to speak, and Zuko steels himself.

“The Moon Spirit is dead.” 

Because this is the answer to Sokka’s question. This is the kind of person Zuko was in life: the kind of person who would bring death into the spirit oasis. 

Chapter Text

“Lesson two on being a good person,” Sokka says, head bent toward Zuko as they walk back to the house, “is about relationships. It’s important to be considerate to other people. Right now, that means being together when things are rough.” 

When Zuko lived in the physical world, his survival often depended on his ability to keep quiet. This was often literal; whether he was following the Fire Lord’s orders on collecting information or following his own instincts, Zuko’s actions were usually restrained to shadows and break-ins and sneaking around. Sometimes it was less literal, and Zuko needed to keep his mouth shut around some corrupt general or minister, and figure out how to frustrate their plans later. 

After all, not being quiet - literally and figuratively - is why Zuko was burned and banished in the first place.

He couldn’t scream when he wanted to scream. He couldn’t stand before someone with immense power but no honour and challenge them to an Agni Kai. He couldn’t even put his own thoughts into words, because there was never anywhere safe for that. And so instead, Zuko folded his rage smaller and smaller inside himself, burned hotter deep below, and let it out by undermining people’s positions or by stealing information or by liberating property and returning it to its rightful owner. 

“You’re going to burn yourself up one day,” Shunyuan had said to him once. The sun was hot that day, and Zuko was dripping with sweat after taking a sword lesson too far. The dummy that had been working with was singed around the edges from where Zuko had sliced his swords in the air and fire had unwittingly poured down them.

Up until now, Zuko had never used firebending while wearing his mask. The shock of anxiety at that realisation tightened his voice as he snapped, “That’s none of your business.” 

“Always so pleasant,” Shunyuan responded with cheer. “Yuxi, I think today’s sword lesson is over.” 

Zuko watched Yuxi disappear into the house. “You didn’t have to do that,” he insisted. “I wasn’t going to hurt her.” 

“Well, you’re about one bad turn away from hurting yourself.” 

“I’m not so bad with swords that I would injure myself,” Zuko snapped. 

Shunyuan just sighed in response, which was something he did often in response to Zuko. It always irritated Zuko further, but Shunyuan didn’t have an unlimited well of patience and he didn’t owe any of it to Zuko. 

But Zuko did owe these lessons to Shunyuan’s family, after he’d stupidly put them in the path of danger. And so he would return back here to teach them to fight whenever he was passing through, and he would put up with Shunyuan’s disappointed sighs and Yuxi’s enthusiasm and the twins pulling at his trousers and asking him to stay. 

Zuko folds his fear down tight inside himself. 

Sokka and Zuko don’t return to the house alone. Katara comes with them, which Zuko knows is fair; she has been giving them space, but it’s her home, too. And Toph and Suki invite themselves inside, too, because this is a group of friends that Zuko has intruded on.

Architect Aang is supposedly trying to fix the problems with the neighbourhood. Zuko doesn’t mention the obvious fact that the death of a spirit probably isn’t fixable. 

Aang needs Momo for now, so they can’t request anything, but it doesn’t seem to matter. They locate every blanket they can in the house and put them in a pile in the main area, and then they huddle there together. For a moment, Zuko isn’t sure what to do, but then Sokka holds out his arm to welcome him in, and Zuko finds himself unable to resist curling close to him. 

He soaks up the comfort that pours from Sokka. Zuko has been alone for years. The idea of automatically choosing to be with other people when things are difficult is… new. Or perhaps it’s very, very old. 

“How could a spirit be dead?” Suki asks eventually, hugging her knees. 

Zuko knows the answer to this question. He does not volunteer the information.

“I’m sure Aang can fix it,” Katara adds with 

Zuko closes his eyes against the oppressive atmosphere, the thick fog of wrongness in the air, and just focuses on breathing properly.

And he means to stay quiet, he really does, but he still finds himself asking: “What happens if he can’t?”

He has a brief wisp of a memory, of saying something like the Fire Nation depends on the tides - a memory which is linked to a crackle in the air and the smile slipping from Azula’s features - but it’s gone as soon as it arrives. 

There’s a long moment of quiet before Sokka clears his throat. “Well, the moon controls the tides,” he states in a careful voice, “so there will probably be all kinds of issues, really, but… it’s hard to know. A lot of animals depend on the tides, and on the light of the moon for hunting. They would probably die off. Which would have a knock-on effect with other animals, and then probably with crops. That’s, uh, assuming it doesn’t cause bigger problems like tsunamis.”

“Everyone dies,” Zuko says, the true weight of this finally settling. He didn’t think things could get worse than when he damned a spirit to death, but it turns out there’s no end to his callous, unthinking destruction. 

“The neighbourhood is about to get a whole lot more full,” Toph comments. 

