A/N: I really should have learned my lesson about saying things like "I'm going to try to get this out fairly quickly" by now. Life always ends up getting in the way somehow.

"Lord Zuko!"

Zuko stopped, his hand on the door to his office, and turned to see a young woman rushing up the hall toward him. She usually worked in the kitchens, but he had gotten to know her during his first few weeks as Fire Lord when she had been assisting the palace physician. He had also occasionally seen her in the komodo rhino stables or sorting through scrolls in the library. If she had a job description, he had no idea what it was.

"Yes, Aili?" he asked, concerned by the urgent tone of her voice.

She came to a halt a few feet away from him, bowing her head briefly. "Lady Katara is in the palace gardens."

His eyes widened. "She's here already? Why didn't anyone tell me?"

Aili inlined her head again. "You were in a meeting. She was very insistent that we not disturb you while you were working."

"Of course she was." He sighed and turned away from his office door. "Thank you for the message, Aili."

After the end of the war, Katara had spent most of her free time in the Fire Nation Capital sitting by the pond in the palace gardens. She had loved creating little eddies with her bending and watching the ducklings ride them around the pond with explosions of tiny quacks.

Zuko was unsurprised to find her sitting at the edge of the water, watching the ducklings paddle around the still water with a wistful expression on her face. Wordlessly, he sat beside her and reached out toward the water, creating a swirl in the center of the largest huddle of ducklings.

As the ducklings squawked in surprise and began to excitedly follow the water's new movement, Katara looked over at him with a tiny smile.

"Thanks," she said quietly. She shifted her legs underneath her. "I guess we really did swap bending, then."

"Didn't you get my letter?"

She laughed. "You mean the mess of garbled language you sent me? I hope your official missives don't read like that."

He created another eddy for the ducklings without looking up at her, feeling his good ear get a bit warm.

"Yes," she said, "I got it. My dad had the hawk redirected for me, since I had already left when it arrived. It honestly just confirmed what I had already assumed. Nothing else made any sense."

"This doesn't make any sense either," he replied, letting the water still again. "I spoke to the palace librarian about it last night—"

Her eyes widened. "You did?"

"Hypothetically," he said hurriedly. "I didn't tell him it had actually happened. I trust him, but not that much. Anyway, he said there's nothing in any Fire Nation record he'd ever seen that indicated anything of the sort. He told me it was impossible, but…" He trailed off.

She held up her hand, conjuring a flame above her palm. Her expression was wry as she looked at him over it. "But," she agreed.

He looked at the flame for a minute, feeling a pang in his chest. It wasn't physical, not like the pains he had been getting before the swap. It felt a lot like being at a Fire Nation festival during his exile.

"We have to fix this," he said.

She closed her hand around the flame. "I know, but I don't even know where to start. Do you think your uncle would know anything?"

"More than us, at least," he said with a small shrug. "I'll send him a letter."

She nudged her shoulder against his, grinning. "Maybe I should send him a letter. You know, if we want it to make sense."

He groaned and covered his face with his hands. "I'm never writing to you again."

She laughed, probably knowing as well as he did that it was an entirely empty threat. Then she looked back at the water, sobering quickly.

"Maybe…" She sighed, dipping a finger into the pond. "Maybe you could write to Aang as well? He usually has some ideas about this kind of stuff."

Zuko watched her twirl her finger in a looping pattern through the water, wondering if he should ask about her hesitation. He knew that something had happened between her and Aang after the end of the war and that now they only spoke to each other in strange, stilted tones when obligated to be in the same room, but he didn't know the full story.

He wasn't sure that anyone but the two of them actually did.

"Yeah," he said finally. "I can write to Aang, too."

A silence fell over the garden, and Zuko couldn't decide if it was companionable or strained. It felt like the avoided topic was still hanging over them, but maybe that was just his own anxious thoughts. He had always been terrible at reading rooms.

"What if we tried sparring?"

Katara looked up at him, her brows furrowing. "With each other, you mean?"

"We can't really do it with anyone else without revealing our bending," he said, "so yeah, with each other. It'll probably go terribly, but…"

She sat back from the edge of the pond, head tilted thoughtfully. "I think that might actually be really interesting. Maybe learning how to use your bending will make me feel less weird about not having mine."

He understood what she meant. Losing access to his firebending left a certain feeling of powerlessness and vulnerability. He had been carrying his dao blades as discreetly as he could since the swap for exactly that reason, but Katara didn't have anything else. She had always relied on her bending.

Zuko gave the turtleducks one final current to ride around the pond, then got to his feet. He held out a hand for Katara, who took it with a smile and pulled herself up beside him.

"Is your training area private?" she asked.

He shrugged. "I'm sure someone would find me there in an emergency, but generally they don't disturb me while I'm practicing. The only place more private than that is my bedroom, and I don't think we want to do it in there."

