Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“So uh, tell me again why we’re doing this?” Sokka asked, staring at the exiled prince’s hair.  Back when he was chasing them (so like, a matter of weeks ago), he’d always had his hair in a top knot, so they’d had no idea how long it was, how it cascaded past his waist and hung in silky, midnight waves.  

“We’re not doing anything.  I’m going incognito as a woman to be Aang’s firebending teacher, since everyone is looking for the traitor prince.”  

Sokka looked at him strangely.  It wasn’t that they didn’t trust him, not after he’d jumped in front of Azula’s lightning to save Aang and basically cemented his place in the group.  He hadn’t even had time to redirect most of it, so he had a nasty scar on his chest, and in the past week that he’d been like, actually conscious, any doubt that they might have had about his loyalties was firmly erased.  It was just that… well, Sokka couldn’t imagine how any man would be not only willing but comfortable to dress up as a woman, but still feel secure in their masculinity.  And sure, he’d dressed up as a Kyoshi warrior that one time, but that wasn’t really his choice so much as atoning for being a sexist ass.  And it wasn’t that he thought there was anything necessarily wrong with people being who they are, whoever that happened to be: no, he’d evolved too much for that.  He just didn’t see how Zuko took this so lightly, how he didn’t even seem to think there was anything out of the ordinary about it.

“You’re mouth’s gonna get stuck like that,” Zuko warned him, lips quirking slightly in a smile.

“Sorry,” Sokka muttered, shaking his head slightly to bring himself back to the present.

The prince got to his feet, still struggling slightly from the wound his sister gave him (it definitely hurt more than he was letting on, but Zuko was far too stubborn to show any more pain than that he absolutely couldn’t hide). “Katara?” he called into the hallway of the ship, “Can you help me with my hair?”

She was there right away, and Sokka had a feeling that she’d been lurking in the hallway anyway, standing by to see if her patient was okay.

“Sure, Zuko,” she said cheerfully, not seeming to find the situation strange like Sokka did. 

“Thanks,” he handed her the comb.  “I can mostly take care of it; it’s just my vision is really shit on the one side so it’s hard for me to do anything super intricate on the right.”  He scowled into the mirror, as if it personally had offended him by obscuring his vision.

“Wait!” Sokka blurted, “You really can’t see?   But you never seemed like it!”

Zuko raised his one eyebrow.  “You travel with Toph and you don’t realize that blind people can fight?”  Sokka had to concede that point.  

“Besides,” Zuko continued.  “I can still see, it’s just that the left eye can only really do colors and vague shapes if they’re close enough.  So it messes with my depth perception a bit, but I got used to it a long time ago.  Besides, my father wouldn’t have made the mistake of blinding me completely, on the off chance he might have ended up needing me one day.”

The comb froze, snapped in half, and little ice crystals worked their way up the piece of hair that Katara was working on, and she regretted even more now that she’d had to use the spirit water to heal his chest and didn’t have enough for his scar (although, it might not even have worked anyway, since she couldn’t keep his chest from scarring either…).  Sokka was dimly aware that he’d dropped both his boomerang and his jaw.

“Your dad did that?” Katara asked, and her voice was odd, strangled, far too high in a way that made Zuko uncomfortable and that Sokka knew from growing up with her usually preceded him getting very, very wet.

Zuko blinked at them, somewhere between confused and nervous.  “You… you didn’t know…?”

Sokka’s laugh was reedy and squeaky, more like a hiccup than anything.  “Do these look like the faces of people who knew?”

“Oh,” Zuko shrugged.  “Sorry, I thought you must have, since a lot of the fire nation does, and I figured it would have spread to the Earth Kingdom and you guys have been travelling so much…” 

He turned back to his hair like nothing had happened, his long, pale fingers deftly making a small braid out of one of the many sections that made up the mass of black locks.  As if it was normal for someone’s father to burn their fucking face off.  

“So,” he continued in that same mild tone.  “Do you think we can do a bun on top? Oh, and can I have some of those hair loops like the ones you wear?  I wonder if we have any extra beads…”

Katara shook herself out of her funk and tensely picked up a brush that she hadn’t broken.  Sokka continued to blink.  Zuko started humming a tune that the other boy could only assume was from one of those dorky plays they’d learned he liked (and it was like, really hard to tease him when he wasn’t even ashamed of any of his nerdy interests).

[]

Sokka wasn’t sure how admitting this made him feel, but Zuko made a very pretty lady.  Perhaps it was his androgynous features, or the delicate gold of his eyes and cheekbones that Sokka was man enough to admit were sharper than his boomerang.  Or the hair- so. much. hair... 

Sokka was worried that Zuko would never be able to pass as a girl, since he, you know, didn’t have breasts (or that his abs were rock hard and almost embarrassingly defined, you know, for him, since it made him look like he was trying too hard.  Definitely not embarrassing for Sokka, whose muscles were just as attractive.  Yeah, let’s go with that...).  He needn’t have been, though, since for all that Zuko was buff, he was also lithe and tall, and once he’d slipped on a simple red and gold hanbok with a loose top, tight sash, and flared waist, it was virtually impossible to tell that his figure wasn’t traditionally female.  

“Wow, you look great,” and was Suki blushing? Sokka squinted at her, and she shrugged, not-at-all-apologetically. 

“Uh, thanks.  So, obviously we all need fire nation names,” he told them.  “Your names mark you guys as distinctly from the water tribe and earth kingdom, which is obviously not great…”  He fidgeted as if not sure how they’d take the news, then winced slightly and rubbed the barely-healed wound on his chest.  

“That’s really smart, Zuko,” Katara eased his worries as she semi-forced him to sit down on an upturned crate. 

“Oh!  I’ll be Kuzon!”  Aang cheered, the curls from his own incognito hairstyle rustling slightly in the wind.

“A little old fashioned, but traditional and won’t raise any eyebrows,” Zuko praised him.

“Thanks, Sifu Hotman!”  Zuko looked at him, unimpressed.

“Uh, Sifu Hotwoman?” he tried again, and Zuko rolled his eyes.

“Just Zuko is fine.  Unless we’re in public.  Then you should call me JinÅ.  She was the first firelord, so it’s a super common name for people here to give their daughters.”

“The first fire lord was a lady?” Toph asked.  “That’s awesome!”

“Gender roles have never been as big of a thing in the fire nation,” Zuko informed them.  “I mean, they’re still sort of a thing in some spots, I guess?  But I didn’t really know that until after my banishment, honestly.  I mean, I was raised with Azula and Mai and Ty Lee, so I kind of just assumed everyone knew how competent and scary girls were.”

“So when you called me and my warriors ‘little girls?’” Suki challenged, hands on hips.

“You’ve met Azula, right?  Trust me, ‘little girl’ is pretty much the highest compliment I could give a warrior.” He chuckled dryly, and she noted that his laugh was warm, like a hearth.

Suki nodded, satisfied, and then gave Sokka a knowing look.

“Alright, alright, I get it, our former enemy had more respect for women than I did.  I’ve already apologized, like, a billion times!” he protested.

“So, Sparky, what names should we pick?”

“Oh, I know!” Sokka, who was decidedly not Sparky, Toph noted, jumped in.  “I’ll be… Wang Fire!  And Katara, you can be my sister, Sapphire Fire.”

Zuko groaned and threw his head back, his hair rippling in the ocean breeze.  “No, no no no no!” he growled.  “Are you trying to get us caught and imprisoned, you numbskull?” he half-shouted, sounding a bit like the old, angry, chasing-them-across-the-world Zuko.  “Those are the worst fake names I’ve ever heard!”

“Hey!” Sokka protested, looking around for support.

“Sorry man, but those were terrible,” Toph said.  

“Yeah, they were pretty bad,” Katara agreed, and even Aang nodded guiltily.

“Et tu, Suki?” he asked his girlfriend, who hadn’t jumped to his defence. 

“Eh, they’re pretty bad,” she sighed, patting his back comfortingly.  “But how about Wan for a first name?  That’s fire nation, right?”

“Good idea, it’s a very common name.  It’s after the first Avatar, who was a firebender.”

“Zuko?” Aang asked, voice suspicious but not accusatory.  “Do you… do you know more about the avatar than I do?”

Zuko blushed guiltily.  “Maybe…”

Katara patted his shoulder.  “We’re really glad you’re on our side now,” she consoled.  Zuko privately allowed himself to wonder how he’d continually been outsmarted by these people (who he now, admittedly, was beginning to think of as friends).  Well, he consoled his broken ego, Toph and Katara were incredibly competent and powerful, Sokka was a literal math and engineering genius, and Aang had thousands of past lives to help him out.  Even Azula hadn’t managed to out-ferretfox them.  So there was that.

[][]

Eventually, it was decided that Zuko was JinÅ, Sokka was Wan, Katara would be Akari, Toph would be Toshi, and of course Aang was going to be Kuzon.  Suki was going to go off on her own to rescue her warriors, but Zuko did warn her that, although Suki was a fire nation name as well as an Earth kingdom one, it would probably be wise to pick something that had no association with the Kyoshi warriors, since the fire nation would be looking for them.  She’d nodded her assent and Zuko had stood by, only slightly more awkwardly than his normal state of ever-present awkwardness, as the water tribe siblings hugged their father goodbye.

“Thank you for everything, Chief Hakoda,” he told the water tribe man with a formal bow.

“Aww, none of that now!  You saved Aang; you’re family now!”  The large man pulled Zuko into a gentle hug, and he blinked cat-owlishly up at the chief, frozen in surprise.

Hakoda saw his face and laughed, booming and bright and wonderful.  “You’re a good kid, Prince Zuko.  When you find that Uncle of yours, tell him I want to share custody.”

Zuko was a statue, a very pretty statue with an intricate hairstyle, regal features, and golden eyes frozen in a state of total astonishment and seeming as if he might never move again.

“Dad!”  Sokka whined.  “You broke Zuko!”

“I’m fine,” their firebender rasped shakily, before going back to his former frozen state.

“Take care, and be careful dad.  We’ll see you at the eclipse,” Katara told him, loading the last of their things on Appa, who was receiving gentle pats on the head from Zuko.  The bison bumped him fondly but didn’t try to get bison slobber in his hair, which Zuko appreciated. 

The ride was mostly a quiet one for the next hour or so, until eventually, Zuko spoke, so quietly they almost missed it.

“This isn’t how I pictured coming home, but spirits, I missed it.  Not what it’s done to the world,” he quickly backtracked, eyes wide.  “I mean, the war is bad, obviously!  I just meant-”

“It’s okay Zuko, we get it,” Katara smiled gently at him.  “A year ago, I couldn’t wait to leave the tribe for a while.  It felt too small and too constraining.  But now I miss it sometimes… home is never perfect, but it’s where you grew up.”

“Yeah,” Zuko agreed, his eyes wistful and nostalgic and far away.  “It is.”

“It’s cool that we’ll have someone to show us around.”  Toph broke the heavy silence.  “Bozo over here probably would have made all kinds of cultural blunders.”

“Hey!” Sokka felt that that was rapidly becoming his catchphrase.  “I resent that!”

Zuko just chuckled and tried to subtly work himself into a position that was slightly more gentle on his wound.  Katara noticed and quietly slipped a bedroll behind him so he could prop up against it.  He smiled gently in thanks.

“Just… try not to talk too much.  And don’t call everybody hotman!”  He shot a pointed look at Aang.

There hadn’t been enough fire nation clothing in the ship’s storage room for everyone, so they quickly took care of that first.  While Sokka, Aang, and Toph were looking for new clothing, Katara and Zuko, who were already outfitted, admired a selection of hairclips. 

“Ahh, I see you’ve found our jewellery.” The shopkeeper smiled, coming up to them.  “We only employ craftsmen of the highest quality,” he continued, picking up the white jade hairpin Zuko had been eyeing.  “A very lovely piece for such a lovely girl.”

Zuko smiled shyly.  “Thank you, but we’re only shopping for essentials today, unfortunately,” he said quietly, keeping his voice low and demure to seem more feminine.  

“Ahh, but for such a lovely blossom as yourself, I shall make you a gift of it,” he insisted, and Katara noted that for all his flattery, he was keeping a respectful distance and not pushing himself into Zuko’s space.

“I really couldn’t,” Zuko denied again, eyes downcast and stance mirroring the polite, regal posture he’d seen his mother adopt whenever they were in public together when he was a child. 

“Ah, but you must,” the shopkeeper declared again, not unkindly.  “It shall accentuate your loveliness.  And furthermore-” he flipped the clip open, pushing the middle of the flower down and demonstrating the thin blade that popped out, “it can be used in self defence.”  He looked around before lowering his voice, leaning a bit closer.  “These are dangerous times, especially for lovely young women.  The soldiers tear through on their way out to war, and they’ll break down any door that isn’t locked, searching for some pretty little thing to satisfy their appetites.”  He curled his lip in disgust, his disdain clear despite the fact that speaking out against the military could be considered treason.  

“I see this war has already hurt you once,” he whispered, gesturing to Zuko’s scar.  “I couldn’t live with myself if I let a young lady walk out of my store unprotected.  You take one and make sure your two friends do as well.  And if you see any other unprotected young women, send them my way.”  Zuko took it and thanked him, realizing he couldn’t very well say ‘thank you, but I already have a knife in my skirts and a set of dual dao packed onboard our flying bison.”

Katara picked a pretty water lily-shaped pin and turned to the shopkeeper.  “Thank you very much, sir.  I realize that this must be a great sacrifice for you in times like these.”

“What do a few coins matter in the long run?  This war has taken everything from everyone, our own people included.  I used to have a daughter, you know…”

“I’m very sorry for your loss,” Zuko said. 
“Thank you.  She was about you young people’s age, years ago, when a troop of soldiers came marching through our town on the way to Ba Sing Se.  We were all so proud to house them for a few days, to do what we could to serve our nation.  I thought nothing of my offer to house a few until when my daughter came up to me tearfully admitting that she was… what they’d done to her, apologizing.  She thought it was her fault.  She died in childbirth not long after.  The baby didn’t make it either, and I couldn’t bring myself to be upset that I didn’t have to… that nothing that came from those men would be in my house….”

Zuko patted the man’s back awkwardly as he shook with suppressed sobs.  “There there,” he tried to console.  What about him seemed like someone people might want to unload things on? Spirits, he was terrible at this.

Katara, thankfully, was much better.  “We’re so sorry about what’s happened to you and your family,” she said, gripping his shoulders.  “We’ll take the hairpins and be grateful knowing that someone out there wants to keep us safe.”

Toph, who wasn’t an original part of the conversation, pretended she hadn’t heard the entire thing with her amazing hearing, acting surprised when instructed to pick a free hairpin and thanking the man profusely, putting on a show and smiling and generally acting very un-Toph-like.  But it seemed to work, because the man was smiling gently by the time they’d paid for their clothing and left.

[][]

“But I can’t see in these!” Toph was complaining loudly as Katara was trying to get her to put on the shoes they’d bought her.  She was not impressed by sartorial splendor, and only deigned to put the hairpin in because it could be used to stab people.

“Hand them to me for a minute,” Zuko instructed, slipping a dagger out of a hidden pocket in his hanbok and using it to slice the soles out before lighting a small fire at the tip of his finger and carefully cauterizing the edges so they wouldn’t fray.

“Now that’s what I’m talking about!” the little girl cheered.  “The perfect shoes for the blind earthbender!”

“Shh! Not so loud, Toshi!”  Katara scolded.  Zuko blinked; he hadn’t thought she was being overly loud, but then again, he was nearly deaf in one ear.

“Sorry, Sugar Queen,” Toph said, not sounding very sorry and not bothering with her fake name.  She barely used people’s actual names; she wasn’t about to remember an alias.

“I’m just glad they have meat here!” Sokka cut in, running up to a trader’s stall. 

The rest of them wandered up at a more sedate pace.

“I don’t think I’ve seen you around here before,” the man running the stall remarked, and Toph felt Katara’s heart thump quickly with nervousness, even though she could tell by the guy’s vital signs that he wasn’t suspicious.

“We’re travelling inland from the colonies,” Zuko broke in.  “We’re going to stay with distant family in the capital.”

“Ah, seems to be more common these days.  We get a lot of colonials returning to the homeland these days.  I guess it’s getting less safe to be anywhere in the earth kingdom.  Not that it’s not worth it for our firelord’s glorious mission,” he added quickly, only sounding half-convinced.  

“Yeah,” Zuko replied ambiguously.  “Uh, can I get one order of the flame crusted salmon-trout, extra spicy?”

“Is that it, little lady?” the man asked, disproving.  “I’m not sure how it is in the colonies, but here a woman’s allowed to eat more than that.  You’re too skinny.  Is that husband of yours not letting you eat properly?  Because we don’t take well to that kind of thing in this town,” he declared, glaring at Sokka, who sputtered, about to protest. 

Zuko shot the water tribe warrior a look that told him to be quiet and go along with it.  “No, my husband is properly respectful; it’s just we’ve not got much to travel on and we’re having to make do.”

“Oh,” the man relaxed.  “Well then, if that’s the case, I’ll just throw in a bag of fireflakes and some curried pig-chicken ears to keep you fed well.  The harvest was a success this year, for the first time in a while, and we’re not about to let any of our own go hungry, colonials or not.”

“Thank you very much,” Zuko gave a slight bow to the man as he collected their food.  “I see you’ve even thrown in some extra volcano-chili paste.” 

The man laughed.  “Well, you seemed the sort of proper young fire nation lady who would appreciate that sort of thing.”

Katara looked around wildly as they sat down.  “Hey, where’s Aa- Kuzon?” she asked, as Toph felt her heartbeat jackhammer. 
“Relax, Sugar Queen; some officer grabbed him for being truant and dragged him off to school.  He’ll be back at the campsite later.”

“And you didn’t think to tell us this, Toshi?” Their resident mom-friend scolded. 
“Nah, didn’t seem relevant.  I’m just glad they didn’t take me; being blind pays off sometimes.”

The incoming argument was interrupted by Sokka’s high-pitched scream.  “That’s so hot!” he squealed, as they all turned to look at him, his face red from spices and embarrassment.

“Of course it is,” Zuko told him, sounding utterly bemused.  “No self-respecting vendor would serve cold pig-chicken curry.”

“No, it’s spicy!” Sokka lisped, fanning his burning tongue. 

Zuko cracked a smile, the widest they’d ever seen from him.  His eyes were twinkling, and he looked seconds away from actual laughter.  

“Of course it is, husband,” he smirked.  “You won’t find anything here that isn’t.  Spice tolerance is a sign of strength here, and kids don’t eat anything plain once they’re weaned off their mother’s milk.”

“Are you serious!” Sokka groaned.  The rest of them clearly weren’t fairing too much better, except for Zuko, whose face was one of pure bliss as he blew some fire onto his fireflakes before popping the entire charred, spicy handful in his mouth and following it up with a bite of fish that the rest of them were convinced was more pain than food.  

Zuko continued happily eating the actual fire in their to-go containers while the rest continued to stare at him, blinking in bemusement.

“Are you going to finish that?” he asked them eventually, when it became clear that none of them were going to take another bite.  

“Nah, all yours,” Sokka passed his curried kabobs over, and everyone else followed his lead.  What was surprising, however, was that Zuko actually finished all of it.

“Where are you putting all of that?” Toph asked, voice full of admiration.  

Zuko shrugged, which he managed to make look graceful and ladylike.  “Firebenders have quick metabolisms.  We quite literally burn through calories.”  

Sokka grunted, displeased.  Now the man (his wife, his aching brain reminded him) was going after his jokester title as well?  Was it not enough for him to have bigger muscles and be able to eat super spicy food?

Zuko smiled like he could read his thoughts, the traitor.  “It was fun in drinking contests in the earth kingdom, when a group of other refugees and I got hold of some shitty alcohol (well, by got hold of, he meant stole, but it was from hoity toity nobles, so who cares?).  I could drink them all under the table, every time.”

