The ice shelf's protests had gone unheeded for too long.
Hairline cracks raced away from every heavy step, every mis-aimed blast, every gout of heat that turned solid sheet into slick melt and back again in ugly patches. The shelf groaned like a tired animal beneath two furious, over-trained teenagers who absolutely did not care about its well being at all.
One more clash did it.
Zuko's counterblast met Raven's latest fire-whip midair. The exceptionally direct hit made a bright blinding flash, causing all still foolish enough to be watching to shade their eyes and wince. The explosion of heat and steam was as controlled as the raging teenagers, and the pressure buckled deep into the ice. A jagged crack ripped out from between them in a sharp, splintering line that went all the way to the lip of the harbor.
For a moment, everything almost held. Zuko slid to a stop, Raven failed to find anything to grab and started slowly sliding on hands and knees towards the ocean.
"Oh, no, no!" Raven tensed up as she saw the water rushing towars her.
Then the world underneath them gave up.
With a sound like thunder, the harbor ice sheared away from the thicker pack. The chunk holding Zuko, Raven, most of his front line, and a respectable amount of the village's shoreline lurched, tilted, and began to slide out toward the icy blue water.
The Water Tribe didn't need anyone to tell them what to do. Years of living on a fickle ocean took over. Mothers grabbed children. Older kids grabbed younger kids. Katara snatched Sokka's parka hood and hauled him bodily away from the edge as the ice beneath the Fire Nation lines began to crumble.
"Back!" Gran-Gran barked, more emphasis than plea now, and the villagers scrambled further inland, boots slipping but moving.
Soldiers shouted and flailed as the ice under them split into jagged rafts. A couple toppled into the freezing sea with armor-heavy splashes, clinging to whatever edges they could grab. Others windmilled their arms, trying to keep formation on suddenly mobile platforms.
Raven's attention stayed fixed on Zuko.
As the ice tilted back in her favor, she sprinted and half slid across a listing sheet, jumped the newly opened crack, streaks of flame kicking from her heels to give her just a little more height. "You will not escape me!" she screamed like it was an order from on high, not that he was even trying to.
"Who's escaping, you idiot—?!" he threw back, but the retort turned into a grunt as the ice under him dropped a full arm's length and his injured ribs slammed against unseen ridges. Pain tore across his chest like a fresh boot heel. "Ga-aahh!" he wheezed.
Momentum did the rest. Raven sailed a generous distance over his head and flailed for the absolutely nothing to hold onto in the air before unceremoniously dunking herself in the roiling, freezing cold ocean with a cut-short panicked shriek—all lost to the chaos.
Zuko glanced, had one moment of intense curiousity what the hell that was about, but the water's roar had swallowed her, and he started clambering back up the broken ice to look around for where the Avatar had gone.
Cold slammed the fire out of reckless Raven like a fist. For a heartbeat she didn't know which way was up, only that everything burned and froze at once. Every last ounce of her bending roiled up from her core and permeated her skin as she scrambled to get out of the water. When she did find the surface the deep cold in her limbs was already dragging her bending down to a dull, useless flicker, and even though she saw the spears and banners of Zuko's crew just down the shattered beach, her legs wouldn't let her seek her vengeance.
"Prince Zuko!" one of his men yelped as their section of ice bumped hard against the side of the warship and began grinding along its hull, each of the men upon it sighing with relief as a confused Iroh tossed them down a rope ladder. "What about the— the noblewoman, she's—"
"WHO CARES!" Zuko snapped, clutching his bruised chest as he snorted out licks of fire. "Get everyone back on the ship, NOW! The Avatar is escaping!"
That was something his men understood.
Armor clanked as soldiers scrambled and hauled each other up the warship's side, abandoning stranded ice chunks as they broke and drifted further out. Half the once-imposing formation degenerated into a wet, shivering mess on deck, with the ones who hadn't fallen in rushing to get the rest of the firebenders. By the time the last of them clambered up and the ramp winches chattered into life, the ice shelf they'd come in on was a jagged, drifting graveyard of slush and broken floes. The village itself still stood, perched on its more solid footing, but the harbor was a shattered mouth.
From somewhere far beyond the steam and falling snow, the deep, mournful bellow of a sky bison rolled across the water. It was just enough stress. Sokka's watch tower held out as long as it could, but finally toppled over while no one was watching.
Zuko, soaked to the bone, steaming faintly in the cold, stormed across his own deck like a prow with legs. Every breath made his ribs throb. Meltwater dripped from his hair into his good eye. His crew tried very hard to look busy and not like they'd just watched their prince get kicked around by a girl half his size over what seemed like a petty teenage dispute.
"MOVE," he barked at a pair of dawdling soldiers, shouldering past them toward the bridge. "Get us turned around—no, don't wait for the ice to clear, RAM it if you have to—"
"Prince Zuko," a calmer voice cut through his tirade like a warm knife through cold butter. "Did something go wrong with your mission?"
"Girls are crazy, Uncle! That's what went wrong!" he barked as he heated his palm to rapidly dry his soaked everything, and Iroh was kind enough to join in with one hand to hurry it along, but still had cup of tea in his hands, robe neat, beard un-scorched—having missed the entire theater outside. His brows rose slightly at his nephew's state, but his eyes were more amused than surprised.
"The men said something about an Agni Kai?" he pondered, and turned briefly to look out over the water, wondering who he even would have been dueling.
"I don't want to talk about it," Zuko growled, which of course meant they were going to talk about it slightly later.
"Ah," Iroh said mildly, as if that explained everything. He tipped his chin toward the sky. "Then perhaps you'll prefer talking about that."
Zuko followed his gaze in pure exasperation and froze.
Appa's huge shape cut between the low-hanging clouds, white fur stark against gray sky. The sky bison was already a considerable distance away, but there was no mistaking the direction—away from the village, toward open sea. A smear of orange and blue on his back marked familiar silhouettes.
The Avatar. Getting further away every second.
Rage, humiliation, pain, and the bone-deep, singular drive that had kept Zuko moving for the last three years all smashed back into one coherent line.
"THE AVATAR!" he roared, because he didn't have a better word for the mix of longing and hatred and necessity that name had become.
He slammed a fist down on the railing and spun on his heel. "Helm! Full speed! Bring us about and follow that bison! I want every crumb of coal in those furnaces burning!"
The ship answered with a deep, growing rumble as it started to wrench itself free of the ice's faltering grip. Metal groaned. Steam billowed. Slowly, then faster, the warship pivoted and shoved its way back out of the broken harbor, nose angling after the vanishing speck in the sky.
Iroh sipped his tea, watching the Avatar's flight with an unreadable expression. "Mm," he murmured. "So... was this girl—"
"I said I don't want to talk about it!"
Zuko's jaw clenched from the pain of shouting, and Iroh backed off, if even just to keep him from aggravating the injury. His ribs ached. Somewhere behind them, that stubborn, furious girl he'd once thought he'd marry was probably dragging herself onto some half-frozen rock and screaming his name at the horizon, and he couldn't think of any sensible reason why.