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The dark room was cold in a barren sort of way. The flames that kept the bedroom alight were dimmed to a murky shadow of their once brilliant incandescence. A man lay in his bed, staring at a picture on the drawer to the left of him. He looked to be about thirty or forty, with long, raven hair that fell loose over his pillow. His face was chiseled by the passing years, and on his left eye was a large, red scar— a reminder of the nightmares in his past. He looked positively miniscule in the vast bed.

His left arm propped his upper body up as he gazed into the small picture. The frame itself was nothing spectacular— or, at least, in comparison to the subject of the photo. It was gold and melded in such a way that it almost looked like permanently frozen ice. There was a crack in the side of it where it had been dropped on the floor.

The picture was of his wife, his beautiful Katara. It had been taken on the day of their wedding, something that was quite evident in her eyes, let alone the ceremonial robes. Her perpetually stunning face seemed particularly exotic beneath the Fire Nation veil. Yet it was her eyes, those undeniably perfect sapphires, which stuck out in the photo. They were warm, regardless of their cool coloring. He was very happy his children had inherited those eyes by some miracle.
Still, there was something so painful in that picture that made him have to turn it away from him at night. Those eyes watched him peacefully, keeping him in his place. They were a comfort and a burden; they brought both reminiscent joy and misery to him.

That picture, he knew, was in many of his subjects’ households, for his wife had been their saint. That stung him that his people still loved him regardless of the fact that their mother wouldn’t preach to them about his supposed greatness anymore. She wouldn’t be there to kiss the foreheads of babies brought up to the palace gates. And they still adored him. They cried with him, they prayed with him, they grieved with him.

He supposed it wasn’t his fault that she had died. But still, the fact that he could have prevented it tore at him each time he stared into those eyes. It wasn’t as if he had begged the Remnant to send an assassin after her and murder her while she was alone. Had he known at the time that the picture had been taken… he would have kept her inside the palace walls. He would have made it very clear that any rebel with an issue with his peace-loving, generous, populist wife would have had to answer to him.

Still, he should have known… His wife had been a very controversial woman in her short time as Fire Lady.
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