AN: This fic turns very AU starting after Zuko's banishment.

Firstly, thank you so much for the comments and nice things. Secondly, these next few chapters are a collaboration with one of my favorite fanfiction authors, someone who I am very , very lucky to call my friend, Cupofdaydream. If you haven't already please do read more of her stuff it's absolutely phenomenal.

As far as this fic goes it's divided into parts and and will be labeled with the author.

Part 1. Cupofdaydream

1. Atonement

When the third arrow hits, it knocks the air from his lungs, and it knocks him back to his halcyon days, to days spent on Ember Island weaving through the tall grass after his sister, and chasing gulls along the beach. His father puts a hand on his shoulder, and if there hadn't been a war raging outside their palace gates, if his father had been first born, could their family have been happy? Zuko can't help but wonder.

And pain is the one to bring him back, he coughs up red into his hands, and his vision blurs, and it takes all he has to stagger forward and keep moving along the wooded road, because he'll be damned if he dies here. He's still so far from his destination—from the weather-worn roofing and the gold-painted borders. He's kept her waiting long enough.

His heartbeat thunders in his ears, drowning out the sound of his rasping breath, and this time, when delirium carries him away, it's not a warm, light memory that eases his wounds and calms his soul, it's biting and cold, and yet it still burns like fire. Those years spent on that dreaded ship haunt him, every foul word he ever uttered to his uncle, one of the only people who ever loved him in his short life of little love, reminds him that he is a man of many regrets.

Life has been a series of broken promises, an empty existence filled with remorse and sorrow. To rectify his wrongs that could never be made right, to turn back time, to bring back the dead, his redemption lies in impossible tasks. And no dying man can defy the impossible.

Three arrows in his back. He hears a fourth whizzing nearer, but before it can hit its mark he stumbles, and the arrow whistles past his head.

It's a struggle, such a struggle to get up. Zuko closes his eyes. The memories flood.

And when he opens them again, he's home. He's home for the first time in six years. He's twelve, or maybe thirteen, and the palace garden is in full bloom, the flowers—brilliant reds, oranges, and yellows—are fires in blossom form, occupied by tiny humming-bees that totter in flight, drunk on nectar. So vivid, so real, memory quickly becomes reality.

Looking upon the babbling fountain, he recalls that day when they both fell in, or, rather, when he pushed her in and then followed suit—a valiant yet gullible act on his part. And there, just across the way, sits the faithful old apple tree. He'd sought solace under its bows ever since his mother's disappearance, his back to the bark he would wait for the day when her hand touched his shoulder, for her to pull him into her arms and assure him that she was back, and that she'd never leave again. Zuko waited, and waited, day, after day, after day, after day, but when a hand did finally graze his arm it was not his mother, but Mai, the girl with the downcast eyes and quiet voice.

"Aren't you hungry?" she'd asked, sliding some bread between them before sitting down. "You've been out here all day."

At first he'd been reluctant to share her company, to let this girl bear witness to this sorrow that was solely his, but with time he'd come to accept and almost crave her presence; thereafter every little conversation, every stolen glance and subtle upturn of the lips taken as Azula whisked her away had meaning. He had a friend.

Zuko can see her now, back against the apple tree, she sighs, a trait she picked up from her mother as childhood ran its course to voice her distaste or boredom. As he approaches, she acknowledges him with the slight incline of her chin, revealing a jawline that will gradually sharpen over the next three years.

"What's with the outfit?" she says, gesturing to his armor.

Zuko puffs his chest out. "I'm attending the war council later on today."

"Your father finally invited you?"

"Well, no, but I'm going anyways."

Mai stretches out like a cat in the sun, and much to Zuko's disappointment, she does not inquire about why he plans on going without an invitation. "Sounds boring."

"It's important," Zuko retorts, "if I'm going to be Fire Lord one day, I need to learn all I can about how to govern our country now. It's my duty."

She scoffs. "Duty is stupid."

"It's our social responsibility to bring honor to our families and country by becoming useful citizens to our nation," he says with a frown, internally delighted with himself for quoting the palace tutor verbatim.

"My social obligation," says Mai, "is to marry, satisfy my husband, and have sons until I drop dead—oh, don't look at me like that, Zuko, just sit down already." She smirks.

He does, highly aware of the color creeping up his neck and ears. She's taken up this new habit: speaking rather bluntly about such immodest subjects—such as the private relationship of a married man and woman, and the business of producing heirs. It is an occurrence so increasingly regular that it must be intentional, must be some sort of ploy to embarrass him. Afterall, causing him public mortification does seem to be one of her favorite past times, from the fountain incident all those years ago, to the dinner just last fall when the two of them had somehow ended up locked inside a broom closet together. If his pride suffered, she was always somehow involved.

"No matter the task, we all must fulfill our duties as citizens of the Fire Nation," Zuko says, once again calling upon his memories of the many lectures he'd received over the years.

"Easy for you to say. You're going to be Fire Lord."

"Whatever. Responsibilities are responsibilities. You can't just avoid them."

"Sure I can," she shoots back. And because he can't gather a reply, the two of them sit in silence.

"My Uncle," she finally says, "he and my aunt have a little cottage on one of the islands that they used to go to in the summer. Maybe I'd go there."

