She rested her hands on the stone before her, watching the sun meet the horizon, finally sinking fully into a sense of calm that seemed deeper than any she'd felt before.

The war was truly over.

She heard footsteps and knew it was him before he reached her. He stood beside her, laying his hands alongside hers, and for a few minutes they simply shared the silence, each taking their time to try and process the enormity of the empty space that fear and doubt and uncertainty had so recently occupied.

Finally she spoke, softly, as if to avoid shattering their hard-won peace with the sound of her voice. "Did you ever imagine it would end this way?"

He was quiet a moment more, for once feeling no great rush to have everything said and done for fear of missing his only chance. They had time, now, and like everything else it was a strange sensation. "At the beginning? Never. But during the battle…I knew. It just…felt right."

She nodded, understanding what he meant. She had never lost sight of the fact that it would be difficult, that it would be messy, that it may require sacrifices none of them were ready to make. But in spite of the odds, the moment she and Zuko faced his sister she'd felt a heated rush of confidence that they would win, that they would stop Ozai and put an end the Fire Nation's insatiable reach for power. And they had done it.

And here they were.

Another comfortable, easy silence hung between them, and she found herself quietly marveling at the wealth of possibility now stretching before her - before all of them. She felt the warmth of him beside her and turned her head to look at him, one very particular possibility suddenly surfacing in her mind.

He met her gaze and all at once it felt less like a possibility and more like an inevitability, like the sun setting beside them and the moon pulling the tides, and he was leaning down to press his lips to hers. The kiss was soft and chaste but lingering, a sweet, gentle sort of heat seeming to fill them both to bursting, and as he drew back and smiled at her he knew that, really, this was where they'd been headed from the beginning.

It had just taken them a while to get there.