“No,” Katara told her brother, who’d gotten an unholy gleam in his eyes.  “We’re not using JinÅ’s insane firebender metabolism to scam anyone.”

“You’re no fun,” Toph told Katara for what was probably the eighteenth time that day.

“Hey, if we need money that badly, we could always just find a group of travelling nobles and rob them,” was Zuko’s valuable contribution to the conversation.

“JinÅ,” Katara hissed, appalled.  

“What?” he asked, unashamed.  “Rich people suck.”

All of them blinked at him in disbelief for a moment, even Toph.  The blind girl, however, was the first to regain her wits, and she threw her head back and cackled.  

“Really, Sparky?  You too?!” she’d wheezed, once she could (sort of) speak again.  

“So is that what we do now?” Sokka asked, “pick up former nobles and turn them into communists?”

“Nah,” Zuko waved a hand dismissively.  “Pretty sure I was one before I met you guys.  You don’t live and work in Ba Sing Se’s lower ring and still believe that the sort of money we come from is fairly earned.”

“We should probably go back to the campsite and wait for Twinkletoes,” Toph reminded them.  “After all, he can’t be in school too much longer, right?”
“It’s about, uh, three-fifteen now, so he should be out within the hour,” Zuko supplied. 

“How do you know?” Sokka asked. 

“What time school usually ends?” he quirked his eyebrow elegantly.  “I was educated, you know.”

“No, smartass, what time it is,” the other boy continued, as Katara socked him on the arm and chastised his language.  “None of us have a watch, and last I checked, there’s no clock around.”  He looked around exaggeratedly to make his point.

“Firebenders always know what time it is as long as the sun is up,” Zuko said.  “We can feel it.”

“Oh, cool.  Cool cool cool cool.”  Sokka cursed benders and their stupid little superpowers that came hidden with their stupid big superpowers as they gathered their trash and set off towards their vacation cottage cave.

[][]

“So, you’re telling us our son has been fighting?” Zuko asked, for all the world seeming like a collected but dissaproving mother.  “Surely you must be mistaken, we’ve raised him better than that.  Haven’t we, darling?”  Sokka hated how much the firebender was clearly enjoying this.  That didn’t stop him from grabbing his hand though.  After all, they did have a part to play.

“Yes, we certainly did, JinÅ.  Why, we’ve worked ourselves to the bone trying to provide a better life for our son, we have!  You know, before we had you, Kuzon,” here he shot a stern look at Aang, for emphasis, “we were just the happiest newlyweds you ever did see.  I took her dancing, and we were always travelling, never settling down, and your mother had all sorts of pretty things, she did!  And then when you came along, we sold all her jewels to buy diapers and I got a steady job and settled down in the colonies and we tried our best to give you a proper upbringing.  It’s why we’re moving to the home islands, after all!  And then to find out…” Sokka stopped here, hand on his heart, acting for all the world like a disappointed, put-upon father, “that you’ve been fighting, when we’ve certainly done our best to teach you that unprovoked violence is never the answer… oh spirits, what have we done to deserve such a thing, your mother and I?!”

“Uh, honey,” Zuko broke in, trying to stop the quirking of his mouth as Aang tried his best not to choke on surprised laughter and instead to make it look like his shaking shoulders were from trying not to cry.  “Perhaps we should ask Kuzon for his side of the story before you break into lecture mode?”

“Well, I suppose…” Sokka turned to the headmaster.  “My wife always was the reasonable one of us, see.  It’s part of why I married her.”
“How romantic,” Zuko deadpanned, pushing a lock of hair off of his shoulder and exposing a sharp, pale collarbone.  He smiled politely at the headmaster, who already seemed quite smitten with him.  “Kuzon, would you like to tell us what happened?”

“Sure thing, Sifu mom,” Aang smiled politely, eyes wide and innocent.  “You see, I wasn’t trying to fight.  It’s just that the other guy kept trying to beat me up, and I kept dodging, and then eventually he fell on his face and then lied to the teacher.”

“Thank you dear.”  Zuko ran a thumb along Aang’s cheek, removing a smudge of dirt the way his own mother used to do for him before he really thought about what he was doing.  Afterwards, he wondered what he had been thinking, and why the ache in the wound on his chest suddenly seemed sharper than the ever-present pain he’d been feeling even with Katara’s healing sessions.  Resolving to think about it later (or never) he turned to the headmaster.

“You see, “ he told him, “this is all a misunderstanding.  My sweet Kuzon would never get into fights; he’s a very peaceful child.  Unless…” Zuko let the pause drag out, the theater nerd in him revelling in the moment.  “You’re implying that my son, who I grew in my womb and raised tenderly from his first moments under Agni’s blessed light is, in fact, a liar?”

The headmaster practically choked on air trying to deny it.  “No, no ma’am, of course not!  Why, it was simply a misunderstanding, is all… and of course I’ll have to have a talk with my teachers about making sure to get both sides of the story.  Why, your son is a lovely boy, simply a gem.  In fact, I would say we don’t get many lovelier children coming through our doors, and we’re so sorry for all the trouble, and we won’t bother you with such trivialities again, of course.  I’m sure you must be tired from your travels.  Not that you look tired, of course!  I mean, you look radiant.  Not old enough to have a twelve-year-old son, certainly!  Not that I’m calling you a liar, of course!”  The man’s face was getting steadily redder as his words became more of a stumbling mess.  “We’ve already established that I would never say such things about such a lovely, well-mannered lady.  I only hope you won’t pull your dear Kuzon out of our academy over this little… misunderstanding.”

“We wouldn’t dream of it, headmaster,” Zuko continued, still completely composed, and it was taking all of Sokka’s willpower not to gawk at him.  Was this the same guy who was so awkward that ‘bumbling mess’ was practically his natural state of existence outside of fighting (or walking; the man had a graceful walk, it must be admitted.  But his general disposition was… not like this)?

“However,” the not-an-awkward-princeling-at-the-moment continued, “we will have to move along in the next couple of days, simply because we have family expecting us closer to the capital.  But our Kuzon has so enjoyed going to school again, and I’m sure he’d love to come back for one more day tomorrow; the only thing is that we can’t really afford tuition at the moment…”

“Oh, don’t worry about it, ma’am.  Of course we’d be happy to host young Kuzon for another day or two; as long as you’d like, really!”

Zuko smiled, in a manner that was slightly condescending towards the headmaster, but not in a way that he could understand.  “Of course; we appreciate your hospitality.  Come Kuzon, husband.”

They both followed him out the door like faithful turtleducklings following their mother.

“Dude!” Sokka hissed as soon as they were out of earshot.  “Where’d that come from?  Because last I checked, you were like, the worst liar.”

Zuko smiled, almost pitying, as if in on a joke Sokka didn’t get.  “I am, but that wasn’t lying, it was acting.  They’re very different.”

“Yeah Sokka, super different,” Aang chimed in.

“And what would you know about acting?” Sokka griped.  “You were trying not to laugh the whole time.”

“We air nomads did a bit of theater,” Aang informed him.  “I was never picked for the lead, but it was super fun, and I was an awesome bush number four.”

[]

“One more day?” Aang was begging Katara.  “I mean, please!  I was having such a good time, and making such good friends!”

“I don’t know, Aang… it doesn’t seem like a good idea to stay in one place for too long…” Katara and Zuko were cooking dinner together; she stirring the pot while Zuko held a small flame about a hand’s-length away from his bundle of sopping, tousled hair, wet from where he’d gone diving for mollusks off the cliffs next to their caves.  Sokka had also gone, and he was pouting in the corner about how Zuko could hold his breath for longer even though he’d grown up in the water tribe. 

“Breath control, Sokka,” Zuko had informed him when he’d asked, huffily.  “First thing every fire bender learns.”

“I think it’d be good for him,” Zuko was saying now.  “Learning a bit more about modern fire nation culture.  There’s only one school day left this week anyway; surely it’d be alright?”  After saying this, he bit his lip.  “I mean, it’s up to you, of course… I wouldn’t want to seem like we didn’t trust your judgement…” In his sad-corner, Sokka perked up a bit.  There was the awkward Zuko he knew and loved to make fun of.

“Maybe you’re right,” Katara agreed.  “I suppose one more day couldn’t hurt…”

Sokka deflated again.  “Hey!  How come you never agree to my plans this easily?” he complained. 

“How come your plans are never this rational?” Katara countered. 

Sokka sputtered but couldn’t think of a comeback quickly enough.  Huffily, he picked up Appa’s brush and started combing through his fur.  Now that they were in the oppressive humidity of the fire nation, he was shedding a lot.  

“Don’t get rid of that,” Zuko instructed from where he was piling part of his hair in a bun on top of his head.  “I can get a spindle in town and make yarn out of it.  Then I could knit it up for when it gets colder, or we could sell it.”

“You can knit?” Katara asked.  Everything she learned about him made her love him a bit more.

Zuko shrugged.  “Picked it up in Ba Sing Se.  There’s not much to do during the slower hours working in a tea shop, and it’s soothing.  Uncle was just glad I found something that kept my hands off my dao for a while…” his voice cracked a bit at the mention of his uncle, and Aang patted his shoulders.

“Don’t worry, buddy… we’ll get him out,” the little monk promised, and Zuko did his best to give him a shaky smile.

“He spent so long teaching me the right path, and then when I finally got it…”

“Hey, don’t talk like that,” Toph ordered him.  “He’s fine.  If there’s anyone who can handle themselves, it’s your uncle.  I’ve met him and he seems like a really great guy.”

“He is; the best.  He was more of a father than Ozai ever was.”  His molten gold eyes glinted harshly in the dim light of the cave when he talked about the fire lord, and Aang shivered with the reminder that everyone was expecting him to kill the guy.  Yeah, he was bad, like, the worst, but not wanting to kill him wasn’t so much about Ozai as it was about Aang, and Aang didn’t want to sacrifice his own principles that way.  But this also wasn’t just about him, it was about the world, and the war that had been tearing it apart since he’d entered the ice.

“Hey,” Toph was suddenly behind him, and for an earthbender, she was hella stealthy.  “We’ll figure it out.  Just don’t worry about it right now.  Besides, don’t you have some homework to do or something?”

“Oh no!” Aang cried, distraught.  “I forgot all about my history essay!”

The gaang laughed as Zuko obligingly lit a little fire in his hand so Aang could use the light to scramble for paper and something to write with.

[][]

Zuko may have regretted going to bat for Aang when he came home the next day gleefully announcing he’d invited everyone in his class to a party in their cave.  

“You want to… have a party?” It seemed Sokka echoed his sentiment, and Zuko turned to his “husband” to back him up.

“Yeah!  I mean, these kids don’t even know how to dance!  100 years ago, every good time in the fire nation started with dancing!  And now everyone is all… repressed and stuff.  We just need to show them how to have fun again!”

“You want… us… to show your classmates… how to have… fun?”  Zuko repeated the words as if he’d never heard them before, casting an eye around their cave, where he was washing and spinning Appa’s newly shed fur, Katara was doing her very best to clean mold spores off the walls of their temporary abode, Sokka was determinedly sharpening his boomerang, and Toph was… picking dirt out of her toes. 

“Yeah!  We’re super fun!  We’ve just been working too hard lately.  What will one night of relaxing and dancing hurt?  Can anyone play the tsungi horn?”
Zuko groaned.  “I can,” he said, regretting more than ever having learned it (and with Uncle’s love of “music night,” he’d regretted it a lot).

“Awesome!  So Zuko’s on music, Katara can make food, and Toph, Sokka and I can decorate the place!” 

“Aang... “ Toph broke into his happy haze of planning.  “I’m blind!” 

“Oh, right…” Aang sighed sheepishly.  “Uh, can you help Katara with food?”

“How about I make a dance floor and some tables?” Toph suggested instead, rolling her sightless eyes at her pupil. 

“Oh… that’ll work.”

Toph sighed as if she deserved a sainthood for dealing with this lot of idiots, until Zuko came up to her.

“Do you think you could carve some little lantern-like spots in the walls?” he asked, “So I can give us some light?”  Somewhere in his mind, he noted how easily he’d given in to Aang’s party idea, even going so far as to start planning some of it separately.

“For my fellow blind ex-noble buddy?  Sure thing!”  Zuko didn’t bother pointing out to her that he was only sort-of blind in the one eye, since he knew she already knew.  She was just glad to have one person on the team who wasn’t constantly forgetting that she couldn’t see in the traditional sense.  He thanked her with a hand on her shoulder and a gentle squeeze (something Sokka had been punched for trying, and Katara had been growled at for, but Toph didn’t mind when Zuko did it).

Zuko had noticed that fires started with breath of fire tended to burn longer, and with the limited space for fuel in the little lantern-holes Toph had made, he figured it was best if he were able to refresh them as infrequently as possible. 

Sokka wasn’t sure if anyone else was paying any attention to the striking figure that Zuko made cut against the low light, standing up on top of Appa’s head as the bison boosted him up high enough to light the lanterns, his stupidly-long hair pushed partly back but otherwise undone and glinting in the firelight as the prince leaned into the concave bit of rock, blowing a delicate lick of fire into it.  He didn’t flinch back from the little pulsing heartbeat of flames, and he didn’t seem at all concerned about his very flammable hair as it flowed loose over his shoulders and down his back. 

Although, to be fair, Sokka conceded, his hair wasn’t on fire, and it stayed unlit as he moved from lantern to lantern, Appa placidly following along to serve as a willing footstool.  

Soon, the cave glowed a soft yellow, leaving them able to get rid of the firepit to make more space for dancing.  

By the time the schoolchildren started streaming in, there was a nice Oyster-clam stew and some roasted almond-cashews on the food table.  

Zuko obligingly played the tsungi horn, and one of the students had also brought a harp, which he could apparently also play, while playing the tsungi horn, so he shoo’d the kid off to dance with her peers and somehow managed to rest the awkward tsungi horn in the crook of his shoulder to prop it up so he could also play the harp.  He was not missing a note on either of them, Sokka noted not-at-all bitterly. 

“Your mom is so pretty, Kuzon,” he heard a little girl saying to Aang (On Li, he’d called her).  “She smells like fire lilies and sea breeze and she plays such nice music.  And she seems so nice and you didn’t even get in trouble because she told off the headmaster for you.  You’re so lucky.”

“Uh, yeah,” Aang wasn’t quite sure how to continue this conversation.  He couldn’t exactly say “well he was originally my enemy chasing us through the fire nation screaming about his honor for some reason, and then he jumped in front of lightning for me and now he’s teaching me firebending so we can defeat his evil father, and he’s also pretending to be a woman so nobody realizes he’s the hunted crown prince of the fire nation, and he pretended to be my mom so the headmaster wouldn’t realize we’re all basically a bunch of unsupervised children trying to end a war that this nation started and is rooting for.”  So instead he just replied, “Yeah, she’s pretty great,” and left it like that.  Nice and vague.  He was great at this.

There was dancing, and they were all having a lovely time and loosening up, and he was almost having a moment with Katara when they got news that the headmaster was coming to check on a report of ‘rebellious behavior.’

“Quick, we gotta leave!” He started to panic, but Zuko put a hand on his shoulder. 

“That will only look suspicious, and we want to draw as little attention as possible.  Toph, get rid of the dance floor and hide the instruments behind another wall.  Children, sit in a circle and be silent.  I’ll handle this.”  

The rest were confused but didn’t question him, and Zuko got down his knitting supplies from Appa before sending the bison behind the secret wall as well.  Then he sat on the floor and started placidly knitting as if he’d been doing that all along.

The headmaster burst in, foaming at the mouth and yelling about wicked aberrant little reprobates.  Zuko looked up, blinking bemusedly.

“Surely there’s no problem, headmaster?  I was merely hosting my son’s new friends for dinner and teaching them a bit of knitting before we left to continue our journey tomorrow.”

“But… I heard… there were reports… dancing…” the headmaster panted, hands on his knees as he went from anger to confusion.

“Surely you’re not implying that I would be hosting a dance party when it is well known that well-behaved fire nation children would not do such things.  Are you suggesting I’m raising and enabling deviant behavior?”  Zuko pursed his lips, feigning mild hurt and adopting a tone of slight accusation.

“No, of course not, ma’am!  Mrs. JinÅ, I would never accuse such a fine upstanding woman of anything of the sort!  I’m very sorry to have disturbed you and your gathering, and I assure you that the town and school will miss your and Kuzon’s presence.”  In the corner, Sokka yet again harrumphed.  He wasn’t even addressed, and he bet the headmaster only knew him as ‘JinÅ’s husband.’  So unfair.

“I suppose I just received a false report,” the man continued, and even though he was physically still on his feet, he might as well have been on his knees for all the groveling he was doing.

“Yes, you should really check the reliability of your sources,” Zuko hummed, noncommittal.  He raised a hand from his knitting regally, and said hand wasn’t any less lovely or graceful for being covered with callouses from his days on the run and from helping around the campsite.  “You may go.”

“Yes ma’am, thank you ma’am,” he nodded his head in a half bow, scuttling out as if he were the naughty student and Zuko was the one in charge.

“That. Was. Awesome!” One of the young boys cheered, and the others followed suit.  

“Kuzon, you have the best mom ever!” Another piped up, and Zuko chuckled as he pulled himself to his feet, and only Katara, ever the healer, noted that there was a slight hesitancy to the movement, and resolved to give him another healing session before they moved on.

“Thank you, children, but it’s not safe to continue our party tonight, unfortunately.  It’s been lovely getting to know you all, though.  Don’t forget to collect your instruments before you leave, and take some leftovers if you’re hungry.”

Within the next half hour, the chattering youth had gotten their things and been herded out the door, after about a thousand more eager statements about how Kuzon’s mom was the greatest mom in the world.  

Zuko’s heart clenched with a mixture of warmth and bittersweet nostalgia, the exuberant innocence of these children only a few years younger than he was reminding him how much he missed his own mother.  The others seemed similarly lost in thought, and throughout the process of packing up and Katara forcing him to sit for another healing session despite his protestations that he was fine, he and everyone else forgot about the still-lit lanterns.

The cave was still glowing with little fires long after they had left, despite the fact that the wood fueling them had burned away ages ago.

[][][]  (For anyone watching, I adapted this fun little scene from the comics)

“So just… let me get this straight,” Zuko looked for all the world like their disapproving parent, which Sokka might have taken more seriously if he hadn’t thought “hide and seek” was actually “hide and shriek” the last time they decided to have a ‘family game night.’  “While Aang and I went on an excursion-”

“Life-changing field trip,” Aang interrupted. 

“To see if the mythical sun warriors were actually a real thing,” Zuko continued, not acknowledging the Avatar’s correction.  “You two,” he wagged one finger at Toph and Katara, flames lit above the tip for emphasis (flames that, Katara and Sokka couldn’t help but notice, were now full of pinks and blues and greens and other colors that didn’t belong in fire; if this was just an ‘excursion’ Sokka would eat his own boomerang), “decided to let private ‘Wang Fire’ join the fire nation army?!” 

“It was to gather intel!” Sokka protested. 

“I was the crown prince!” Zuko looked like he was nearing the point of pulling his (long pretty) hair out.  “You could have asked for intel!  Is this what happens when we leave you all alone?  Katara, I thought you were supposed to stop nonsense like this!”  He turned beseechingly to the waterbending master.

“I tried, but even I can’t heal stupid,” she sighed.  “If it weren’t for me, those two wouldn’t have even thought to send you a message about where our new location was (a gross, polluted little fishing village, apparently).” 

“To be fair, I can’t write,” Toph grumbled, sounding not at all sorry.

“Okay, fine, thank you Katara.  But you,” he turned his rage on Sokka, who privately thought that at this moment he’d preferred it when Zuko was shooting fireballs at them, “we got back into town and heard everyone talking about brave ‘private Wang Fire’ who’d died saving them all from a dangerous earth and water bender; for all we knew, you really could have been dead, and we weren’t sure until we found that note that you were safe!”