As soon as the words left his mouth, he regretted the phrasing. Sokka would have immediately thrown a lewd comment at him, he was sure, but luckily Katara was not her brother. She just raised her eyebrows.

"You know what I mean," he said awkwardly. "We don't want to spar there. Because of space, and—"

She nodded, her lips twitching at the corners. "Better to stick with the training area."

"Right," he agreed. He scratched the back of his neck. "Uh, anyway. I'm sure we'll be fine."

As he led the way out of the garden, he thanked Agni that his uncle had taught him how to rehearse speeches. The Fire Nation would probably be at war again in a day if he ever tried to ad lib a public address.

When they reached the training area, Katara immediately moved to stand near the barrels of water that Zuko had kept in the corner since the first time the two of them had decided to train together. As she turned back to face him, he raised an eyebrow at her.

"I think maybe I should take that side this time," he said.

"Oh, right," she replied, ducking her head as she shuffled away from the barrel. "That does make more sense."

He moved to take her place as she took up a defensive stance in his usual spot. After a moment's appraisal of their opponent, both benders began to move.

Zuko realized almost immediately that his instincts were entirely wrong for waterbending. Trying to force his limbs to move in fluid, continuous motions made him clumsy, and most of the water he tried to use against Katara ended up on the floor instead. Opposite him, Katara seemed to be having similar troubles. She moved rigidly, her awkwardly jerky movements causing her aim to fluctuate wildly.

After a few minutes of the worst sparring either of them had experienced in years, Zuko stopped and hurled the water back into its barrel.

"This isn't working," he said with a sigh. "It's like trying to write with my left hand."

Katara nodded, moving a chunk of hair over her shoulder. "I don't feel any less powerful, though. It's like I have the same level of bending ability, I just can't figure out how to control it."

Zuko gestured sharply upward with his hand, and the contents of each barrel shot out in a geyser-like fashion. The move definitely demonstrated a level of bending power that neither he nor Katara had possessed a couple years earlier.

"So we have the right amount of power," he said, dropping the water back into the barrels, "but the wrong technique."

She tilted her head thoughtfully. "I have an idea."

Before Zuko could ask what she meant, she had whirled her arms around her body and conjured a ring of fire. Grinning, she moved into a familiar waterbending stance and began to control the fire as if it was water, creating a bizarre version of her octopus form. Zuko watched her in shock, amazed at her ability to keep the fire in place. Firebenders were trained to summon bursts of flames as they needed them and to let them dissipate before moving on to another form. Zuko had always been told that a bender must be incredibly powerful to keep a fire burning with no fuel, especially long enough to do anything useful with it in combat.

But then, Katara had proven herself many times over to be an incredibly powerful waterbender. He supposed it made sense that the same would hold true of her firebending.

"This is amazing!" she exclaimed, her eyes wide with excitement. She moved her arms again, whipping her tendrils of flame into something reminiscent of a dance as she shifted out of the octopus form.

Zuko could only watch, entranced, as Katara completely upended everything he thought he had known about firebending. He wasn't sure he had ever seen anything quite so beautiful in his life.

She turned to face him as she completed another form, letting the fire vanish into the air. The radiant smile on her face made something in his chest jump.

"You should try it," she said. "With waterbending, I mean. See if you can use the water like you usually use fire."

He remembered his lessons on lightning redirection and the idea of taking inspiration from other forms of bending. His uncle would be elated to see what Katara had managed to do with the concept.

Frowning, Zuko settled into a more comfortable bending stance and pulled the water from the barrels again. It responded immediately, floating beside him in a massive ball. It took him slightly longer than Katara to find a rhythm that successfully adapted his firebending forms to the water's natural movement, but after a few minutes he managed to manipulate it to begin shooting shards of ice as though they were fireballs. He moved steadily through a basic firebending routine, using his hands and feet to control the water and concluding with an arc of water that followed his feet as he spun on one arm and flipped back upright.

Katara applauded as he returned the water to its barrels, adding a bit more gusto to her ovation than he thought was really necessary.

"That was incredible, Zuko!" she said. "I've never seen waterbending like that before."

"Your firebending was pretty unique, too." He shook his head slowly, still stunned by their discoveries. "I can't believe this worked."

She just grinned at him, conjuring an arc of fire between her hands. "Me neither, but I'm definitely not going to pass up the opportunity to kick your ass. What do you say we see just how far we can take this?"

"Bring it, Water Tribe," he retorted, and raised his arms to bring the water up in an array of hovering ice shards.

A/N: Unfortunately, since I didn't get this all written when I had planned to, I've now run up the end of my summer free time. I'm leaving for a trip to Europe in a couple of days and then I'm moving and starting a new job, so it may be a little while before I can actually finish up this fic. But I hope you enjoyed this chapter, and I'll try to be back as soon as I can with another.