Though he does, as she reminded him, have more coveted obligations than she, no matter how hard he tries to replace her image with his own, to picture a future of being sold into a passionless marriage, a future of submission, he doesn't see it within himself to run as she would. He's always given chase.

"There are some responsibilities you can't escape."

"Well," Mai sighs, rising to her feet and brushing the grass off the back of her robes, "if the royal life ever gets old, you're welcome to join me. Have fun at your war council."

. . . . . . . . . .

It doesn't take much to sneak past the palace guards. Not that she really expected much security around the prince's living quarters—not after what happened. She does nearly run into General Iroh though, and she ducks behind a corner maybe just a moment too late, but if he notices, he doesn't say a word, walking past her hiding place without so much as a glance. She'd had her reservations about coming, for not only did her intentions compromise the privacy of her feelings and emotions, it was beyond her knowledge whether or not Zuko had even been released from intensive care in the first place. But her ears serve her well enough.

She can hear him through his bedroom door, and it takes all she has not to cover her ears and run away. Crying is an awful sound. And there's something about his tears—so devastated, so desperate, more tears of despair than anything else despite the pain from his physical injury—his agony transforms itself into a grimace on her face.

Mai wonders if it hurts. To cry. Can he still feel the pain? Or have the nerves been too badly damaged? Can he even cry to begin with?

Slowly, she raises a fist to the door, and knocks, yet there is no reply amongst the sobs. "Zuko?" she says, turning the knob. Mai catches a glimpse of the room in total disarray, the silhouette of his his seated figure on his bed, the carpet scorched and shards of mirror littering the floor, before something shatters against the door.

"Get out."

But she stands there in the crack of the door, eyes averted, taking no action to move until Zuko sends something crashing into the door, hard enough so that it slams shut in her face.

"I said, get out!"

The crying begins again, though this time it's muffled, making the sound somehow even more pitiful.

She's about to take her leave, because she's just a nobleman's daughter and he's a prince, and she's supposed to do as she's told, but recent events throw her judgement for a loop, meddling with the hierarchy in a way she's unfamiliar with. And so Mai simply sits back against the wall, listening to the tears of a dishonored prince…

Mai waits. She waits long after the sun has gone from the windows, long after the birds have ceased their daytime singing. She's surely missed supper, and her mother is bound to give her a scolding—though in retrospect a mere scolding can't really be that bad.

And then she asks, in a voice so quiet she doubts Zuko can even hear her through the bedroom door: "Is it true? Are you really leaving?"

She's only heard rumours-bits and pieces—the palace has been full of whispers for the past six days: talk of the events that transpired, the prince branded as a disgrace by his own father and banished.

Banished.

And then her answer comes in a voice toneless and already lost at sea. "Tomorrow. At sunrise," is all he says.

She remembers the days when she could still hide behind her mother's robes, when she'd watch the ships leave port, heading off to the warfront, a thousand hulking iron figures becoming mere silhouettes and shadowed reflections on the ocean water, growing farther and farther away until they disappeared off into the horizon. She remembers the mourning mothers who stood on the shore when word came home about the sons and daughters lost in battle, their lamenting cries an unsettling song, the sea foam flecked with white flowers and petals meant for the lost.

There will be no white petals scattered across the water for Zuko. Not for the disgraced prince. There will be no letters bearing news of his well-being, no mourning mother, no funeral ceremony, only one lone ship sailing into the vast unending sea, disappearing from sight and memory.

There's no point in grieving—yet she feels herself doing so all the same. Her eyes sting with unexpected tears, and a heaviness settles in her limbs and chest; she rises to her feet, hand turning the doorknob, denying the years of lectures dictating proper etiquette and ignoring the shame of the tears that have begun to dot her cheeks, her pride overwhelmed by the swelling need to say goodbye.

This time, he doesn't say a word and she doesn't either, looking down at her hands as she takes a seat on the edge of his bed, the space between them cavernous.

Mai stares straight ahead, her arms trembling as she struggles to compose herself. "I don't remember when it happened," she says, her voice quivering, betraying her, but she pushes on, past every instinct that screams at her to stop. "You should know before you leave… I should tell you…" But before she can say it, he speaks, and the three words she summoned up the courage to feel and speak aloud, three words she never thought she'd ever say in her lifetime, die in her throat.

"Don't mourn for me," Zuko says. And it hurts.

Don't mourn for him. After all those stolen days beneath the apple tree, light flecking in a mosaic through the leaves, those moments when their hands brushed by chance, or when they held each other's gaze just a little too long in the instants where silence spoke loudest. After that one summer day when their lips had met, half in curiosity and half in pink flushed cheeks, neither of them saying a word after, but surely, surely he must have felt it too. And he asks her not to mourn—how could she not?

"I'll capture the Avatar. I will return," he speaks with resolve, resolve she had thought deserted him. She always did tend to underestimate him.

"Promise me," Mai says, her hand closing the distance, her fingers curling over his right hand. "Promise me you'll come back."

He looks straight at her. And she sees him, really sees him for the first time in what seems like forever. White gauze obscures nearly the entire left side of his face, the skin around his right eye swollen and his nose red from crying, but it's still there. The fight in his eye.

"I will return. I swear to you," he says.

And she believes him.