“Come on babe, you know I wouldn’t leave you a widow at this young age.”  Sokka wasn’t sure, but he thought that he might have seen fire in Zuko’s irises as his glare intensified.

“Uh, Avatar?  Mr. Pacifist?  A little help here?”  Sokka turned to Aang as Zuko’s nostrils started smoking slightly.

“What?” Aang shrugged.  “He’s not hurting you, and it was kind of stupid.”

“He’s hurting me emotionally,” Sokka grumbled.  

“I will leave this between you and Sifu Mom,” Aang declared.

Zuko sighed, smoke releasing from his nose as he came down from his point of near-combustion.  “So we’re really sticking with that, huh?”  He sounded tired; this was clearly an argument he’d already lost many times.

Katara felt relieved; she was worried she’d have to douse her friend to keep him from accidentally lighting their campsite on fire, and she’d really rather not when the water here was so… yuuuugh. 

“We should probably go into town for supplies,” she said.  “The environment here isn’t likely to yield anything edible.”

[]

The town didn’t really yield anything edible either.  And after the debacle with ‘Dock’ and ‘Shop’ Katara was beginning to worry that extended exposure to the pollution in the area could cause insanity.

“Spirits, what I wouldn’t give for some jian dui right now,” Zuko sighed, and Sokka’s mouth watered at the thought of the fried sesame balls.

“The air nomads had the best recipe for those,” Aang sighed, looking warily at their two-headed fish.  “I wish I remembered it.”

“I’m not saying I would betray you all for a bowl of good red bean paste, but I’m also not saying I wouldn’t,” Toph added.

“What, like out of the mixing bowl?” Katara asked, scandalized.

“Yep.” 

“Heathen,” Zuko looked like he’d be less offended if Toph had pissed on the grave of his ancestors.  Actually, considering his ancestors, he might even thank her for it…

They gave away their slightly less disgusting, less-polluted-by poison one-headed fish to a little boy with a burn mark on his shoulder and all made peace with going hungry that night.

“Do you think if I ate this fish, it would give me superpowers?” Sokka asked.  “Like, I could be a pollution bender or something.”

“Oh, sure, go ahead; it’s not like your experiments with licking strange objects in nature have ever gone badly,” Toph harrumphed.

“Hey, say what you will about the cactus juice, but I was both hydrated and happy in that desert.”  Zuko wasn’t sure what incident they were speaking of, but he was pretty sure Sokka shouldn’t sound as smug as he did about it.

He looked at Katara, a question in the slope of his shoulders.  

“Please,” she nearly begged him.  “Don’t ask.” 

Fair enough, Zuko thought to himself.  He was pretty sure that, for all that Sokka’s plans might save the world, travelling with him could also be bad for their blood pressure.  Well, there was a 50/50 chance his father or sister would kill him anyway, so…

“Stop that,” Toph suddenly punched him in the arm.

“Ow! Stop what?!” he protested loudly.  

“Thinking dark thoughts,” she said.  “We’re gonna be fine.  Well, as long as nobody falls into this river and is immediately melted down to a skeleton.”

“Come on,” Sokka said glumly, stomach rumbling loudly.  “Let’s get to bed so we can get out of here as soon as possible.”

Katara looked back at the town, an indecipherable look in her eyes.

“You alright?” Zuko asked her, and she jumped a bit.  

“Stop slinking around like that!” she gasped.  “Or we’ll have to put a bell on you.”

“Sorry…” Zuko actually looked guilty.  

“I’m kidding,” Katara rolled her eyes.  “Better stealth than careening through enemy territory like a raging armadillo bear.”

Zuko wasn’t sure if she was talking about Toph or Sokka, and he decided not to ask.

“Let me take a look at your injury,” she instructed him.  “To make sure you didn’t strain yourself on your life changing field trip with Aang.”  

He rolled his eyes but allowed it (not that he’d make the mistake of trying to stop Katara from doing something, anyway).

[]

Zuko woke up in the middle of the night to a misty fog and a red-clad figure in a screened-visor hat.  He sat up, readjusting the worn-out anorak Sokka had loaned him as pyjamas.  

“ ‘Tara?” he asked, voice heavy with sleep.

“I’m not Katara,” the figure declared with what Zuko could only guess was her best guess as a spirit-y voice.  “I’m uh… the Painted Lady.”

Zuko groaned, his hair a poofy net of tangles as he laid back down and turned over.  “Ok then.  Jus’ don’t do anything stupid and we can talk ‘bout it t’morr’w.” 

[]

Zuko wasn’t sure if ‘feed Appa colorful foliage and pretend he was sick’ was necessarily following his directive of “don’t do anything stupid”, but he was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.

“One more night, and I’ll cover for you, but we really have to leave tomorrow.  The only way to keep things like this from happening is to get rid of my father, and that means that we can’t stay forever in one little village that needs help.”

“Alright Zuko, thank you,” she said with a gigantic yawn.

“Just go back to sleep; I’ll tell the others that I overdid it on my field trip with Aang and that you’re tired from healing me.”

She leaned against his arm and squeezed his shoulder fondly.  “Thanks Zuko, you’re a gem.”

“I am coming with you tonight though, to keep watch.  No arguments.”

Katara couldn’t argue, because she’d fallen asleep on his shoulder.  Zuko let out a sigh that might have been a chuckle as he picked her up and deposited her in her sleeping bag.

While Katara was sleeping, the rest of them went into town again, and it was clear that the villagers seemed happier and healthier.  Zuko was impressed by what she’d been able to do in one night.  Of course, Zuko knew a thing or two about healing and herbalism; his mother had taught him before she’d… well, before she’d gone away, and he’d had ample opportunity to refresh those skills while he and Uncle were on the run, since the old man insisted on putting his mouth on anything and everything that might be tea (spoiler alert: more often than not, it was not tea, and then he had to listen to Uncle complain about how badly Zuko’s medicinal teas tasted).  But this… he could see why Sokka called Katara’s bending “water magic” when it could do in hours what took traditional medicine days or weeks.

“They seem happier.”  Aang, ever the optimist, was happy to state the obvious.

“Hey, did you guys hear?” the little boy to whom they’d given the fish came running up to them, tugging eagerly on Zuko’s skirts.  “The painted lady came back to us last night!  She didn’t abandon us after all!”

Zuko’s heart clenched; he knew that they had to move on soon, and he was glad the town was happier, but it was hard, realizing that sooner or later this child and every other one would realize that the spirits weren’t coming to save them.  He remembered praying to them too, to make his father love him, to make his bending better, to make him less of a disappointment.  If they’d actually seemed to answer, if things had gotten better for just a day or two before going back to how they’d been… he wasn’t sure he would have been able to cope.

“Why so sad, pretty girl?” An older woman asked him.  “The painted lady has come!  She’s here to make everything better for us.”

“I just find it hard to trust that any improvement will last unless I’ve brought it about for myself,” Zuko settled on finally.  Although, it’s not like there was much these poor people could do for themselves.  He just hoped that they were able to defeat his father, so that Uncle could be the firelord and make everything better.  Uncle was just what they needed, he was sure.  Uncle would never watch people suffer like that.

He sighed.  There wasn’t much he could do, but if Uncle were here he would have told him that something is better than nothing.  He took out the hair clip that the shop owner had given him in the first village they’d stopped in, causing his hair to fall loose and partially obscure his face.

“Here,” he handed it to a little girl who had been staring at him with an expression he couldn’t quite understand (were it directed towards anyone else, he would have said her face was something akin to enraptured, but he couldn’t figure out why anyone might look at him that way).  “Take this home to your parents.  It should fetch a fair price at the markets.”

She took it as if he’d just handed her the keys to Ba Sing Se instead of an (albeit very pretty) enamel pin.

“Thank you!” She cheered, then beckoned him to lean closer.  He turned so that his good ear was facing her so she could whisper into it.

“Are you the painted lady?” she’s asked, and he sputtered so hard he nearly landed on his ass in the muck.

“Don’t worry, I’ll keep your secret!” she smiled and winked at him, and by the time he was able to say anything, she was halfway across the street leading towards the group of wooden huts.

The only thing that yelling “I’m totally human!” for the entire town to hear had gotten him was a lot of strange looks.

[][]

“Are you ready?” Katara asked Zuko’s sleeping bag, only to nearly scream when someone came up behind her.  

It turned out that the only thing in Zuko’s sleeping bag was the pillows piled to make it look full, and when she turned around there was Zuko in a blue Spirit mask.  The only way she recognized him was by the long dark braid of hair and the two dual dao swords strapped across his back.  

“You… you’re the blue spirit?!” she whisper-yelled.  “You’re the scourge of bandits and fire nation soldiers, the hero of the streets of the Earth Kingdom?  You’re the one who broke Aang of out Poheui Stronghold?!”

The masked vigilante shrugged, and now that she was paying attention, she could see echoes of Zuko in the way the spirit moved, in the grace with which he slunked through the shadows.  Reports of the vigilante had painted them as so… ethereal, as someone who could take down an entire caravan of bandits in moments with no backup and be gone into the night before the victims they’d rescued had any time to thank them (which, to be fair, Zuko had done, once or twice).  She had almost started to think of them as an actual spirit, although the one time she’d asked Aang he got all sputtery and changed the subject.  She had thought it was some weird spirit-y avatar thing, but she supposed now she knew better.

“Alright.”  She shook her head; she could grill him about this the next time they were alone.  For now, they had work to do.  “So I’m going to do what I did last night, and you’ll stick to the shadows and keep watch, make sure nobody figures out I’m not actually a spirit?”

The Blue Spirit nodded, and it was weird to be looking at someone she knew was Zuko but also feeling like there was a degree of separation from actual Zuko.

They managed to get through the village without incident, but they’d run into Aang coming back, who was apparently a little hurt that there was a spirit around who hadn’t bothered to introduce themselves to him.  

“Can’t help you here; he knows me,” Zuko whispered to Katara before somersaulting into nearby bushes and using the cover to scramble up a tree.  The waterbender rolled her eyes- showoff.

[]

Somehow, somehow, she’d managed to keep her identity protected… until he’d airbent her hat away.  

How disrespectful, she fumed!  And not very smart!  If I’d been a real spirit, I could have, like, stolen his face or something (spirits could do that, right?  She couldn’t keep track anymore).

Then again, he was right about her being Katara and not some ancient fire nation spirit.

“We’re busted,” she sighed.  “Get out of the tree, Zuko.”

Her partner in crime (well, not-crime, she supposed.  Except for lying about Appa… so her partner in sort-of-crime.  Sort-of-crime for a good cause) jumped lithely out of the tree, landing in front of Aang with barely a sound and startling him so badly he shrieked.   The other two bolted upright and blearily looked around (well, Sokka did).

“W’uz happ’nin?” he groaned, waving his boomerang around wildly.

“Nothing!” Aang yelled back.   “Just a, uh… badgerfrog in my sleeping bag!”

The other two went back to sleep, and Zuko looked around with a wide smile. “Badgerfrog?” he asked eagerly. “I love badgerfrogs!”

“There’s not actually a badgerfrog, doofus,” Katara sighed.  She couldn’t believe this was the same guy who took down bandit caravans and scampered along rooftops in the lower ring like they were normal sidewalks.  

“Oh, right.  It was a cover; that would make sense.”  Zuko sighed, looking downtrodden.  Aang patted him on the shoulder.

“It’s okay, Sifu Mom.  And I know you were only trying to help, Katara, but pretending Appa was sick was so not flamin, hotman.”  Here Zuko took a moment to slap his masked face in exasperation as Aang continued.  “If you were that determined to help, you could have talked to me.”

“You’re right, I should have.  It’s just… I know we have places we need to go and things we need to do, but I just couldn’t leave them alone to suffer like that.”  Katara might have been willing to apologize for lying, but Aang knew by the stubborn set of her brow and the solid way she held herself (almost like Toph, in that moment) that she did not regret what she’d done for the village.  Nor should she.  But…

“We can’t save them forever,” Aang sighed, and the truth pained him too, she knew.  

They’d almost forgotten Zuko was there until he spoke (seriously, was the kid a fucking airbender?  How did he just... melt into the background like that?)

“Wait… the factory is what’s causing all the pollution, right?  So why don’t we just destroy the factory?”

“That… that might actually work,” Katara agreed, stroking her chin.  “You know, for a crown prince, you’re a little bit of an anarchist?”

The light of the fire he’d made in his hand to light their way glinted off his grinning mask, and Katara just knew that he was smiling like a crocodillo under it as well.

[][][]

Zuko was a fucking ninja.  Katara had seen him earlier that night, slinking around, but it still hadn’t prepared her for… whatever this was.  She realized then that, subconsciously, Zuko must not have wanted to catch Aang (although consciously he very much had, don’t give the guy too much credit…), because if he had actually utilized the skillset he was using now, easily disarming and dispatching all the guards in the factory without even using his bending (or seeming to even try all that hard) and before Katara and Aang had a chance to even begin to jump in, then surely Aang would be in a fire nation prison somewhere by now.

“I’ve got the guards, you guys start breaking the machinery and give me a shout when you leave the building so I can burn it down,” he instructed them, not even bothering to turn towards the soldier rushing at his left side as he slipped one of his dao under the man’s sword, broke his grip, disarmed him, and then knocked him out with the hilt of his own sword.  “Oh, and Aang?  Could you airbend these guys out before you go?  I think that was most of them; I can just toss the rest out the window.  Once I light up the place,  you guys head back to camp.  I’m not so sure that all this sludge in the river won’t catch fire, and I’d rather not worry about you guys while I’m handling things here.”  He could control the flames no problem, of course, but he’d rather not worry about his friends being anywhere near anything potentially flammable, including the polluted river.

“You got it, Sifu Mom.”  Zuko just rolled his eyes at the perky little air nomad before leaping up, grabbing hold of a ceiling beam, and using it to swing himself up into the rafters.  He didn’t make a sound, and with his dark clothing and hair blending into the shadows, the only way to know he was there would be to have seen him jump up, and besides Katara and Aang, the only ‘witnesses’ in the room were the pile of unconscious guards the avatar was currently lifting out of the window with his airbending.  Normally, he would have been more gentle about it, even with ‘bad guys,’ but he held a special anger for anyone destroying the environment, so those soldiers were going to wake up with more bruises than they’d had before being knocked unconscious by his Sifu.

Katara broke the watermill by bending the river sludge the wrong way with more force than the machine could handle, and Aang knocked all the metal support pillars down with small, concentrated tornados full of rocks.  They shouted out to Zuko that they’d finished and Aang bent them over the river on a little air cushion.  When they reached the shore by their camp, they waved at Zuko, who gave them a thumbs up before raising his arms. 

All around him, the factory immediately burst into flames; it was disconcerting how something that had been fine the minute before could so quickly combust at a simple command from Zuko, the fire suddenly springing up and cracking away merrily as if it had been doing so for hours.  Curiously, the flames were predominantly purple and blue, blending in with the pre-dawn light and drawing less attention than a normal orange fire would have.  It was beautiful, and Zuko stood in the middle of it on a small circle of the dirty ground untouched by the flames that raged in a wall around him.  His long braid was whipped back by the winds created by the roaring fire, and the building was nothing more than ashes in far less time than it should take a building to burn down.  Taking in a relaxed breath, Zuko lowered his arms gracefully, and just like that, the flames were gone, and the only sign that they had been there at all was a large pile of ash where there had once been a factory. Even the metal beams were gone, burned away to nothing by the blistering heat their friend had conjured.

He ran onto the dock and somersaulted up over the water, trusting that Aang would ferry him back to shore before he hit the river, and he did.

“Zuko, that was… beautiful.”  Technically, they were far enough away from everyone that Katara didn’t have to whisper, but she was awed and couldn’t help it.  “How did you color your flames like that?”  Of course, she’d seen the flickers in his flames after he got back from his ‘excursion’ with Aang, but to see it on this scale was, well, there was no other word for it besides “incredible.”

Zuko, ever articulate, merely shrugged.  “The sun should be up in about fifteen minutes,” he told them.  “We need to get back to camp before then or Toph and Sokka will notice we were missing.”

Alas, it was no use.  For people who normally had to be physically dragged out of their sleeping bags, they were certainly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when the rest of them got back a few minutes before the sunrise.

“Are you… having an affair?!” Sokka gasped, hands clutching his heart as he made betrayed moon-eyes at Zuko.  “I have been nothing but faithful to you, beloved wife, and yet I find you sneaking out in the middle of the night to… to do what?  Or should I ask who?” Toph, for being blind, seemed to know how to roll her eyes quite well, and the rest of them followed.

“Relax, I was just doing some vigilante justice,” he replied gruffly, beginning to pack up their campsite and grateful he’d taken his mask off and hidden it in his clothing before they’d gotten back on the off-chance the others would have, miraculously, dragged their lazy asses out of bed on the one day it would have been useful for them to sleep in a little.  Unfortunately, he forgot about Toph and her magic feet.

“Whatcha got in your shirt, Sparky?” she sing-songed, smile devious.

“Nothing,” he tried, even though lying to Toph was futile.  The little earthbender, in addition to being a human lie detector, had no boundaries or concept of personal space, and she was across the campsite and clinging to Zuko’s midriff before anyone could blink, her grubby hand digging around in his shirt as Zuko’s face glowed red.  Well, he supposed this was better than his biological sister, who only would have stuck her hand down his shirt to try to burn him.

“Ah-hah!” she swore gleefully, pulling out his mask.  “I’ve got it!  Sokka, what’ve I got?”

Sokka’s jaw was hanging, eyes wide.  “YOU’RE THE BLUE SPIRIT?!”

Zuko face-palmed.  “I’ve already explained this once tonight,” he groaned.  “Just… ask your sister if you have any other questions.  I’m trying to get us ready to leave.”  He proceeded to finish packing as he ignored Sokka’s continuous torrent of eager, rapid-fire questions.

And they would have left, really they would have, except for the march of soldiers they saw speeding towards the town on jet-skis (curiously, they were not the ones who had been stationed at the factory.  No, those soldiers deserted their post that day, half-mad and ever-after seen in seedy taverns and shadowed places, telling whispered, terrified tales of avenging spirits and colored flames and a dragon in a humanoid body, always looking over their shoulders as if expecting to be snatched through the walls and into a place no-one could follow).

“Shall we put the fear of the spirits into them before we go?” Katara asked, her smile sharp like Zuko’s swords as she readjusted her hat and checked her makeup in the reflection of their cookpot.

Zuko smiled back, and his was genuine and soft and somehow seemed no less dangerous (although, to be fair, it didn’t seem to matter what mood he was in, or if it was on purpose or accidental that he was in whatever the predicament-du-jour was. He was just always a trouble magnet through a combination of his chronic bad luck and his own- albeit usually well-intentioned- actions).

“You two, stay a ways behind us and don’t interfere unless it looks like we need backup,” Katara ordered Sokka and Toph.  “Aang, you and I will make a creepy mist.  Zuko, just keep being yourself. Since we’re already having a hard time remembering you’re not a spirit, that should be plenty.”

Aang gave her a thumbs up, and as they slinked into the village, Katara did her best to mimic Zuko’s steps in hope of making her own seem more like his (and how did he do that? They were soundless and his feet barely seemed to touch the ground and the way he moved was all… spirit-y and stuff). 

“You know, I gotta say I like Sugar Queen’s vibe this way.  Quiet and mysterious suits her,” Toph said to Sokka, who snorted.

“You just like that she’s not bossing us all around,” he replied, and she did not contest him.  Bossing them all around was her job, after all, and she didn’t appreciate the competition from their naggy team mom (although, was Zuko also their team mom now?...). 

Ahead, there was a group of currently terrified soldiers as Katara’s low voice, amplified by Aang’s airbending, told them off for poisoning the environment and threatening the villager’s livelihood.  Zuko stood behind her menacingly, and when she was done, he moved his arms, one above his head and one below, in a dance-like position as he sent out a slow arc of lapis-lazuli colored flames that swept within a hair's-breadth of their armour.