Sokka frowns into the distance. “Actually, maybe it won’t.” He tilts his head in thought, a quirk that fills Zuko with an old affection born from a life he didn’t live. “If people only enter the Spirit World when they leave the wheel of rebirth… What happens when there’s no wheel anymore? Do they still end up here?” 

Suki suggests, “Maybe they can’t get here, so they end up in the Bad Place,” and it’s abruptly too much for Zuko. 

He’s on his feet before he can really process that he’s moving.

“I need a minute,” he mumbles, and then disappears into his new bedroom. 

Every step of the way, this is getting worse. How does this keep getting worse? 

There’s a small part of Zuko, below the steadily-rising buzz of anxiety, that thinks: at least Sokka will understand what is happening now. At least Sokka will have to stop denying that Zuko belongs in - belongs to - the Bad Place. 

It doesn’t really help anything, but Zuko doesn’t think he can stand Sokka’s hope much longer. 

“You could stay, you know,” Yuxi said one day, adjusting her grip on the sword. Zuko felt like he’d been watching time pass on her face, as she grew from an innocent girl to an adolescent child of war. “You don’t have to go so quickly every time.” 

But Yuxi was still a child. She never fully understood what Zuko did to her family, because the Zuko who had tea with generals and reported back to the Fire Lord wasn’t the same person as the man in the Blue Spirit mask who showed up to teach her to defend herself. To Yuxi, Zuko must look like a friend of her older brother’s, not the reason that Shunyuan was forced to take over the role of their parents.

“You don’t know what you’re asking,” Zuko said eventually, because he wasn’t going to be the one to explain this to her. Not if her family hadn’t managed. “Your form is off. Try again.”

Yuxi didn’t argue with him again that day, but the cadence of her sigh said it all. 

Zuko spends several long minutes folding his fear and frustration down and down and down, tucking it away, and trying to convince himself to leave the bedroom. He’s going to do the right thing: he’s going to return to the others and consider their needs. He’s going to sit with his own guilt, because there is nothing he can steal and nobody he can lie to that will make this better. 

(He doesn’t wince at the thought, but it’s a near miss.)

But when Zuko goes to push the door open, he hears his own name from the other side.

“... Zuko, but there’s something wrong with him,” Katara is saying, her voice gentle enough that it barely travels far enough for Zuko to hear. “I think you need to talk to Aang about it.”

Zuko hears Sokka’s sigh, and the weary whisper of it cuts Zuko somewhere deep. 

“He just needs time,” Sokka responds, and the tone of his voice is even worse than the sigh. He’s never sounded like this before: like he’s tired beyond his years and down to his bones, even though he’s in literal nirvana. 

Zuko clenches his jaw until it aches. His shoulders crawl up and his fists tighten. 

There’s something wrong with him. 

He’s brought back abruptly to the last time he saw Yuxi. Zuko had allowed ignorance to lie between them for years. He had decided it wasn’t his job to explain to Yuxi that she should hate him. And ultimately, it allowed him to get almost two years of sword fighting practice into her and her older brother, so Zuko couldn’t bring himself to regret it. 

But there’s something wrong with him, and Zuko isn’t helping anyone by allowing ignorance to keep himself safe. 

Zuko slips out the window. 

It’s second nature to keep his footsteps light. This is woven through the fabric of his being by now. He is silent, and he is alone, and he packs every feeling he has about it down tightly where it can’t burst out of him again. 

He walks until he’s back where he started: the waiting room outside the architect’s chambers. 

It feels completely different here now. The colours feel muted. The cheery statement on the wall declaring that everything is fine feels mocking and insincere. Nothing of the previous calmness remains, not when the death of the spirit has sapped the energy from the Spirit World. 

There’s a girl kneeling in the waiting room. Her eyes are closed and her face is relaxed. She hasn’t been woken up for her time in the Spirit World yet. 

“Architect Aang?” Zuko asks as he knocks on the door. 

After a moment’s hesitation, the door creaks open.

“Zuko?” Aang asks, frowning up at him in confusion. “What are you doing here?” 

Aang is not alone. Behind him stands an imposing woman with a painted face and heavy green robes, and a man with a long grey beard. 

“I need to talk to you about something,” Zuko says, pulling his gaze away from the unimpressed stares of the stern adults. 

Aang smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “I’m sorry, Zuko, now isn’t a good time. We’re sort of mid-crisis.” Aang jolts. “Not that you need to worry! Nothing to worry about. It’s not really a crisis so much as it is a… disagreement.” 

“Disagreement?” Zuko asks, because he absolutely thought this was a crisis. 

Aang scratches the back of his head. “Yeah, uh, why don’t you come on in? Maybe we could use a fresh perspective.” 

“We do not need a fresh perspective,” the woman declares. 