Whatever tenuous thread of duty that had been keeping them in place after Katara’s speech snapped, and they turned heel and ran to join their fellow deserters in whispering hush, frantic tales of avenging spirits and jumping at every shadow for years to come.

They realized that Katara was a waterbender, but the figure behind her seemed so inhuman that the villagers assumed the group was spirit-blessed anyway and wisely kept their mouths shut, thanking them for helping clean the river with their bending before they left on Appa.  

In their own world, the spirits watched, and the real painted lady smiled, smug that Aang had called her attractive earlier.  No amount of the others protesting that he’d been talking about Katara could dissuade her, and they bickered a bit (nobody could say that Spirits were always ethereal and detached, after all. They could actually be quite petty).

“That blue spirit one,” a fire-ferret shaped spirit grunted.  “Are you sure he’s not one of ours?”

“Yes, we’ve been over this, Mushi,” a dog-rabbit spirit sighed.  “He’s totally human, however much he might move like one of us.”

“I still think he could be a lost spirit, locked out on the last solstice, but whatever you say,” Mushi the fire-ferret spirit grumbled.  The others did not acknowledge this statement, but they did not refute it either.  Mushi thought that in itself was telling.

[][][]

Zuko thought that Sokka would have been the one to complain about being “married” to Zuko, and that he himself would find it funny. And he did, until Sokka had started making a constant production about his adoration for his “wife,” especially when they were in public.

Whenever they were walking through a town, any town, Sokka would sling his arm around Zuko’s waist, earning him an eye-roll.  

“These would look so beautiful on you, darling,” he would sigh sadly whenever they looked at jewellers selling their wares.  “It is too bad I cannot afford to buy them for you; I have failed as a husband.”

“Quit your horse-bullshit, I can take care of myself,” Zuko grumbled, resenting the idea that someone might feel the need to ‘take care of him’ more than the fact that Sokka was overdoing it on the ‘wife’ thing.

“Someone got up on the wrong side of our bed this morning,” Sokka laughed, and Zuko punched him on the arm.

“My wife is so strong,” Sokka cooed.  Zuko punched him again.  Toph laughed.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, since Zuko made such a pretty lady, he earned a lot of stares, some of them rather predatory.  Zuko was content to ignore them, knowing that if they went any further, he had a knife on his person and fire in his veins.  Sokka, however, was not.

“Hey!” he growled at the third man that day to conspicuously look Zuko up and down.  “That’s my wife you’re leering at!”

“I think the lady can answer for herself if she’s uncomfortable,” the man, big and beefy and who seemed twice Sokka’s height and weight, looked down his nose at the younger man’s indignant face.  Then he smiled smarmily at Zuko.

“Would you like to go grab a drink with a man who isn’t clearly overcompensating for something?” he asked the prince, who rolled his eyes.  Sokka squaked angrily at the implication of what the man had said.

“Yeah, I’m good.” Zuko replied drolly and tossed his hair over his shoulder, unconsciously mimicking Mai’s mannerisms whenever she got fed up with unwanted male attention.

“Well, come find me if you change your mind,” he ordered.  “I’m easy to locate; biggest house in the village.  All I’m saying is that I could afford to buy you jewellery.” 

Now Zuko was mad.  “Didn’t I just tell my husband that I could take care of myself?” he snarled, stepping closer and glaring up at the guy, who now looked slightly intimidated despite the fact that Zuko was a good foot and a half shorter and still underweight from his days as a refugee in Ba Sing Se.  “I don’t need anyone to buy me things, because I’m strong and smart and capable and I can earn my own living.  So back the fuck off and go back to whatever big fancy house you say you have.  You should be ashamed of yourself, assuming that you have any right to try to buy me or any woman like some sort of trophy.  Last time I checked, here in the fire nation we trusted women to look after ourselves.  After all, isn’t that the greatness we’re trying to spread to the rest of the world?”  

Zuko’s voice was acerbic and sarcastic.  He’d really thought that the fire nation was better towards women and championing gender equality, or at least that’s what he’d been taught growing up in the palace.  But since he’d actually been disguising as one, he’d received a surprising amount of subtle disdain and condescension that he’d never seen anyone direct towards the women he’d grown up with.  He could only imagine if someone tried to imply that Azula needed looking after… the poor sap in front of them would be a pile of ashes by now, no doubt.

He turned around and stomped off, incensed.  The rest of the group followed, a little warily.

“You okay there, Sifu Mom?...” Aang was the first one to broach the topic, eventually.

“I’m fine,” he grumbled, clearly not fine.  When Aang deflated at his gruff tone, he sighed.

“Sorry,” he said, voice softer.  “I just… When I was growing up, I almost never left the palace unless it was to go to Ember Island in the summer.  And I guess it was stupid, but I kind of assumed that everything worked like in the palace.  There, Azula got more respect than I did because she was a better fire bender.”  Toph snorted- she’d ‘seen’ both of them fight, and Azula might shove more power into her hits, but Zuko’s movements were better; they flowed with more grace and precision and she had no doubt that Zuko could take her if he wasn’t so preoccupied with his own self-doubt and his lingering desire not to hurt one of his only remaining family members.

“And her friends got respect because they were Azula’s friends, and because they could fight like angry tigerdillos,” he continued.  “And there were a few female generals, and from what I saw everyone treated them with the same respect as the male ones.  And okay, the female servants weren’t treated all that great by most people, but neither were the males.  So I just thought… but now I’m wondering if I just wasn’t paying enough attention…  What if…” he sighed deeply, sadly.  “What if it wasn’t as equal as I thought it was, and part of the reason Azula was so… what if she noticed things I didn’t, and she became the way she was partly because she was trying to prove herself as better than men in general, and not just me?”

“Zuko, your sister being a psycho is not your fault, and even if things weren’t as equal in the palace as you thought they were, there’s nothing you could have done,” Katara told him.  “I mean, I grew up being told I had to listen to ‘the men’” here she stopped to glare at Sokka, who mouthed ‘sorry’ and ducked his head in shame, “and I didn’t start going around torturing everyone and stealing cities and trying to kill my brother.”  She looked pointedly at Sokka again, as if he should be grateful for this fact.  “You were a child, and you had so many expectations on you already, and it’s not fair to beat yourself up about not noticing these things.  The point is that you never treated women differently, and that you’re noticing these things now instead of just burying your head in the sand and telling us that we should ‘stop complaining’ because things aren’t as bad as they could be for us.”

Zuko didn’t seem to have a response for this other than an unconvincing “I guess so,” but that was alright.  The group couldn’t expect him to improve his low opinion of himself in a day, but they were working on it and giving him all the reassurance they could.  That would have to be enough for now.

“So, I couldn’t find any potato-carrots in the marketplace, but I found tomato-sprouts, and I think I think I have some spices that will make them an okay substitute in the stew you wanted to make.”  Zuko changed the subject eventually, uncomfortable with everyone looking at him with… what was that? (affection.  It was affection, Zuko).

“Nice!  Sokka also caught a fish earlier, so Toph, would you mind making a separate little pot so we can do a vegetarian version for Aang?” Katara responded.

The little pot was done before Katara even finished the request.  “Wanna fire it, twinkle-toes?” the little earthbender asked him.

Aang smiled sheepishly.  “Uh, I would, but Zuko can make his fire way hotter, so it’ll get done faster if he does it, and I’m really hungry…”

Zuko gave an indulgent smile and took the pot.

[][]

They were startled awake in the middle of the night by a blaze of light and heat overhead and a loud sound.  

Zuko bolted up first, his inner fire automatically alerting him to a large blaze of light that should not be there at this time of night.  Aang, though not quite as attuned to his own fire, was next, rubbing his eyes and feeling the vague sensation that something was amiss.  Toph, although a heavy sleeper, seemed to have felt the large mass of it with her seismic sense; it was hard not to notice a large chunk of strange metal in the sky, even though she was sleeping like a rock (when called out on how heavily she slept, she merely defended that an earthbender should always emulate the earth, including in sleep).

Katara and Sokka were last, the noise and the heat waking them up even without a bending intuition tuned in.  They were up on their feet to match the other three quickly, running towards where the meteor seemed to be headed for the town.

They reached it just as it was nearing impact.  The blazing heat had already started a forest fire from the air.  

Immediately, Zuko snuffed the fire out all at once, extinguishing the meteor as well and removing all the heat from the rock so quickly that it shrunk a bit.  It was still headed towards the village, however, so Aang and Toph set to work building trenches to hold it, while Toph simultaneously slowed it with her metal-bending.  It was no earthly metal, however, so the progress was slow, and the trenches were still needed.  Katara brought in water from the river to wash the soot and ashes away from the forest floor.  Sokka was put in charge of guarding Momo, a strange sort of tightness in his chest as he watched his friends handle the crisis without even breaking a sweat.  

Momo caught a piece of rock that had broken off (which was, thankfully, no longer hot due to Zuko) with his little hands.  Great, Sokka thought.  Even the lemur is more helpful than I am. 

The rest of the group fell asleep almost immediately after they got back to camp, but Sokka was awake for a long time afterwards, bemoaning his fate and trying to think of something to make himself more useful.

The next morning, he was still glum, and his chosen family managed to drag an explanation out of him.  They were aghast that he thought he wasn’t as useful as they were, and tried to dissuade him of the notion, but it wasn’t helping.

Eventually, the only plan that they could think of was to take him shopping, and they stepped into the local weapons store.  

The rest of his friends seemed to be having a good time, at least, Sokka mused to himself as he looked at weapon after weapon that didn’t seem right.  Toph was waving around a heavy mace, Aang was clanking around in a suit of armour that was way too big for him, Katara was trying on what seemed to be some sort of weaponized gloves, and Zuko was weighing some throwing stars in his hands.

“Those are on the house for a pretty lady like you,” the shopkeeper smiled at Zuko.  “Nobody else who has looked at them had that sort of grip, anyway.  You’re a natural.”  

Zuko smiled, thanked the man, and then waited for a discrete moment to slip them into Sokka’s pocket.  

“No thanks,” Sokka sighed sadly.  “They’re not right for me.”

“But you haven’t even tried them!” Zuko protested.

“I don’t need to,” Sokka bemoaned.  “I can just tell.”

“Alright then,” Zuko replied dubiously, taking them back and slipping them into his own pockets.  People just kept giving him things.  Maybe if he’d dressed as a woman during his time as a refugee, he wouldn’t even have needed to rob all those noble caravans to feed him and uncle…

Nah, he decided.  Robbing snooty rich people is too much fun.  He once again ignored the irony that he once was ‘snooty rich people’ (although the servants would disagree with the ‘snooty’ part.  They were sad when he was banished; he was the only noble who was ever nice to them, besides his lady mother, who had been gone for years at that point).

“Woah!” Sokka said, his eyes suddenly widening comically as he caught sight of a sword in a glass case in the back of the shop.

“Oh, I see you’ve found our pride and joy,” the shopkeeper told the group.  “That sword was forged by Piandao and his most promising apprentice.  I’m not supposed to tell you this, but…” he lowered his voice.  “Prince Zuko was the apprentice who helped him forge it, may Agni guide his soul.”

From his position, Zuko gulped and tried to hide behind Katara as the rest turned to look at him.  Their eyes told him that there would be a discussion later.

“I can tell by your reactions that you are anxious,” the shopkeeper whispered, looking around furtively.  “But you needn’t be.  I, along with most of our town, support the cause.”

“What cause?” Toph asked skeptically.  “We haven’t heard about any cause.”

The man paled.  “Su… surely you are not serious…” he wondered if he had misjudged the group.

“We’re from the colonies; I’m afraid we’re a bit behind as to what goes on in the home islands,” Zuko assured the man, and he relaxed.

“Ah, well I suppose that makes sense.  If you’re from the colonies, then surely you do not agree with the war, after what has been happening there?” The shopkeeper whispered, beckoning him closer.

“Um…”. The lack of an immediate defense of the war seemed to be enough for the shopkeeper, who smiled knowingly while beckoning them even closer.

“We call ourselves the Dragons of the 41st division…” the man began, and Zuko dropped the nunchucks he’d been looking at in surprise.  He looked like he’d seen a ghost, his face so going so pale that the scar seemed even redder against it.

The shopkeeper looked up, seeming to take in both sides of Zuko’s profile for the first time.

“My… my prince?” he gasped, dropping to his knees and genuflecting.  “It is you!  You are alive!”

“Shhh!” Zuko whispered, panicked. 

“It’s alright, my prince,” the shopkeeper raised his hands placatingly.  “We are your allies.  If you would please come to the back, and I will explain everything.”

The back of the shop was a cozy little room, if a little tight.  Zuko saw a teakettle and bolted for it, measuring out leaves into the cups next to it and resorting to the tried and true tactic of ‘when in an uncomfortable social situation, make tea and avoid people as long as possible.’

“My lord, you do not have to…” the shopkeeper protested, moving to take the teapot (which Zuko took into his arms possessively, like a protective mother turtle-duck).  Toph and Zuko both knew, from growing up in noble families, that in the Fire Nation Royal Family, ‘my lord’ was only used to address the fire lord, not mere princes, and Zuko did not like the implications of that.

“I like making tea, really…” Zuko nearly begged, his anxiety spiking.  Toph was a little worried, actually, about how high his heart-rate could get in these sorts of situations.  “I… it relaxes me…”

The shopkeeper backed off reluctantly, sensing that there was no way he was getting the teapot away from the young royal even though he would have preferred to serve his Prince and not the other way around, and Zuko’s skirts swished as he heated the kettle and poured the water into cups before passing them around.  Once they all had a beverage, they looked at the shopkeeper expectantly.

“My real name is Private Riku,” he informed them.  “I was part of the forty-first division.”

Zuko’s face paled further, a myriad of varying emotions flitting across it so quickly that it was impossible to name them all. 

“Woah, back up!” Toph, as ever, could be relied upon to demand the answers others were too hesitant (or polite) to ask.  “What’s the big deal about this forty-first division?”

“We were a group that was to be sacrificed as a diversion to win a battle against the Earth Kingdom.  We were entirely new recruits; it would have been a massacre.  Only one person stood up for us against the cruel plan, and he is in this room.”

Everyone looked at Zuko.  Katara got a sinking feeling in her stomach.  

“Zuko…” she began slowly, wishing she wasn’t about to ask but needing to know.  “Does this have anything to do with why your dad gave you that scar?”

The prince just nodded in the affirmative, his throat too tight to say anything.  He was being battered by a storm of different emotions: painful memories, guilt over the fate of the 41st, relief that at least one of them had clearly survived.  He took a sip of tea, his hands shaky in a way that was uncommon for him.  This only worried his friends further.

“His father demanded he fight an Agni Kai for disrespecting the general who suggested the plan,” Riku spat.  “What his father did not tell him was that he would not be fighting the general, but the fire lord.  When he was a good and honorable son and refused to fight, his father burned and banished him.  He was not to return until he found the avatar, which most of us naturally assumed was a lifetime exile.”

Aang’s face was accusing in a way that Zuko had never seen it before, even when he was hunting him.  “Zuko, why didn’t you tell me why you were hunting me?!” he demanded.

“It wouldn’t have made a difference when I was chasing you, and then I didn’t want to use it as an excuse for the things I’d done after I’d joined you.  It just never seemed important…” Zuko would not meet their eyes, and Katara lifted his chin and forced him to look at her.

“Of course it would have made a difference,” she told him, sincerity in her voice as she tried to drill in how seriously she meant it.  “It wouldn’t have excused what you did, but it would have put it in perspective.  We thought this whole time that you were hunting the world’s last hope just for the fun of it…”

“And yet you still forgave me,” Zuko smiled guiltily.  “I didn’t deserve it, but I’m grateful.”

“Shut up; you deserve our love, Sparky,” Toph ordered him.  It was a very Toph way of making him feel better, and he appreciated it.  Especially since Katara had clearly been gearing up to give a long speech on how much they all cared for him and how he’d redeemed himself already and how he didn’t have to keep feeling guilty, and he found those speeches awkward enough already without an audience (Zuko was still learning how to accept love and kindness; he was good at giving those two things, even to people who didn’t deserve them, but he still didn’t understand why people would want to offer them to him of all people in return).

“Anyway…” Riku broke in, clearly feeling awkward about witnessing such an intimate moment between his Prince and his allies.  “About half of the forty-first deserted, forging new lives under new identities.  We started an underground resistance group with others who are against the war, called Dragons of the 41st. There were rumors going around that you had been captured and killed, my lord, and we were worried they were true.  It was possible that they were only rumors that were started to demoralize the people, since there have been uprisings in the capital, but we could not be certain.”

“There have been uprisings in the capital?” Zuko asked, surprised.

“Yes… there have been uprisings among the common people since you were banished, Lord Zuko, but they have only been growing stronger and more common since the takeover of Ba Sing Se.  Ozai (the lack of honorific was very telling, as was the way the name was spat like a curse) has been raising taxes for months, to support maintaining our control of the stronghold, and so tensions are only growing.  Things came to a head a week ago, when there was a failed attempt to burn down the palace after he murdered a fire sage.”

The teapot, which Zuko had been using to refill Aang’s cup, fell from his hands and shattered.  Zuko could not even bring himself to apologize, he was so surprised and appalled.  Luckily, Toph put it back together with her earthbending, since Zuko had appeared so fond of it.  The colors weren’t right, but Zuko still appreciated the gesture.  Or he would have, if his head wasn’t currently spinning in disbelief.

“He murdered a fire sage?!” Zuko gasped, looking more shaken than they’d ever seen him.  “What in the four nations could have prompted that?”

“Who’re the fire sages?” Sokka asked.  He vaguely remembered some people in silly red hats when they’d visited some temple back on the winter solstice, but it had all been so crazy a time, what with being captured by Zhao and then Roku-Aang showing up, that he didn’t exactly have the clearest idea of who they were talking about.  Also, he’d just been captured by the spirits and taken into their world the day before, so his head had been kinda screwy from that. He’d had a lot on his mind at the time, so learning the nuances of Fire Nation religious practices hadn’t exactly been at the top of his list of priorities. 

“They are the chosen representatives of the sun spirit Agni,” Zuko informed them, voice raspy.  “Killing one is sacrilege, almost akin to making sushi out of Tui and La.”

“Spirits alive!”  Katara swore.  “What could have possibly led Ozai to do that?”

“The rumors are that the flames around the royal throne were growing weaker,” Riku informed them.  “The imposter on the throne (Riku was clearly going all-out on verbal treason) asked a fire sage why, and after consulting the sacred flames, the sage informed him that Agni was displeased by his treatment of his son, and that until he was restored to his place of honor in the line of succession, the flames would only weaken further, needing constant tending until they eventually went out entirely.  Ozai did not like this, and he had the sage executed.”

“That’s bad; that’s very very bad,” Zuko whispered, distraught.  “Is he trying to bring Agni’s wrath down on the whole nation?  And why would the sun spirit care about me?”

“Because you are the only honorable member of the royal family left, my Lord.  That is why we are revolting; the common people will not be satisfied until it is you who wears the crown.”

Sokka and Aang had to support Zuko so that he would not fall over at the pronouncement.  “But… Why me?” Zuko asked.  “I’ve made plenty of mistakes!  Why not put Uncle on the throne? Uncle is the most honorable man in the fire nation!”

“With all due respect, my Lord, your Uncle, while a good man, abandoned this nation to Ozai when we needed a good leader, a leader who cared about his people and not just the war.  However valid his reasons, he failed us.  But you stood up for the most vulnerable of your citizens when you had everything to lose, and we know that this is how you will look after our nation.”

Zuko’s jaw tightened at the criticism of his Uncle, but Sokka nudged him, and he swallowed his protests.

“So, you have a whole society of people who are loyal to Zuko, then?” Sokka asked, his eyes shining with an idea.

“Yes, and we would follow him wherever he led.  I am sure you do not wish to spread the word that you are alive, my lord, for your own safety, but I would be honored if you would allow me to tell our senior officers, to boost morale.”

“Yeah yeah, but we need you to do something for us,” Sokka answered instead.  “How willing would you be to aid us in an invasion…?”

[]

They left the shop with a lot more allies than they’d gone in with, and Riku had promised to meet them with his fighters before the Day of Black Sun.  The man had tried to give Zuko the sword that he’d made with Piandao before his banishment, but he declined, not wanting to draw attention to himself by carrying around the most expensive thing in the shop.  It did, however, give them a clue about what to do about Sokka’s problem.

“Training with Master Piandao sounds great, but wouldn’t it be safer just to have you train me?” Sokka asked, and Zuko shook his head.

“No.  You have to go to Piandao since we’re here.  He’s a better teacher than me, and there’s so much more to sword mastery than just using a sword.  Go to him; we can afford to spend a few days here, especially after your brilliant idea to get us more help with the invasion,” he ordered the other boy, who blushed at being called brilliant (it was true, but he didn’t hear it nearly enough, in his own humble opinion).

Which was how they ended up sitting bored at their campsite, missing Sokka.  To pass the time, they were all telling bad jokes, which only made them miss Sokka more.  So Katara started telling them fun stories about growing up in the Southern Tribe with him, and then Toph talked about the Earth Rumbles.  Aang had some heartwarming tales about his childhood as an air nomad as well.

“So, Sparky, do you have any fun stories, or is your life really just one long tale of misery?” Toph turned to him, and Zuko shrugged, trying to think of something.

“Oh!  I have some fun stories about Ember Island, I think.  I used to love freediving in the reefs.  I can hold my breath for a really long time, too, since Azula had this game where she’d hold me underwater and try to drown me.  Eventually I could stay under for like, five minutes before I started having trouble.”

“Dude,” Toph protested, appalled.  “We said fun, not depressing!”

Zuko shrugged helplessly.  “I thought that was pretty fun,” he protested.  “I mean, those were some of my best childhood memories, before Azula started trying to kill me in earnest.”  The prince was actually smiling nostalgically.

“You have a disturbingly high threshold for what counts as a legitimate murder attempt,” Katara said, and then they all fell quiet.  They really missed Sokka.

[][]

Sokka had a pretty good week; he had made some art, learned how to rock garden, and got pretty good with a sword.  He’d even made his own sword out of meteorite (his space sword, he called it).  And they also had more allies for their invasion.  So yeah, overall, not a bad time.  He couldn’t wait to spar with Zuko with his new sword.

It made sense, then, that when he got home to camp and his little cobbled-together family, that something would go… less than great.  Aang was telling them that they had to go to a deserted volcanic island on the solstice to visit Avatar Roku’s old home so that he could meditate there on the Summer Solstice and… learn something about his past lives, apparently?  Sokka didn’t really understand what all the drama was about; why couldn’t Roku just like, tell Aang instead of disrupting all their travel plans?  Roku’s old island wasn’t exactly easy or safe to get to when you were trying to travel incognito.  He sighed.  Well, their luck had been a little too good lately, he supposed (Zuko had also been expressing doubt; he’d apparently used all his luck being born and was thus mistrustful of anything too good happening for too long.  Sokka thought that was kinda depressing, but apt to their current situation as national fugitives).

Speaking of Zuko, apparently he wasn’t actually at camp right now.  Katara informed him that their local firebender had found a pretty reef to dive in, and was enjoying himself making friends with fish or whatever people did in warmer waters.  Sokka didn’t really know; he’d not had a lot of chance to swim in places that weren’t sub-arctic temperatures, and even there, most swims were usually purely accidental (like when a self-taught waterbending sister lost control and sent you hurtling through the ice into the ocean below).

“How long has he been down there?  Should we be worried?” Sokka asked, idly swinging his new sword and interrupting them as they all welcomed him back and asked him questions about his training.

“As long as he comes up for air at least once or twice every ten minutes, we don’t have to worry,” Katara reassured him, not looking overly happy about it, but then again, they’d probably already had that same conversation with Zuko.  She decided to change the subject.  “That’s a really cool sword you have.”

“Thanks, I made it!” Sokka declared, brightening.  “And Toph, I brought you some meteorite too!  I uh… I tried to make it into a bracelet, but apparently I’m not as good with jewelry as I am with swords…”

“I appreciate the gesture anyway, Snoozles,” she said brightly, immediately taking the bracelet to shape it into a more professionally-made bajuband.  And ouch, she could have at least waited until he wasn’t watching, Sokka grumbled to himself.

“We really missed you, Sokka!” Aang chirped.  “Zuko did too!  I’m sure as soon as he comes up for air he’ll be happy to see you.”

It was about another minute before their firebender surfaced, smiling brightly, his wet hair clinging to his face and a net bag full of oysterclams and seaweed in his hands.  “I got dinner!” he announced cheerfully.  It was still strange to see the sullen prince who had chased them all around the world wearing a smile and seeming so comfortable with them, but it had been happening more and more lately.  Not that Sokka would ever say it out loud, but he really was just a big softie when you showed him any kindness, and none of them failed to notice the way he leaned into their casual touches like nobody had shown him any in Spirits-knew how long.  Besides his Uncle, probably nobody had…

“Sokka!” Zuko’s face lit up even more as he sped back to shore.  “You’re back!”  He was dripping all over the sand as he emerged, wearing nothing but the shorts for an old jinbei that he was using as a swimsuit.  His hair was clinging to his back and shoulders and covering his left eye, but it didn’t seem to impede him much, since he could barely see out of that eye anyway.  The new scar on his chest, still red and angry, stood out against his skin (amongst a smattering of other, less noticeable scars that Sokka hoped were accidents, but it was not a hope in which Sokka was super confident), and Sokka wondered once again how it must feel to have a sister do that to you… he couldn’t imagine that Katara was even capable of imagining that sort of cruelty towards him, no matter how much he could annoy her sometimes.  Of course, Azula had been aiming for Aang, and Zuko had intercepted the blow, but somehow Sokka suspected that it wouldn’t matter to her either way, and that she’d be more than happy to aim directly for Zuko if they saw her again.

Zuko, in a chipper mood today despite the fact that they were about to head even further into the heart of the fire nation just so that a long-dead avatar could give their friend a dramatic spirit world performance instead of just telling the story like a normal person (ghost? Spirit? ghost-spirit?), put down his bag of (delicious, delicious) mollusks to hug him, fawning over his new sword and asking him how Piandao was doing.

“He’s doing alright, I think.  Hey, are he and Fat like… married?” Sokka interrupted all of Zuko’s eager questions.

Zuko rolled his eyes (well, he rolled his good eye, and the scarred one sort-of moved awkwardly in the attempt).  “Duh!  You spent a week there and didn’t realize that Fat wasn’t actually the butler?”

Sokka reddened, although it was thankfully less visible with his skin tone than it was when Zuko blushed (which was often, the poor bastard).  “Well, I had my suspicions.  He talked about you a lot, by the way.  He has a picture of you in his calligraphy room and wouldn’t stop comparing my ‘shoddy brushwork’ to ‘his best student.’  You should probably go see him before we leave tomorrow.”

“I don’t know… it’s kind of dangerous to go around exposing my identity, and we’ve already done it once in this town…”

“Awww, come on, you heard Riku!  Most of this town supports you anyway, and Piandao knows I’m water tribe and he didn’t care!”

“You told him you were from the water tribe?” Katara screeched, smacking him upside the head.  “You idiot!” 

“Everybody’s a critic,” Sokka grumbled.  “So much for you all missing me so much.”

“Awww, are you sad we’re not weeping at your feet, Snoozles?” Toph teased.  “Seriously though, Sparky; go see this Pen Doo guy.”

“It’s Piandao!” Sokka and Zuko exclaimed indignantly.

“Whatever, just go.  I’m pretty sure Katara can handle dinner on her own just this once, especially since she did everything herself before you joined up with us.”

Zuko looked to Katara uncertainly, and she nodded at him.  Piandao, despite Sokka’s massive risk in telling him who he was, sounded like a good guy, and she knew that they’d be sad if they thought Zuko was dead, so it was safe to assume his old teacher felt the same way (Zuko just had that effect on people… well, at least on sane, non-evil people).  It was the right thing to do, and she had a feeling that the prince wanted to catch up with his old master as well.  

“I’ll come with you!” Sokka declared, grabbing his swords again.  “I want a rematch with Fat.”

“You’ll never beat him,” Zuko said, rolling his eyes (damn, he rolled his eye(s) a lot around Sokka…).

“Says you,” Sokka grumbled, even though he had a feeling Zuko was right.  You probably couldn’t spend years cohabitating with a swords master without gaining the ability to hold your own with the best of them.

Piandao, as it turned out, was ecstatic to see Zuko.  He actually picked him up and spun him around in a hug, leaving Zuko looking very confused.

“It is so good to see you alive and well, Prince Zuko!” he’d declared with far more enthusiasm than he’d shown towards Sokka the whole week he’d been staying there (rude).  “We were so very worried when we’d lost contact with your uncle after the debacle in Ba Sing Se.”

“You know my Uncle?!” Zuko asked, flabbergasted.  He’d known that Master Piandao knew Lu Ten, of course, since he was the one who introduced him to the swordsman, but it sounded like they had a more intimate relationship than just that of a teacher and the parent of a student (hopefully not the kind of intimate that Piandao had with Fat, though… seeing Uncle flirting with various women in their travels had already been too much for him).

“I see your uncle never told you about the White Lotus.”  Piandao quirked an eyebrow, the back of his mind sadly noting that Zuko really did have only one of his own now.  Of course, they’d all seen the scar on wanted posters, but seeing it in person was so much worse…

“Um….”

“It is no matter now,” Piandao waved his hand, as if to disrupt the awkward aura emanating from his old student.  “Come, let us see how you have kept up your skills.  Although, I am somewhat concerned you will have trouble fighting in that absurd hanbok you are using as a disguise.”  He looked at the full-skirted dress dubiously.  It was something more fit for a noblewoman’s day-wear than a wanted fugitive on the run, but he supposed that the little group had to make do with what they could find.

“I’ll be fine,” Zuko promised, and Sokka knew he was telling the truth.  After all, he’d seen Sukki fighting in skirts, and had done the same himself (albeit far less skillfully) so he had no doubt Zuko could manage as well.  Although, he supposed it was a bit strange that they’d found such a luxurious garment on their stolen fire-nation ship, especially when there were only soldiers stationed on it before they’d ‘repurposed’ it.  But then, if any of what they’d heard about some of the less honorable behaviors of the soldiers was true…

He purposefully shoved those thoughts out of his head as they headed to the courtyard, Sokka’s artful rock-garden arrangement still standing proudly.  He warned Zuko that it had better stay that way, and the other teen smiled impishly at him before taking a fighting stance.

The spar (or swordbending match, as Sokka liked to call it) that followed was intense.  Sokka had never really had the chance to watch two sword-masters fight without having to also fight himself, and being able to devote all his attention to watching two masters dance in a clash of steel and willpower was something he didn’t think he’d ever forget.  Piandao clearly had the advantage, but not as much as he would have suspected.  Zuko was on the defensive, but holding his own quite well and still moving with his usual grace and breathing fairly easily.  Piandao had also chosen to use dual swords for their spar, and it was hard to track the movement of all four blades as they moved in a blur of silver and gray.  Zuko’s poofy skirts flared and twisted as he moved, but it didn’t seem to hinder his footwork as he danced easily through his attacks, his feet not making a sound against the stonework of the ground (seriously, how did he do that?).

Sokka normally had trouble focusing on any one thing for long periods of time without his brain taking him on some sort of tangent, but he felt like he barely blinked the entire fight.  He knew that it must have been at least an hour, because the sun had started to fade from the sky before Piandao finally had Zuko backed up against the wall, pinned and unable to move his arms.  The old master had clearly been giving it his all as well, as they were both panting, and there had been a moment in the middle of their fight where Zuko was fairly close to disarming Piandao completely.  They were both down to one sword and looking each other in the eyes with an intense sort of focus, before Piandao finally backed up and laughed.

“You’ve gotten even better, my Prince.  Give it a few decades and perhaps by the time you’re my age, you will have surpassed my own abilities.”

“I highly doubt that,” Zuko smiled, taking his loss (although it was a close thing) with grace, the same way he seemed to do most everything else (except social interactions; he was useless at those, and it was one of few things Sokka could latch onto to tease him with).  “You clearly haven’t been slacking in your retirement, either.”

Piandao didn’t take the bait, still looking at his old student intently.  “You compensate well for your left side.  A lesser fighter would not have even noticed your impairment.”

“But you did?” Zuko asked, not seeming at all surprised.

“Your left eye does not move very much; you don’t use it to track your opponent the same way a fully sighted fighter would.  Other than that, it is basically impossible to tell,” Piandao reassured him.  “The fact that you managed to improve your skills in three years while having to relearn how to do things with your disability is evidence enough of your prowess.”

“I still didn’t realize it was that obvious,” Zuko sighed.  He blushed deeply at the praise but didn’t address it, still not used to receiving it and therefore not knowing what to do with it. “Sokka, did you notice, before I told you all?”

“Not when you were chasing us, because we were uh… kinda distracted back then, and not before you told us, since you were unconscious most of that time, but when you told us and then were traveling with us, it wasn’t too hard to tell when we were paying attention.  Master Piandao is right; it’s usually only the one eye that follows something, unless the thing is really big or really bright, and we have to make more exaggerated movements to get your attention if we’re sitting on your left when we’re eating or traveling on Appa or sitting around the campfire.  That’s nothing to be ashamed of, though, and it seems to affect your normal interactions more than it affects your fighting.  When you’re fighting, none of us can tell at all… except maybe Toph, but I don’t think that really counts when she can feel someone’s pulse from freaking 50 meters away.”

“Good to know, thank you,” Zuko replied, looking thoughtful and missing the worried look that Piandao gave him at the news that his favorite student had apparently spent what sounded like a not-insignificant time being unconscious (he was disappointed, but not surprised, and he didn’t ask for the story.  He didn’t think his blood pressure could handle it).  He’d have to work on moving his left eye more when he was interacting with the enemy; no sense giving them any more ammunition than they already had…

Piandao invited them to stay the night, but they respectfully declined, saying they should get back to their friends.  Piandao gave Zuko one more hug and even ruffled Sokka’s hair before he and Fat loaded them down with extra provisions (which they hadn’t done for just Sokka, and seriously, the favoritism here…) and showed them to the back door so they could leave less conspicuously.

“We’ll see you on the day of the invasion,” the old swordsman told them, raising his hands placatingly when they looked at him in surprise.

“Don’t worry; your plans are still secret; but the White Lotus has ways of learning these things, even with our Grand Lotus temporarily out of contact.”

Back at camp, Katara was just finishing dinner and dumping an absurd amount of spices in Zuko’s bowl (she’d had Toph make him a larger dish despite all of his protestations once they’d found out that firebenders needed more calories.  They might not have a lot of food to spare, but Katara would be damned if she didn’t see Zuko’s ribs start to fill in more before the war was over).  Toph was punching a rock and the rock was the one that was suffering for it (Zuko sincerely hoped she was using her earthbending to help her, otherwise that meant that she just had the brute strength to punch a rock without breaking her knuckles and that kind of terrified them all a little bit).  Aang was braiding Appa’s shaggy bangs, a basket of shed fur sitting beside them, ready for Zuko to wash, spin and knit.

“Eat it all or else,” Katara told Zuko only sort-of playfully as she handed them all their dishes and they sat down around the fire together to eat.  He grabbed his chopsticks, not about to ignore an order from a superior officer.  Three years on a navy ship had taught him that (and yes, he might have been nominally ‘in charge’ back on his old rustbucket, but that didn’t matter to a ragtag group of rough-and-tumble naval rejects, who were eager to put him to work and boss him around just like they did with each other.  It had made Zuko feel, absurdly, like a part of something, and he wished that he’d recognized and appreciated that feeling back when he still had them.  He hoped they’d escaped the North Pole alright…).

[][]

Roku’s island was… well, there was really no other word for it.  It was dead and desolate and it left an odd sort of ache in his chest that certainly wasn’t from the wound Azula gave him.  He’d seen enough casualties of Fire Nation violence, even against their own people, that a cold hunk of magma shouldn’t bother him like this, but it did.  He knew that when the volcano had erupted, most of the inhabitants had made it off the island, all except for the avatar, who had stayed behind to hold back the flowing magma.  But it was just a natural disaster, an unfortunate accident… every fire nation child learned that, and he thought that this was one of the few historical events that it wouldn’t make sense to lie about.  So why did it leave a bad taste in his mouth, like there was still ash thick in the air and corpses against the shoreline?

He felt a connection stirring in his bones, his inner fire rearing in a way that he hadn’t felt since he was little and kneeling at the braziers full of eternal flame during sacred religious festivals at the fire sages’ temple.  He did not understand it, and this made him wary.

Perhaps it was merely the fact that Avatar Roku had died here, and that it was the solstice and that the place was therefore probably full of spiritual energy.  He turned to ask the others if they felt it too, but Toph was making unflattering statuettes of Ozai out of volcanic rock, and Sokka and Katara were fighting about the fact that he’d nearly hit her with his boomerang while he was practicing his throws.  It seemed that he was the only one besides Aang to feel apprehensive around this place, and that only worried him more.

Zuko was always awake when the sun rose, but he normally did not retire with the sunset.  He hadn’t slept more than four or five hours a night at the most in years, and even though his sleep was deeper and better with his friends than it had been at any other time in his memory, his hours were still few.  Which was why it was strange to him that, as Aang sat down to meditate with the setting sun, Zuko suddenly felt unreasonably sleepy.   It seemed his limbs were pulling him down to rest on the ground almost against his will, and his eyes were already drooping as he leaned back against Appa.

“Are you okay?” Katara looked at him with deep concern etched in her face, hands automatically going to check the scar on his chest.

“M’fine…” he slurred.  “Jus’ really sleepy all of a sudden…” Katara, seeing his eyes closing, did not press the issue, but she did set up vigil nearby, glacial eyes watching him carefully and with no small amount of worry.

When Zuko ‘woke up,’ he knew he was not actually awake.  However deceptively vivid this dream is, he knew that there was no way he would actually be alone in the lush jungle of the sun warriors’ temple without either his friends or an attacking force that would have brought him here.  

His inner fire told him that it was still sunset on the solstice as he sat on the same peak where he and Aang had performed the Dragon Dance for Ran and Shaw.  And he looked up, and they were there now.  Along with a third dragon that he knew did not belong there, and one who looked awfully familiar, like he had seen him in a history scroll somewhere…

“Hello, hatchling,” the dragon, who Zuko had a sneaking suspicion was Fang, the fucking dragon of Avatar Roku, spoke inside his mind.  “Your great-grandfather regrets that he could not be here to speak to you, but he unfortunately had pressing business elsewhere, so I brought your spirit here for a bit.”

“I’m fucking glad my great-grandfather isn’t here,” Zuko snorted indignantly, “considering he was a genocidal maniac.” 

Fang breathed a small puff of flame that could have been a laugh.  “You are young, hatchling, but surely you still realize that every family line has two sides?”  How a dragon could raise an eyebrow without actually having an eyebrow was beyond Zuko, and yet Fang was somehow doing it.  He’d have to figure out that trick for his left side...

“My mother’s family were simple herbalists,” Zuko replied, bemused.  “If they were to ever have any sort of connection with the dragons or the spirit world, it wouldn’t be in the traditional sense.”  He would of course never forget all the lessons his mother had imparted to him on herbalism, including about the less common types of herbs, ones not typically used for medicine and that had some… unpredictable side effects.