Aang beams at her as if she hasn’t just shot him down. “Zuko, these are my colleagues–”

“Bosses,” the man corrects. 

“--Architect Kyoshi and Architect Roku. I told you this is my first neighbourhood, right? Well! We’re having a disagreement about whether someone gets to be here.” 

A chill runs down Zuko’s spine. 

“Oh,” is all he can bring himself to say. 

“It’s unheard of,” Architect Roku states. 

Aang’s smile doesn’t waver. “Well, isn’t everything unheard of before it’s heard of?” he asks. He catches Architect Kyoshi’s eye in a way that looks deliberate. “Is it really justice to keep soulmates apart when we don’t have to?” 

Kyoshi’s face doesn’t shift at all. 

Zuko curls his hands into fists and waits for two strangers and a spirit he met mere days ago to decide his eternal fate. It takes every drop of patience in himself to do it. 

He wishes Sokka were here. Sokka would know what to say, and the warmth of him would make it easier to accept that this is happening. Except… Sokka being here would mean that Zuko had to face the fact that they were likely to be torn apart at any moment, and that thanks to a cruel twist of fate, Sokka’s eternal paradise would always be marred by the fact that he once had a soulmate who was damned to the Bad Place. 

How long would it take for Sokka's memory of Zuko to fade into nothingness? 

“I know she has a job to do, and she chose to do it, but surely we can compromise,” Aang suggests. “The Moon Spirit isn’t always at work, and… of everyone, she belongs in this neighbourhood!” 

“Free passage back and forth,” Kyoshi says, narrowing her eyes in thought. 

What?

“What?” Zuko asks, confusion overtaking the dread. “The Moon Spirit? Isn’t it dead?”

“Oh, duh,” Aang responds. “I didn’t actually explain, did I?” He turns to face Zuko properly, then waves a hand to the open door. Zuko looks back to the girl in blue, and Aang says: “This is Princess Yue. Tui once gave Yue life, and now Yue has given it back. The moon will live, and Yue will be the new spirit of the moon, but… she belongs here.” 

“She did not step off the wheel of rebirth into the Spirit World in the usual manner,” Roku adds. “The most obvious and natural way forward is for her to simply take Tui’s place.” 

Zuko hasn’t looked away from Princess Yue once. He doesn’t recognise her, of course; the Northern Water Tribe is secretive, and for good reason. But now that he knows, he can see the regality in her posture. This girl was fated to lead her people and then ascend from the wheel of rebirth to join her soulmate. Instead, Zuko doomed the Moon Spirit to die, and doomed Princess Yue to take her place. 

The conversation ebbs and flows behind him, but Zuko fails to catch the thread again. 

“It isn’t fair,” Yuxi insisted, tears gathering in her eyes as she glared at him. “You– After everything– You lied to me!” 

Shunyuan’s voice was careful and gentle as he said, “He didn’t lie, Yux. We just didn’t want to explain everything.”

“I had a right to know!” Yuxi snapped. She lowered her face to her hands. 

Zuko didn’t say a word, because Yuxi was right. Zuko let her go two years without knowing that he was the reason she and Shunyuan and the twins didn’t have parents anymore. He’d shown up here, gone out of his way to pass by for the excuse to teach them to defend themselves, and every single time, he’d chosen not to mention it to anyone but Shunyuan. 

Yuxi sobbed, and Shunyuan’s shoulders slumped, and Zuko sat there with them knowing that this was the end of a chapter. But Yuxi was good with her swords now - was a faster learner with a blade than anyone Zuko had known - and even the twins were competent at escaping and hiding. There wasn’t much more Zuko could do for them. 

“It’s just as much my fault,” Shunyuan lied, and Zuko winced a little at the words. 

Yuxi looked up at Zuko again. Her hair was wild around her face, almost obscuring her red-rimmed eyes. “I should have known,” she spat. “You won’t even take off your mask. I don’t even know your name. Why should anyone trust you?”

“You shouldn’t,” Zuko agreed. 

Yuxi huffed a tired breath and closed her eyes. “It’s not fair,” she said, a note of finality in her voice. “It’s not fair that you made a mistake, and we had to pay for it.” 

Zuko left before Yuxi opened her eyes again. 

“She shouldn’t be punished,” is what Zuko ends up saying. 

The architects pause their argument, and Zuko can feel them turning to face him. 

“Go on,” Aang prompts him. 

Zuko clears his throat. It doesn’t stop the roughness of his voice when he explains: “It wasn’t her fault. It was– everyone else’s. She did everything she could to save everyone else. If there’s any way to let her have time here, you should do it. It’s not fair to punish her for someone else’s mistake.”

“It’s not a punishment,” Architect Roku insists. But then he narrows his eyes at Zuko and adds: “But if there is a chance…” 

Zuko leaves before they decide Yue’s fate.