“Your mother’s family became simple herbalists to try to avoid attracting the royal line’s attentions, young one,” Fang corrected.  “Of course, it did not work, not when those power-hungry bastards (and, alright, if it wasn’t already weird enough hearing a dragon spirit talk, it was definitely weird hearing a dragon spirit call someone a bastard) were so intent on combining Sozin’s line with Avatar Roku’s.”

Zuko’s eyes widened as the implications of Fang’s statement dawned on him.  “You don’t mean…”

“That your beloved mother was Roku’s granddaughter?  You know that that is exactly what I meant.”  Dragons were not known for beating around the bush or for any sort of social prowess.  Perhaps the young prince was alike in that way, Ran and Shaw mused from their own perches a little bit away.

“Your destiny was entwined with the Avatar’s the moment Azulon made the decision to bind the lines together through your mother’s marriage.  He thought this would make his quest for destruction a sure thing, where in reality it will be his undoing.  You will be his undoing, Zuko.”  Zuko knew they were no longer talking about his dead grandfather.

“Killing my father is the Avatar’s destiny,” he objected.

“A destiny that he could not achieve without your help and the decisions you have made and will make,” Fang countered.  “Aang is the last hope for the world, it is true, but you, Prince Zuko, are the last hope for the Fire Nation.  Your people are counting on you to save them, and to restore your nation to balance and greatness and honor.”

“That’s not stressful at all,” Zuko quipped, crossing his arms and sitting down in a huff.  Perhaps he should be less comfortable around the spirit of Avatar Roku’s dragon (and two others), but with all this talk of destiny and hope, Fang kind of reminded him of Uncle.  Spirits, he missed Uncle…

“Uncle is going to be the firelord,” Zuko reminded the dragons, now that he was already thinking of the old general.

“Hmm,” Fang muttered noncommittally.  

“And yet, it is your destiny eventually, whether sooner or later,” the dragon then reminded him.  Zuko did not want to think about that at the moment.

“Why did you bring me here?” he asked Fang instead.  “Not that the family history lesson wasn’t… illuminating… but I’m sure I would have found that out eventually anyway, and it’s not like it’s integral to our plans right now.”

“What, an old dragon’s spirit is not allowed to have a chat with his great-grand-hatchling in an ancient temple?” Fang replied wryly.  “You wound me.”

Zuko sighed deeply and rolled his eyes.  “Why do I have a feeling you’re about to make my life more complicated?”

“Your instincts are good,” Fang told him, his reptilian eyes twinkling almost proudly.  Ran came forward and dropped a big golden jewel in his hands.  The dragons’ last words to him before he faded out were ‘feed it with fire.’  Zuko wasn’t sure what that meant.

Well, he wasn’t sure until he woke up back against Appa, his hands ablaze and the golden jewel somehow still in them as Katara looked on in horror.  Zuko couldn’t help it, he squealed.

“What the fuck?!” he said, calmly (please note that, whenever old, powerful men- or dragons- and their schemes to have teenagers save the world are involved, calmly does not actually mean calmly).  

“It just… appeared in your hands, and then they caught on fire!” Katara replied, no less calmly (but certainly no more calmly, either).  “Are you… are they burning?” she asked, not quite panicking (but not quite not panicking).  Zuko didn’t need any more scars.

“No, actually… it doesn’t hurt…” he replied, breathing ragged.  This was unusual for him, to lose control of his breathing, but considering the circumstances he figured he had earned a pass on that one.  “And I can’t seem to turn them off, either…”. In fact, it seemed the thing was pulling the flames out of him somehow, rather against his will.

“Um, guys…” Toph and Sokka had run over, trusting that Aang would be fine meditating without their guard for a few minutes on this deserted island.  “That’s not a rock…”

Toph’s insights via her seismic sense were often unexpected by the rest of them, but this one seemed sort of common-sense as the golden not-rock began vibrating rapidly, then cracked along the middle.  Everyone held their breath, waiting to see what sort of Eldritch horror was about to come out.

Oh…. It was a dragon.  A little baby dragon.  Zuko supposed, considering that dragons had given it to him, that this should have been expected.  And yet, nothing about this situation was expected.  He’d gone to bed early for the first time ever and then woke up less than an hour later with a baby dragon.  His life was a study in irony.

“This is why I don’t sleep,” he grumbled, as the little red hatchling sniffed his face and, seemingly satisfied, curled around his warm neck happily.

Well, he was happy for about two minutes until he started screaming, doing the infant-dragon version of a wailing infant human.  He supposed dragons weren’t that different from humans in some aspects.

“What do we do with it?” Sokka also wailed, covering his ears.  Toph, with her overly-sensitive hearing, seemed to have the worst of it, and for once Zuko was glad he was half-deaf, because damn did this dragon have a set of lungs (did dragons have lungs?).

“Uh, in my dream the dragons said to feed it with fire…” Zuko suggested, tentatively shooting a small jet of flames from his finger. 

This perked the little reptile up immediately, and he scurried down Zuko’s chest and opened his mouth, sucking up the flames hungrily, his scales lighting from within as he fed happily.

“His claws are sharp,” Zuko grumbled.  He hadn’t signed up to be a dragon’s wet nurse.  To be fair, though, he hadn’t signed up for most of the things that had happened in his life.

“So uh, what are we going to name him?” Katara broke in eventually, subtly moving in to heal the little nicks the baby dragon’s claws had made alon Zuko’s neck and shoulder.

“Uh, well Roku’s old dragon Fang gave him to me, so what about Fang II?” Zuko suggested.

Toph rolled her eyes, and Sokka face-palmed.  “You suck at naming things,” the water tribe boy told him helpfully.

“Well, do you have a better idea?” Zuko asked, offended.

“Flamethrower, Destroyer of Worlds!” Toph boomed, shaking the earth beneath them for emphasis.  Zuko looked at the little creature, still greedily sucking down flames of orange and green and purple (Zuko had quickly discovered that those seemed to be the only colors he liked, after he’d spit the others back at him.  Zuko didn’t see how they’d taste any differently, since they were all just fire, but it’s not like he could ask, so he’d just sighed and made sure to keep his fire to those three colors only).

“We’re not naming him that!” he protested.  “It’s so violent, and he’s so cute!”

“Hmmm... “ Katara thought.  “What about… Druk?”

“Druk!” Sokka squawked.  “You want to name the dragon… Dragon?  That’s stupid!”

It was too late, however, as Zuko’s eyes had already lit up with glee.  Sokka sighed: they veto’d his own stupid name, so of course he’d latched onto the even stupider one suggested by Katara.  

“Druk,” Zuko cooed, apparently already fully warmed up to the idea of dragon parenting.  “That’s perfect.  What do you think, Druk?”  

The newly-christened Druk showed his approval by belching flames, and everyone but Zuko jumped back.  The fire prince, however, was an idiot with no self-preservation, so he merely looked at his new scaly son proudly (and yep, Toph had checked.  That dragon was definitely a dude).

“Did someone eat too much?” he cooed, pushing his hair back and laying the dragon over his shoulder, gently patting his scaly back.

Oookay, Sokka groaned inwardly.  So Zuko was burping a dragon, Toph had moved on to straight up making life-sized statues of their enemies with phallic-shaped heads, Katara was scolding Toph for making Penis-lords, and Aang was in the spirit-world having a conversation with a past life he could talk to at any time just so said past life could tell a story with better spiritual pyrotechnics.  This was fine….

[][]

When Aang emerged from his mediation, he seemed, perhaps not surprisingly, less concerned with Zuko’s new dragon son than the fact that he was apparently Zuko’s great-grandpa, and what was that about?  Toph really couldn’t keep up with these weirdos.

“Aang!” Zuko was snarling, “Just because Roku was my great-grandfather does not mean I’m gonna call you grandpa.  I didn’t make you stop it with the Sifu Mom thing, so for the love of all that is sacred, do not push it!” 

Aang, predictably, continued to push it, knowing Zuko would give in eventually.  “I’m so proud of you, grandson!  And look at that, you have made me a great-great-grandpa!”  He tried to pet Druk, but Druk only snapped at him, curling back into his mommy.

“We’ve had a long day,” Aang sulked.  “Maybe it’s time for bed.”  He might be putting this matter to rest for now, but he would get his great-great-grandson’s approval.

[][][]

Katara was pissed.  Okay, she was really somewhere beyond pissed by this point.  Toph was just… going around scamming people, and Sokka and Aang didn’t seem to take an issue with it.  Honestly, she was going to get them caught!  Didn’t she think that the Dealer might get a bit suspicious that the little blind girl could keep up with a scam most sighted people had trouble with? 

And okay, they might have been down to their last silver piece, but that was no excuse!  She was pacing the camp angrily, but that didn’t seem to make her any less angry.  Thankfully, Aang was no longer off pulling further scams with Sokka and Toph, but that was only because she made him promise not to do so.  Honestly, he hadn’t seen a problem with Toph using her skills to cheat people out of their money!  Something about ‘he was cheating first’ and ‘we do need money…’ and ‘well, resources in the air temples were communal anyway.’  

She turned to Zuko, who was feeding Druk fire from out of the tip of his finger.  The little dragon had doubled in size in the past week since he’d hatched, and it was clear to see that he and Zuko were enamored with each other, even if the dragon wouldn’t let anyone else touch him.

“I’m glad that you at least aren’t off scamming people,” she told him, voice full of motherly pride.

Motherly pride which Zuko promptly ruined.  “Eh, I was gonna, but Sokka said highway robbery was ‘blatantly illegal’ and ‘that it wasn’t okay just because they’re stupidly rich,’” he made gratuitous use of air quotes and then shrugged.  “Besides, Druk needs to be nursed every two hours anyway.”

Katara still hadn’t cooled off by the time Sokka and Toph returned with another full purse and a… messenger hawk?
“Uh, Sokka?” Zuko voiced his concern.  “You realize that as soon as he’s weaned, Druk is gonna try to eat that bird?”

“He will not!” Sokka covered the bird’s head where his ears would be, scandalized.  “He’s not going to eat Momo, so he better not eat Hawky!”

“Yeah, but he’s already friends with Momo, plus dragons prefer birds anyway.”  Over the past week, Zuko’s head had been filling with previously-unknown knowledge about dragons.  He also felt his inner fire getting stronger every time he nursed Druk.  Weird…

“Also, Hawky?” he continued, peeved.  “That’s a very terrible name for someone who made fun of Katara’s and my naming skills.”

Sokka ignored him.  “Your dragon will not eat my bird, you better see to it.”

“Fine,” Zuko rolled his eyes.  “But if you wanted to send a message, you could have just paid to rent a hawk at the post office.  It would have been cheaper.”

“Maybe I wanted a pet too,” Sokka grumbled.

“Fair enough,” Zuko shrugged again, seeming satisfied with Sokka’s motives.

“I still can’t believe you’re just going around spending money in the same town where you scammed everybody out of theirs,” Katara growled, pulling at her hair.  “Besides the fact that it’s wrong, you’re risking blowing our cover!”

Zuko decided it would be in his best interests to stay out of this argument.  While he understood Katara’s frustrations and concerns vis-a-vis their safety, he couldn’t say he had a problem with them being able to buy food.  And scamming people who took advantage of the poor was fun…

Katara and Sokka were still bickering, so he decided to go give Aang a firebending lesson.  Katara and Toph had gotten a training session with him earlier, practicing his seismic sense, but Aang wasn’t confident enough with fire yet to work on it blindfolded.  Druk hung around his neck like a scarf as he stepped away from the very tense atmosphere the two water tribe siblings had created.

He and Aang had managed to get through the bulk of their lesson and were doing a cool-off exercise where they passed a fireball back and forth while also adding and taking away flames from their little ball by turns when Katara stomped into their practice site.

“Apparently,” she grit her teeth.  “Toph’s a wanted criminal now!” 

“Oh cool!” Zuko exclaimed.  “Now we both have wanted posters.”

It was the wrong thing to say, as the tense silence afterwards proved, but Katara couldn’t bring herself to scold Zuko for his excitement as she was reminded how horrifying Zuko’s wanted poster had been.  While they hadn’t seen as many lately, not since the rumor started circulating that he was dead, she would never forget the first one that they’d found, almost the second they’d entered Fire Nation territory.  It had proclaimed that Zuko was wanted ‘dead or alive’ but also offered an extra 5000 gold pieces if they brought back Zuko’s corpse and it was ‘sufficiently mangled.’  Zuko, oddly, didn’t seem surprised or even all that bothered by this.

When he realized he wasn’t about to get yelled at, Zuko scooted forward to look at Toph’s poster.  “Huh, not a bad reward,” he mused.  “But they want you alive, so I guess I’m still winning.”

“Dude,” Sokka said.  “It’s not a competition.”

Zuko might have said something about how it absolutely was a competition, thank you very much, and he was totally winning, but it would have been hard to hear over the sounds of Toph screaming at Katara for going through her stuff and Katara screaming back for being careless and risking their safety.

“Oh?!” Toph laughed sarcastically.  “I’m endangering our group by having a wanted poster?  Zuko just said that he’s like, 10 times more wanted, so I don’t see what the big deal is!”

Zuko backed up.  He did not want to be brought into this.  Druk nibbled his ear reassuringly.

“Well Zuko is a fugitive for saving Aang and helping us!” Katara screamed back.  Druk whined.  He didn’t like the screaming.  Zuko was inclined to agree with him, and he could only hear properly out of one ear.

“I was helping us!” Toph yelled.  “I was making sure we could buy food!”

“You were buying totally unnecessary stuff like messenger hawks, and you did it because you just wanted to show off!”

Sokka covered the bird’s ears again.  “Don’t listen to her, Hawky.  You’re totally necessary.”  He glared at his sister.

“Stop protecting the bird’s innocence, Sokka,” Katra grumbled.  “He can’t even understand you!  He’s just a stupid bird!”

The bird apparently could understand her, because he looked affronted.  Zuko hadn’t realized a bird could look affronted (every bird he’d ever spent any significant length of time with looked happy to see him.  Granted, they were mostly turtle-ducks and they loved him because he brought bread, but still…)(Zuko was underestimating himself; the turtle ducks loved him because he was amazing and had a good heart and attracted animals like a magnet because of it).  

This bird definitely looked affronted,

though.  Not that Katara was paying attention.  She was busy storming off.  Toph was busy storming off in the other direction.  Sokka looked torn over which girl to try to calm down before he eventually headed off after Toph.

Aang looked at Zuko.  Zuko looked at Aang.  Both looked like they had no idea what to do.

“Wanna play leaping lemurs?” the avatar asked eventually.

“Sure,” Zuko agreed.  “Can I go first?”

“Only if you say ‘please, Grandpa.’”

“You go first.”

“Hey!” 

[]

Zuko didn’t know what happened.  He’d just beat Aang at leaping lemurs again (because Aang kept cheating by using airbending, and he didn’t care what the avatar said; that was automatic disqualification) when there was a BOOM! And suddenly he and Aang were thrown back and there was a combustion bender standing in front of them.

Zuko shoved himself back into a handspring, fire shooting out of his feet towards the man as he did so.  He could only assume this was an assassin, probably sent by his sister to do what she’d failed to do in Ba Sing Se and take out the avatar.  After all, she’d probably told their father that she’d been successful, since they hadn’t seen any wanted posters for Aang (and since Azula never failed at anything- and had seen the consequences for Zuko when he had- it was probably easier for her to lie and take care of the problem later).

“Some sisters send postcards when they haven’t seen their brothers in a while.  Figures mine sends an assassin,” he grumbled to himself as he tried to draw said assassin away from Aang.  Where were the rest of their group?
Zuko wished he had his swords; they’d learned quickly that it wasn’t a great idea to send fire at a combustion bender, since it only made more fuel for when he blew it back in their faces.  They were also defending the low ground against a cliff with a very sheer drop, and Aang didn’t have his glider with him.  Zuko cursed himself for getting so comfortable, for not paying enough attention to his surroundings in enemy territory.  He was just glad he’d sent Druk back to their main campsite to take a nap; he didn’t need the assassin reporting back to Azula that he had a dragon while Druk was still young and vulnerable.

It was clear that they were losing ground.  They’d been ambushed, firebending was too volatile, and they had no weapons.  The assassin was also focusing most of his attention on Aang, who was too hesitant to try to seriously incapacitate the combustion bender.  They could keep playing the ‘avoid and evade’ strategy, and if they’d been on more open ground, that might have worked.  But they’d end up blown off the cliffside long before Combustion Dude (Zuko was still working on the name; he’d have to ask Sokka later if he had a better one) tired himself out attacking them.

Zuko then did something very brave, and also very stupid (his sweet spot).  He threw himself at the assassin, wrapping his arms around his neck and squeezing as he rode the man piggy back.  It was hard to firebend with any accuracy without being able to breathe properly, so his current, on-the-fly plan was just to keep squeezing until the guy passed out.  Which wasn’t looking to turn out in his favor; while Zuko was very strong, he was also an underfed sixteen-year-old up against a fully-grown man who looked like he’d been eating his protein and competing in earth rumbles as part of his workout routine.

He was doing pretty okay, however, considering that brute strength was not where he typically specialized (although he was definitely far stronger than a scrawny sixteen-year-old had any right to be.  Like that one time where earthbenders had kidnapped Uncle and he’d drop-kicked a boulder and then broken the chains with nothing but his feet.  On second thought, this was actually a great plan and he was totally strong enough to pull it off if he could just stay on for a bit longer).  The assassin’s breathing was becoming very labored and his attacks were slowing down and he could totally do this with just a few more seconds and the man would be unconscious already if he’d just stop moving but it didn’t even matter because he almost had him knocked out anyway and…

Oh, Zuko realized.  The stars were very pretty that day.  Or maybe those were just the stars in his vision, as he was suddenly on the ground, a large rock nearby.

“I’m so sorry Zuko!”  Aang called out, his voice seeming very distant.  “I was aiming for the guy attacking us, but I guess my earthbending still needs some work!”  He was now panicking about both the assassin and his friend.

“That’s nice, Aang,” Zuko replied, dazed.  “I think I’m gonna take a nap now…”  the ground was really quite comfortable, although it’d be rather more comfortable if his hair wasn’t wet with blood from the wound on his head.

The last thing he saw before he passed out was a blurry image of Toph and Katara showing up, the little earthbender taking out Combustion Dude with a well-placed pebble to the forehead.

[]

Zuko woke up to a massive headache, a guilty Aang, and a concerned Katara.  And Druk was lying across his aching face like a noodly, scaly heat pack, which he appreciated.

“Wha’???” he slurred, trying to remember what happened.  He hadn’t felt this out of it since the crew on his ship had dragged him out drinking on his fifteenth birthday, saying he needed to take a break from ‘trying to capture a mythical being nobody has seen in a century’ and ‘being a stick in the mud.’  It had apparently worked, since he woke up barely able to remember his own name, much less what an avatar was, and with a giggling crew standing over him who kept teasing him for months afterward about things that he had yet to remember.

“A concussion and a skull fracture,” Katara murmured, her healing water glowing against his dark hair, which was still matted with dried blood.  “Only you could draw that kind of trouble on an afternoon off.”

“Aang helped…” Zuko protested with a groan.  

“Yeah, Spark-lord, but Aang didn’t try to piggyback ride a dangerous assassin,” Toph snorted.  Apparently she and Katara were getting along again, since the waterbender merely rolled her eyes fondly at the other girl and didn’t try to snap at her.  Zuko also realized that he couldn’t see Hawky on Sokka’s shoulder… was he off sending a letter already?

Ugh, thinking hurt, Zuko realized, and stopped trying.  “Sorry my sister sent an assassin after us,” he said, in lieu of using his brain.  “That’s probably my fault.”
“If you imply that your psycho sister is your fault one more time, I will wait until you’re all the way healed and then knock you over the head again,” Katara warned him.  

“Gotta throw up,” was Zuko’s eloquent response to that, and she helped him lean over the side of Appa to do so (apparently they were traveling again, which was nice, since it meant that part of the fact that his world was spinning around could be attributed to the fact that they were moving; not enough of it, but part.  That was good...).

“Thanks,” he told the waterbender, after she’d settled him back in place in Appa’s saddle.

“Shhh, don’t thank me,” she chided gently.  “Just go back to sleep, and we’ll wake you in a couple hours.  It’s easier to heal you when you’re sleeping.”  His body was incredibly tense when he was awake, and she had to force her water to relax his muscles before it could do anything else.  She was just glad he was more relaxed in his sleep when he was around them, finally.  When she’d been healing his lightning wound back on the ship, he was wound so tight even in unconsciousness that it seemed his body had undone half her progress as soon as one session was finished.  She didn’t blame him for it; she knew it wasn’t his fault that he’d probably never felt safe a day in his life, but it definitely made her job more difficult.  At least she was getting plenty of practice…

“Thanks ‘Tara,” he mumbled, yawning and then wincing as the movement hurt his head.  He was asleep in moments.

“You’re welcome,” she told his unconscious form as she kissed his nose with platonic fondness.  “Just… try not to hurt yourself so much.”  She knew it was no use though; he continually protested that it’s not like he tried to get into trouble constantly, so even if he was awake, her words likely would have fallen on deaf ears (er, ear…).  

It was alright though; they were all together, and everyone was alive and relatively alright.  There was a dragon on Zuko’s face, a lemur on Sokka’s stomach as he lounged, Appa was flying contentedly along, Aang was covering a sleeping Toph in one of the blankets Zuko had finished knitting out of the bison’s fur, and there was a letter on its way to the young earthbender’s parents.  Today, they were together, and for now that was enough.

[][][]

Mayu might be a mere palace servant, but she was not stupid.  She had been there for ten years, since the first bloom of womanhood had inspired her mother to send her out of the house with a basket containing one spare dress and a loaf of bread because she was ‘old enough to not be my problem anymore’ (it was a war, and there were four other children, and the world was harsh; she did not begrudge her mother- much).  

She knew the habits of the royal family, of the nobles and the generals who frequented the palace, of the guards and of her fellow servants both higher and lower than she on the staff hierarchy.  She may be less than 24 years old, but she had the wisdom and the practicality of a matron who had seen many more seasons than that.  And she knew that Prince Zuko was not dead, the same way that she knew to tell all the other young women coming in to serve at the palace to avoid Ozai as best they could lest they wake up with a sore body in a strange bed with a packet of herbs being shoved at them to take.  She knew it the same way that she knew that princess Azula would burn the first servant she came across if she found fire lilies in her chambers (anything that reminded the young princess of her mother was a sure way to earn her wrath).

Oh, Mayu was well aware of the official ruling; that Prince Zuko had fallen a traitor in Ba Sing Se, along with the avatar (although, if anyone were to see someone matching the traitor prince’s description, they were of course to report it to the authorities, as it could be an impersonator, a dangerous radical hoping to finish what Zuko had not and destroy the fire nation from the inside).  

But if Prince Zuko were truly dead, then 

Princess Azula would not be showing subtle signs of anxiety; she would not need frequent spa treatments to hide the puffiness of her eyes from lost sleep, or near-constant manicures to fix her bitten nails.  No, if Zuko was truly dead, she would have responded as she had after his banishment; with wild mood swings, going from hysteric joy to manic despair when she thought no-one could see her.  For all her faults, for all that she disliked the princess, Mayu knew that Azula was still a girl, the same age that she herself had been when she was tossed into the maw of the beast to make her own way through its treacherous teeth.  And as much as she wished she didn’t, the princess loved her brother, a love borne of childhood where she followed him around like a turtleduckling as Zuko told her fantastic stories of his own making and helped her sneak sweets from under the nose of the indulgent old cooks.

Those had been Mayu’s first days in the palace, and back then she had thought that the two were adorable, and so lucky to have each other in the rat-viper pit of the palace.  The princess had never liked her mother all that much, even as her mother tried desperately to offer her own love and affection, but she had loved and adored her elder brother so very much.  It had pained Mayu to see her pull further away from the prince in later years, even as he tried desperately to close the rift that was growing by the day.

She remembered the day that Azula had burned Zuko’s hip, leaving a little scar in the shape of sputtering embers, little dots extending up from the small splatter-shape.  Their father had praised Azula and scolded Zuko, and after that, Zuko stopped trying, and his own love for his sister was quiet and kept within himself.  

Mayu had been carrying a basket of laundry past the courtyard during the incident, and part of her, the part that had been a big sister and a second parent to her siblings, wanted to stop and comfort the prince, but she knew her place, so she had bitten her lip and kept going.  She was a laborer, poor and trying to survive, and she simply did not have the luxury of unlimited compassion.  So she did her job, and she ignored and pretended not to see the atrocities in front of her.  It was not until nighttime that she ever truly thought about all that went on at the palace beyond her initial, instinctual reactions.

She had paid more attention to the prince than was her place, perhaps, but so did all the servants, because he had extended the invitation first.  He asked names as he went to the kitchen to request bread for the turtleducks, thanked anyone who came to do chores or drop off laundered clothes when he was in his own room.  She had mourned and angered quietly with everyone else, when the fire lord had burned his son’s face and sent him off on a hopeless quest.  A number of servants had quit after that disgrace of an ‘agni kai’, if it could even be called that.  They all knew that nothing would be the same after that, and that nothing was to keep the same or even worse from happening to them, if that was the price that a prince had paid for caring about his people.

Some of the newer servants who had not been quiet enough in their disdain had disappeared, surely piles of ash in unmarked graves by now.  The pastry chef who had made Zuko’s favorite jian dui had also quit and quietly left the country for seemingly no reason, and nobody in the palace had eaten jian dui since, for he had been the best in the country, and the fire lord would not have anything unless it was the very best.  Slightly less skilled pastry chefs had learned that the hard way.

Through all of this, Mayu kept her tongue, cleaned hallways and sconces and laundered clothes and scrubbed teapots and delivered meals.  She kept her job and she kept her life and she did not think it would be prudent or practical of her to expect anything more out of life than this.  Mayu was not an optimist; pragmatism had been drilled into her by days and days of mundane duties and low wages (that were still higher than anything else one of her station might find in the city), and by the taste of teas made of bitter herbs sipped after waking up in the chambers of nobles who had dragged her there against her will.

Mayu was not an optimist; she put no stock in rumors like ‘the avatar was coming to save them all’ or ‘the war must end sometime.’  From her view, the war could very well go on forever; after all, no twelve-year-old could save them from an army of tyrants led by a beast, and after what their nation had done to his people, why would he even want to?  But the same practicality that told her this also told her that Prince Zuko could not be, and was not dead.  It was a cold comfort, but a comfort nonetheless.  If the idealistic little boy she had known had been shaped by his forced departure from home the same way she had by hers, then he would find a quiet place in the Earth Kingdom to settle down and build a life of anonymity for himself.

Considering what had led to his banishment, she knew he would not do this either.

[]

The fire sages knew that Prince Zuko was not dead; the flames told them even as they demanded his safe return and his rightful place on the throne.  His portrait, the most recent official one that was available (with an unscarred face that wore a shy smile even though he had been ordered to keep a stern and serious expression) hung above the sacred flames in the private temple that only they had access too.  

It was treason to put their devotion and their prayers towards any mortal besides Fire Lord Ozai, of course.  But it was folly to defy the will of Agni, who had made clear to them that Prince Zuko must not only be restored to his position as prince, but to be the one on the throne as fire lord.  Death could only take you past the gates of the mortal plane, but the wrath of one of the Great Spirits could follow you anywhere.  

Soon, the flickering flames informed them, the imposter fire lord will learn this. 

[]

There were whispers in the capital that the Crown Prince might be alive.  Some believed it, and some did not, but no-one who had ever known hunger or fear or desperation hoped that he wasn’t.  He had stood up for their most vulnerable people and been banished for it, and yet he still tried to aid the avatar, they knew, in Ba Sing Se.  

Everyone who knew anything of him 

knew he was a good soul, and they knew he had wanted (or, if they were optimistic about his continued existence, still wanted) to end the war.  Among themselves, whether they believed the rumors or not, they called him “the crown prince” in whispered tones, determined to respect him when they could.  In the streets, nobody mentioned him at all, preferring to pretend he didn’t exist rather than disrespect his memory by calling him a traitor, as was now required by law when speaking of him.

They were quiet for now (the mounted heads of those who tried to burn down the palace weeks ago saw to that), but they were not content.  And they would not be, not while the throne was occupied with someone who did not care for his own son, much less his own people.

[][][]

Zuko’s head was still slightly tender, but at least his skull was in one piece again as they sat around the firelight telling ghost stories.  Druk, now too big to wind around his neck, sat perched in his lap like a deerdog that was slightly too large to fit there but was staunchly refusing to acknowledge this.

“That’s so lame,” Toph said, boredly, of Sokka’s latest attempt to frighten them.  “If we’re telling scary stories, they should at least be scarier than things that have actually happened to us.”

“That’s a tough order,” Sokka protested.  “I mean, the whole thing with Sparky Sparky Boom Boom Man was terrifying.”

“You weren’t even there, and that’s a terrible name.”  Katara rolled her eyes.

“Well does anyone have a better one?” Sokka stuck his tongue out at her.

“Uh, I had one, but I’m not sure if it was any good or not; I can’t remember it,” Zuko said.

Aang looked guilty.  “Sorry about that,” he apologized for what felt like the millionth time in the past few days.

Zuko rolled his own eyes even though it still hurt his head.  “If you apologize for accidentally breaking my skull with a rock one more time, I’m going to go back to trying to capture you.  Seriously, I forgave you like, right away, and it wasn’t even that big of a deal.  Azula did worse things to me on purpose when I was like, eight.”  He moved the sash on his hanbok aside to show them a small but messy-looking burn scar on his hip, the shape of a starburst and with a trail of little dots like popping embers making their way a couple centimeters further upwards.

“I would prefer if you don’t use your sister as the yardstick of what is acceptable from your friends,” Sokka said tightly, and Zuko looked at Katara for help.  

She shook her head, which Zuko knew meant not mad at you.  He exhaled in relief and wondered how he’d ever made it through any social interactions without a Katara to guide him.

“I’ve got a better ghost story,” the waterbender changed the subject, telling them a story from her mom’s childhood about how the ghost of the friend who died in a snowstorm showed up to tell her she was freezing to death before fading away again, leaving nothing but an empty house with an empty fireplace that occasionally blew ghostly smoke into the antarctic sky.

“Pretty good,” Zuko approved, although Toph still seemed slightly less than impressed.

“Why don’t you tell one, spark-lord?” Toph asked ordered him.

“Uh, most of the ghost stories I know are about the war, so I’m not sure…”

“It’s okay, just tell us!” Sokka demanded.  “We wanna hear about fire ghosts!”

“Uh, well there’s this one about a soldier and a spirit, but the spirit doesn’t come out looking very good…” he looked at Aang warily.

“I’m sure the spirits will forgive us,” Aang nodded sagely after cocking his head and thinking for a moment.  Of course, this was all avatar wisdom and had nothing to do with him being twelve and wanting to hear a ghost story.

“Okay, well, um...” Zuko moved his hands, and a figure appeared out of the flames, of a woman whose arms were slightly too long and her face too gaunt, wearing a dress made of white flames and with purple hair and seeming vaguely inhuman.

“Well, once upon a time there was a spirit woman… I don’t think this is based on a real spirit though, since I’m not sure spirits have genders the same way we do?  So I’m pretty sure it’s made up, but everyone who ever tells it swears it's real, so I guess I should probably say it too, for authenticity…”

“Hey!” Toph interrupted.  “Folklore history lesson later, scary now!” 

“Right,” Zuko did not seem offended at her rudeness.  “Um, so this spirit woman liked to wander the borders between worlds, and one day she saw an honorable fire nation soldier, practicing his fire bending.”  Here his hands moved again, subtly, and the vision in the flames changed to keep up with the narrative.

“The spirit thought the soldier was so strong and beautiful that she fell in love immediately, mad with desire.  She crossed over into the world of the humans (this was another point against the authenticity of the tale, as very few could just cross over willy-nilly, Zuko knew), and made her way to the soldier.  She was odd-looking, but still beautiful and ethereal and charming.  She confessed her love to the soldier, who offered to make her his wife.  She gladly accepted, and soon she was with child.”  The flames depicted a traditional fire nation wedding ceremony with the soldier and his purple-haired bride, and then the spirit proudly holding her hands against her swelling belly.  “But the child was strange, a hybrid, and as it grew within her womb, the fire inside of it started to consume the spirit, who was not equipped to bear such a thing.  She slowly went madder and madder, and her husband became frightened.  He refused to leave her however, as honor dictated he must follow his vows to her.  At night she wailed so loudly that nobody in the town could sleep,” (here her vision in the flames warped and twisted as the spirit warred with the child inside of her, and with the contrast of humanity and spirituality). The flames crackled again as a wave of distorted images flickered against the night; the woman towering over her husband menacingly, of her clutching her belly with her mouth opened unnaturally wide, of her shoving her hands against the soldier’s chest.  Zuko had done something with the heat of the flames against the wood, somehow able to make a pitched whining that sounded remarkably similar to a woman screaming.

“On the night the baby was born, the moon burned red against the night (here they all pointedly refused to think about the siege in the north pole) as the woman bled black against the bedsheets.  What came out was a scaly, stretched, toothed menace that looked nothing like a human or a spirit.  Screaming in rage, it stood up on its stubby legs and devoured its father.  The spirit, devastated at the loss of her husband, in turn devoured the child, who burned her up from the inside out.  The fire consumed the whole village, and it served as a warning to all not to get too familiar with spirits, except to worship Agni.”

Four sets of eyes (well, seven if you counted the dragon, the lemur, and the sky bison) blinked back at him, stunned to silence.  

“Well, that was…” Sokka began, finally

“Something…” Aang agreed.

“I thought it was awesome!” Toph threw back her head and laughed.  “I think Zuko should tell all our stories from now on!”

Zuko blushed, and hoped she didn’t follow through on that statement.  None of his stories were any friendlier, unless they liked play scrolls like the ones his mother had read him before he was old enough to read them for himself.  Even some of those ended unhappily, come to think of it (and also, there was the fact that Sokka constantly made fun of his love of theater)…

“Do you guys hear screaming?” Toph suddenly asked them, no longer laughing.

“Ha-ha, very funny,” Sokka taunted.  “What now, a spirit comes out of the woods and burps flames at us?”

“No, I’m serious!”  Zuko knew that she was, but Katara told her she was just being jumpy, and Toph seemed to drop it, at least for now.  He’d ask her about it tomorrow, in private.

Someone came up behind them, and they all screamed, and Zuko had his swords at the throat of the old woman before he’d realized that it was, in fact, just an old woman.  He backed up.

“Very sorry ma’am,” he demurred, adopting his softer and more feminine voice that he used when it wasn’t just their group.

“Oh, that’s quite alright dear; I can’t blame you for being on your guard in these woods; people are disappearing, after all…”

Which is how they ended up going to her inn.  Druk was on edge, and Zuko was inclined to agree with him; besides the fact that it was strange that she hadn’t remarked on the fact that they had a dragon the size of a young platypus-bear, he was getting a weird vibe from her that set his teeth on edge.  Nobody else was saying anything, however, so neither was he.  

He and Sokka shared a room that night; the woman (Hama, she’d introduced herself) assumed they were a couple like everyone else.  Sokka said he wouldn’t be able to sleep a wink, but he was out within the hour, which didn’t surprise Zuko at all.  He, on the other hand, barely even blinked the whole night, much less closed his eyes to sleep, even after Druk had gradually drifted off with his hackles still raised threateningly.  He kept sitting up in bed, hand on his swords, and as he felt the sun rise, giving more fuel to his inner fire, he was just grateful the night was over.

When Sokka was snooping around while Hama went to the markets the next day, Zuko didn’t say anything against him like Katara, but he didn’t try to stop him either.  He hadn’t been able to relax since they stepped foot in the inn.  

When Hama showed them the comb, he tried to calm his racing heart.  So she was from the Southern Tribe; that didn’t necessarily mean…

When she bent their soup at dinner, he dropped his glass, shattering it.  He knew who she was; he and everyone else who had access to the military reports on what had happened in the old prison (even if his ‘access’ had been stolen glances at their grandfather’s papers after sneaking into his office on a dare from Azula, who would never admit that she’d only dared him to do it because she wasn’t stealthy enough to do it herself).  

He had thought, of course, that what 

the fire nation had done had been atrocious (although he hadn’t been able to admit it to himself at the time, even in the privacy of his mind) but what had scared him the most was the legends of what the last southern waterbender had done there.  The stories of the blood witch only served to reinforce the lesson amongst the military and the nobility that waterbenders were all savages who needed to be killed on sight.

Zuko knew that wasn’t true, of course, but this woman scared him.  He had no idea what to do.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, deciding to take care of the glass first.  “My hand slipped.”

Katara looked at him worriedly… it was unusual of him to be so clumsy; was his head still bothering him?

“That’s quite alright, dear,” she told him, but her eyes were appraising.  “We all have accidents sometimes.”  She bent the water up off the floor, and Zuko finished picking up the glass.

When Katara agreed to take lessons with her the next day, Zuko knew he had to do something; as soon as they left the dinner table and were alone, he would tell them what he knew.  

Then Hama asked the others to go gather more wood to feed the fire while she and “JinÅ” cleaned up the kitchen.

Every nerve of Zuko’s was screaming at him to run, to ask one of the others to stay with him.  But they were already leaving, and Zuko’s brain felt frozen with fear; growing up, the blood witch had been their bogeyman, and even Azula had been afraid of the stories, whispered between noble children in the dark.

Besides, he couldn’t ask his friends to risk themselves, not if even a fraction of what he’d heard about this woman was true.  Extra people would be no help against the blood witch, not if she could really take hold of your body like a puppet on a string (and oh, now he knew why the puppets Sokka had found earlier had given him chills down his spine…).

“So,” she said, as soon as they were alone, as Zuko tried to feign innocence by picking up a dish and reaching for the sink.  “You’ve heard of me.”

Zuko was a terrible liar, but he tried anyway.  “Well, you told us about yourself,” he feigned, aiming for levity.  

It didn’t work.  Her eyes hardened; Zuko reached for his swords, even knowing it would be no use.  

Instead of grabbing hold of his body from the inside, however, Hama bent some black liquid from a little clay pot on her countertop.

Zuko adjusted his stance, quickly blocking the liquid coming at him with his swords, but it was a futile effort.  She bent it around them, shoving it into his skin with a force that hurt, and Zuko felt his world growing dark.

[][]

The next hours were vague and disjointed; he would rouse to semi-consciousness to vomit at his own feet, feeling the hard metal of chains pulling his arms back painfully against a hard surface.  He heard worried whispers, sounding frantic.  His skin felt hot, but in an uncomfortable way that he could not control rather than in the reassuring manner it normally did.  His inner fire flickered erratically, flaring up to throw itself at something under his skin, then being forced back down again.  The fire in his skin was a separate sort of heat; it wasn’t part of him, and it was acidic and sadistic and it burned in a way that did not reassure him like the flames in his own belly and his own bones, and he wondered if this was how the heat of his homeland made Sokka and Katara feel.  It burned like the scar on his face had burned when it was new, fire and blood and pus charred against the bones of his cheek.

Then it would be dark again, for a while.  And then he would wake up not trapped, but somewhere he couldn’t feel his burning body.  His vision was blurry and his cousin, several years older than when he had last seen him, was standing in front of him.

“I have missed you, dear cousin, but it is not your time,” Lu Ten told him, and Zuko was too tired to make sense of that and then he could feel his body again and it was on fire and it was burning but it was burning cold, and then it was too hot again and he couldn’t breathe.

He wanted to not feel again, to go back to his cousin, but he was blocked by a wall- no, a towering being made of flames.  

“You must fight, young one, for your destiny lies ahead.  I have chosen you to restore the honor of our people, and we are all counting on you.  Stay, Prince Zuko; don’t let go.”

The other hallucinations were vivid and weird, their messages even less clear.  He was a dragon, bright against the burning sun.  He was diving in the arctic waters again, only this time instead of trying to break into the tribe, he was reaching for the moon at the bottom of the sea, and then the moon was a woman and then the moon again.  Two fish swam around his body, begging him not to go, but he was so tired.  

What little flashes of awareness he received were all pain and shaking muscles and a heaving stomach.  He heard screaming and then dimly realized it was his own before he was lost again.

He dreamt of the eclipse that was to come, except he wasthe sun, and he was trying to burn away his father, the fire lord, the scourge of his nation and the source of all the pain of his people.  His consciousness was both his own and not his own; he was sharing with something cavernous and powerful and that stretched far beyond his imagination, and yet it wasn’t beyond his imagination because he could feel it all and a rage that was not his own was demanding to burn the traitor.  

And the moon- no, the woman from the sea, no, the moon again- was speaking in a soft voice, flickering between images.

“Calm,” she ordered, not unkindly.  “You know that this is not your destiny to fulfill.”

[]

From their own positions in their own chains, the other prisoners watched the scarred woman’s body in horror; she was alight in rainbow flames, flickering and dying down and going out and then combusting into a roaring inferno again, and yet she did not burn.  What sort of spirit had the blood witch put in here with them, and what kind of revenge might it enact upon them all once it was freed?

[]

Zuko’s consciousness was abruptly severed from the sun, became his own again as he came back to his suffering body and felt his arms released to slump against the coolness of a familiar waterbender.

“‘Tara?” he asked, so relieved that the blood witch hadn’t hurt her.  “Y’kay?”

“Shh, I’m fine Zuko, just concentrating,” she muttered, clenching her teeth.  She pulled her arms back, and suddenly the fire-water-pain was being yanked back out of his skin, every trace.  Katara seemed to know his body as well as her own as she reached into his muscles and his nerves and his capillaries, pulling out every last drop of the poison that Hama had shoved into his body.

He sighed, immediately feeling a bit better- still like he had gone through literal torture, but no longer like he was actively dying.  Or maybe he’d already died a little bit?  Something about Lu Ten…

He couldn’t hold onto whatever thoughts he’d been trying to cling to; they must have fled his mind with the poison.  He slumped.

“That poison would have killed anybody else,” Katara was saying to someone else as Zuko faded away again, “I don’t know how he survived it, but he’ll be fine in a few days…”

He knew no more.

[][]

When Hama had said that Zuko had offered to go run an errand in the next town over for her, and that he would be back the next day, Katara hadn’t doubted her.  She regretted that deeply.

She’d been so excited to meet another waterbender from her tribe; she didn’t think that Hama could be anything but trustworthy.  When Toph had pulled them aside to say Hama was lying, Katara dismissed her, saying that her senses had been jumpy last night when she thought she heard screaming, and that her lie detecting ability had failed her before, with Azula.  What reason would Hama have to hurt Zuko? she’d asked.

Why wouldn’t he have left a note? Sokka had rebutted, and she’d scoffed and asked why they’d need a note when Hama could just tell them?  Then Toph and Sokka had gotten mad and said they were going to search for Zuko.  Katara had rolled her eyes and Aang, after looking a little torn, eventually said that there was no reason to distrust Hama, but it wouldn’t hurt for the other two to try to catch up to Zuko anyway.

She had realized her mistake the minute Hama talked about bending blood the next night, and it was with her heart in her throat that she realized they needed to find Zuko.  And then Aang had come running up to her, saying that Toph and Sokka found him but that he was in critical condition, chained up in the mountain with the missing villagers.  Hama, failing to control Katara, had grabbed Aang with her evil technique, and Katara, desperate, had been forced to grab hold of the old woman’s own blood to stop her.  She barely heard the triumphant speech Hama had given her as she’d rushed, tears in her eyes, to where Aang was leading her.

It had almost been too late, and Katara wasn’t sure how Zuko was alive but was grateful beyond belief that he was.  For what felt like the thousandth time, her hands, covered in healing water, were against his skin.

But it was no use, she realized, until she rid his body of the poison that was doing this.  Her new awareness of people’s blood and what was in it told her where it was, what it was, and how to remove it as she jerked, too desperate to be gentle, pulling and pulling until she felt every last drop of the poison leave his body.  She threw it far away and tried healing again, and she nearly staggered back.

This thing that Hama had taught her, so evil a moment before, had expanded her healing senses beyond what she ever thought possible.  She could feel every vein and muscle and the blood in the marrow of Zuko’s bones as she pushed her water deeper, her expanded senses dizzying.  She could feel the pumping of the hearts of every person in the room, knew that the fourth prisoner to the left had high blood pressure and that two people down from him, a woman’s blood sugar was too low.  

Is this what Toph feels all the time? she wondered.  It was overwhelming, but she managed to block everything else as she pushed her senses deeper into Zuko’s.  It was almost like being in his body, she was so attuned, and she realized how much pain he must be in as she rooted through looking for not right not right not right.  His kidneys were damaged already, but she could fix that.  His liver could be fixed too, and she very gently encouraged his heart to pump steadier and stronger, softly nudging the blood nearby to help the process along.  The world narrowed to just her and Zuko, and she ignored the noise and the prisoners streaming out and their pumping hearts getting further away, ignored Toph and Sokka and Aang’s own anxious heartbeat, and even the various spots of old scar tissue along Zuko’s skin as she pushed deeper.  

His body, she realized, was millions and millions of tiny segments within his organs… like little, self-contained cells, almost.  And she checked every last one, fixing and fixing and fixing and double and triple-checking just to be safe, until she was sure that, with rest and water and a few square meals, he would make a full recovery.

She stepped back, exhausted, as she heard Zuko’s voice asking if she was alright (and it was so like her idiot patient to ask if she was okay while hovering on the brink between life and death).  She reassured him, sent him back to sleep, and was actually grateful for the lesson that Hama had forced her to learn the hard way.  Because Hama might have used her technique to force and control and even to stop hearts, but Katara would use the same skills to heal and to free from pain and to keep hearts beating.

She nearly collapsed as the exhaustion hit all at once, and felt Toph lift her up to carry her away as Sokka did the same for Zuko, and she lay her head back against Toph’s chest, where she could still feel her heart beating and every blood cell moving through her veins, and she let herself sleep.

[][]

Sokka and Aang had had a busy couple of days.  They needed to make sure Zuko, who could barely sit up, let alone hold much food down, got enough fluids and gentle meals to help him recover his strength after the nasty poisoning scare he’d had.  They were just grateful he was lucid, and Katara had said he’d be fine, but it was still nerve-wracking.

As for Katara, she’d woken up screaming how she could feel everything and everyone and it was too much too much too much!  

Apparently what Hama had forced Katara to learn had given her a wider awareness, and she could feel all the blood in everyone’s body and every drop of water for miles around.  Sokka had known Katara was powerful of course, but this was another level entirely.  It wasn’t even the full moon anymore, but her senses did not seem to have dulled at all.  Bloodbending had woken something in her, had unlocked some new level of intensity to her abilities beyond the frankly awe-inspiring potential she’d already shown.

So for the past few days, Toph had been helping her learn to control her new sense, being the most qualified when it came to bending-related extra-sensory abilities.

“Well Sweetness,” Toph had said, as she had Katara doing what felt like endless repetitions of narrowing and widening her awareness, “if you ever do go blind, you’ll be just fine. Welcome to the ‘awesome sixth sense benders club’.”

Katara didn’t reply, too busy focusing on pulling her senses all the way back into her own body.  She knew that, if she wanted to, she could bend the blood in Toph and Sokka and Aang and Zuko even though it was no longer the full moon and also broad daylight, but she wouldn’t, not to them or anyone else ever again, never to harm.  Only to heal.  Pushing away all other thoughts, she managed to narrow her senses until she got to only her and Toph, but still couldn’t seem to block out the other girl. 

“I’m just gonna go tell the others that I think you should be able to function normally with just two more days of training,” Toph told her eventually, standing up, right as Katara finally managed to pull most of her awareness away from Toph.  It took a little bit of concentration, but she managed to block out everything but her beating heart, then extended her awareness to Zuko, checking on him with her new abilities.

“I think it’ll be about four before it’ll be safe for Zuko to be up and moving again,” she informed the earthbender.  “Tell them that as well.”

“I guess I’ll just do everything around here, huh?” Toph quipped, but didn’t argue.  Katara, pulling her senses back in, decided to take a short power nap.

[]

“Sugar queen says four more days before Zuko’s off bedrest,” Toph told the three boys as she stomped up to them.

“Pretty sure it’s not bedrest if there’s no bed,” Zuko quipped, wan and drawn and tired-looking, but awake.  

“Not that you aren’t just as comfortable,” he reassured Appa, patting the bison whose side he was leaning against, wrapped in blankets.

“That’s fine; we have ten days until the eclipse, and it should take us about two days to get to the meeting place as long as we don’t get sidetracked,” Sokka grunted, trying  and failing to start a fire with spark rocks so he could cook their dinner.  

“Hey!” he suddenly cried, indignant, turning to Zuko accusingly as the fire roared to life.  “Katara says you’re supposed to be resting, not firebending.” 

“I’m sorry buddy, but watching you try to start one was just pathetic,” Zuko chuckled, a small cough tearing its way up his throat as he did so.  The firebending had actually helped, though; kickstarting his inner fire to warm him up on its own, and he loosened the pile of bison-fur blankets a little.

Druk, apparently seeing this as a sign his ‘mommy’ was ready to nurse him, butted up against him impatiently, and Zuko laughed and lit up a finger.  From what he’d been told by Aang and Sokka, Druk had not enjoyed eating the boring old campfire flames while he was out of it.

Sokka was going to scold Zuko that he needed to be resting, not spoiling his dragon (seriously, the campfires he started were delicious, he was certain; Druk was just being picky), but he noticed that a little bit more color was coming back into his cheeks as Druk eagerly licked up the flames, so he let it be.  He didn’t understand whatever symbiotic relationship mumbo jumbo was happening between the dragon and his friend, but he wasn’t going to complain as long as it didn’t appear to be setting back Zuko’s recovery.

He looked over at the firebender again, ready to ask him a cooking question (he’d been doing most of it himself with Zuko and Katara both laid up by their own respective issues, and it might not be great, but it was at least edible, which was an improvement).  But he was already asleep again, Druk curled up against his side and snoring smoke.  

Sokka just smiled and turned back to the fire, trying to figure out the correct water-to-rice ratio and just how much salt was too much salt.

[][][]

When Aang woke up from his first nightmare four days before the eclipse, he turned to see Zuko looking at him with concern as he trimmed his hair with one of his dao (Zuko’s hair, they discovered, grew insanely quickly, and it was getting rather close to his knees at the moment, so the teen was trimming it back so that it just brushed his thighs instead).

“Nightmare?” his Sifu asked, and Aang nodded.

“Yeah,” he replied, shakily.  “You too?”

“Nah,” Zuko shrugged.  “Not tonight; I just slept so much after I was poisoned that I’ll be good for the next week or so as long as I take a nap or two somewhere in there.”

“Ugh, I wish I didn’t have to sleep; how do you manage it?” Aang groaned, putting his head against his knees and trying not to scream.

“A lifetime of practice.” Zuko gave a little laugh.  “Trust me, you don’t want that.”

“I don’t wanna have another nightmare either,” Aang grumbled.

“Why don’t we try something?” Zuko asked, finishing with his hair and securing it so that it was half-tied up with a strip of leather.  “After my first Agni Kai, when I was having nightmares, Uncle would come into my cabin when he heard me screaming, and he would pull me into a hug like this,” he laid down, grabbing Aang and securing him so that he was flush against his chest, “and then he would warm his body like this.”  His skin heated wonderfully, better than the warmest blanket, and Aang was kind of jealous.  Sure, airbenders could regulate their internal temperatures no problem, but they couldn’t make their skin all toasty like this.

“That would always let me get an hour or two of sleep, and it was enough to keep me going for a while,” Zuko told his friend, who was already yawning.

“Thanks Zuko,” he whispered, curling deeper into the prince’s scarred chest.  

“No problem kiddo.”  Zuko smiled, taking the opportunity to ruffle his hair while he still had it.

An hour later, Zuko was literally counting sheep (and they were just sheep, and wasn’t that strange?) and thinking that he might, weirdly, get even more sleep, when his hazy state was interrupted by another startled gasp from Aang and an elbow to his face.  

“Hey, you’re okay,” he told Aang, gently shaking him.  “It was just a nightmare.  We’re alright, all of us.”

“I… what happened to your nose?” Aang asked, his pupils blown wide.  “It’s bleeding everywhere, and it’s crooked.  Wait… did I do that?!”  He scrambled back, horrified, and Zuko held his hands out placatingly.

“Hey, it’s okay buddy; happens all the time.  I’ve got a very breakable nose.”  He grabbed it with his fingers and straightened it with a loud crack, barely wincing.

“See?  All better!”

Aang might have been reassured by his smile, were it not for the fact that the blood running down Zuko’s face made the otherwise-cheerful gesture look very macabre.

“Yeah, I’m gonna go get Katara…”

“No!” Zuko yelled after him.  “We don’t need to wake Katara up for this!”

Aang would have argued with him more, but Katara was already marching towards him, rubbing her eyes.

“I felt you start bleeding and it woke me up,” she grumbled, pulling water out of her pouch.

“It’s not a big deal; I already set it.  Please don’t make Aang feel bad about it, or he’ll never go back to sleep.  He already feels bad about accidentally hitting me with a rock back with Sparky Boom Boom Man…”

Katara looked at him, confused.  “I’m a little behind…” she yawned, her hands glowing as she brought them to Zuko’s face.  Zuko, in a touching gesture of trust, did not flinch; in fact, it did not even occur to him that he would have if it were almost anyone else.

“I was trying to help Aang get back to sleep by cuddling him, and then he had another nightmare and accidentally lashed out and hit me in the face.  It’s not a big deal.”  Zuko’s voice sounded nasal, since his nose was covered in glowing water.

“Not with me here,” Katara agreed, pulling her hands back, the water coming away bloody.  “Compared to everything else you get yourself into, this is easy.  It won’t swell or anything; like it never happened.”  She pulled back to assess her handiwork, subtly prodding her senses into the cells of his face, making sure she hadn’t missed anything.

“It’ll never get less amazing when you do that,” Zuko said, prodding his face, completely awed that it didn’t hurt at all.

“Yeah, but next time, let me set it.  You did fine, but it would have hurt less if I’d done it,” she scolded.

“I’m more worried about Aang, honestly,” Zuko sighed, scrubbing a hand through his hair and accidentally pulling the hair tie out.  The dark locks fell around his face, and he blew it out of his eyes in exasperation.  “I’m afraid he’s gonna start running in the opposite direction whenever he sees me.”

“Hurting people happens to be his biggest fear,” Katara said, unable to really offer any reassurance in this situation.  “It’s hard to convince him that accidents happen, and that it’s not his fault.”

“Well, maybe it’s just the universe evening the scores a little bit?  I nearly capture him a few dozen times, he punches me in the face a little bit?  Seems fair to me,” Zuko joked.  

Katara put her head in her hands and screamed sighed in exasperation.

“Too early for humor, got it,” Zuko apologized, heading off to look for Aang.

[]

By breakfast, Aang seemed (reluctantly) willing to come within 2 meters of Zuko again, which he supposed was progress.

“People hit people by accident all the time, twinkletoes.  It’s no big deal; watch.”  She shoved a small rock at Sokka, and it hit him in the arm.

“Ow!” he squealed indignantly, shoving Toph, who didn’t even move.  In fact, the resistance threw Sokka off balance, and he landed on his back in the grass.

“You don’t understand!” Aang yelled.  “How am I supposed to defeat the fire lord if I can’t even keep from hurting my friends!”

“Well, you’re supposed to take out the fire lord, so maybe accidental violence is a good thing,” Sokka pointed out, and Katara and Zuko turned to glare at him.

“Not helping, Sokka!” his sister growled at him.  Aang did not seem happy at the reminder that he was supposed to kill someone.

“Look Aang, if you’re really that against killing, maybe I could do it?” Zuko offered.  “I mean, you fight him, obviously, but I can finish it, if that would make you feel better?”

“I can’t ask you to kill your own father,” Aang told him seriously.  “And it wouldn’t solve my problem; me asking you to kill someone for me would be just as bad or even worse than if I did it myself.  I’d be staining someone else’s soul as well.”  Zuko nodded his understanding and squeezed his shoulder reassuringly.  Aang looked frightened and pulled away, afraid Zuko would somehow break his hand against his bony shoulders.

“Look, I really don’t get what the big deal with murder is,” Toph butt in.  “I mean, they’re bad guys, and they deserve it.  Nobody was complaining when I offed a couple Dai Li agents.”

“You killed them?” Aang gasped.

“Uh, yeah,” Toph shrugged.  “They kept getting back up when I used non-lethal force, and they were aiming rocks at my head.  I did what I had to do.”

“Look,” Sokka broke in, before a fight could start.  “You guys both have different views, and that’s fine.  Aang, Toph did what she had to do to survive, and Toph, Aang has his beliefs and we shouldn’t belittle him for those.  It’s not like anyone’s killing people just for fun, and it’s the middle of a war, and sometimes we have different ways to come out alright at the other end.”

“This is why I didn’t tell you, twinkle toes.  Besides, didn’t the monks encourage you to be tolerant of other views?”

“They did, but that doesn’t mean I can just be okay with this sort of thing, Toph.”  Aang sighed, looking defeated.

“I know, which is why I haven’t done it more.  Look, Aang, I know how you feel about this stuff.  If it were up to me, I’d be more aggressive, but I know you want to leave everyone alive, even if they suck, so I’m trying to respect that.  That last day in Ba Sing Se was hard, Aang, and it was either me or them.  I promise I wouldn’t have done it otherwise,” the little earthbender said.  “I can’t pretend I feel bad about it, because I don’t, but I care about you so I’m trying to meet in the middle.”

Aang looked up at her, his tears starting to spill over.  “I… I really appreciate that, Toph.  Thank you for explaining, and thanks for understanding.  I’m not gonna lie to you either; I believe all life is sacred, and I’d really prefer if you hadn’t done it, but in the end, I’d rather it be them than you who was dead.  I know that’s probably wrong, but…”

“I don’t think that’s wrong, Aang,” Katara reassured, pulling him into her side.  “I think that’s natural, and it’s human.  And even the most enlightened monks were still human, right?  Don’t you think Monk Gyatso would rather your people survived than the fire nation soldiers?”

“I… I guess so…” Aang was shaking now,  and Katara pulled him even closer and let him cry.

“You need sleep, Aang,” Sokka told the younger boy gently.

“I… I can’t… not even if I tried…” Aang sobbed.

“I think I have something that can help,” Zuko told him.  “Wait right there.”

Zuko hadn’t stopped gathering herbs and keeping them on his person since Uncle poisoned himself trying to drink tea made of dubious plants (the first time).  Druk followed him loyally as he pulled a few leaves out of a sachet, grabbed a tea cup, and used his firebending to boil some water.

“Drink this; it’ll help,” he promised, and Aang cooled the tea with a blast of air before drinking it slowly.

“Thanks Zuko,” he said.  “I’m really sorry I hurt you… again…”

“Don’t worry about it,” Zuko waved away his apology.  “You guys are my family now, and I’d rather break all the other bones in my face than lose any of you.”

Aang gave a small smile and didn’t pull away when Zuko squeezed his hand, or even when he picked him up to carry him to lie down against Appa.  He was asleep before Zuko was halfway across camp.

[]

They’d all thought that was the end of the issue, and Zuko knew that Aang’s nightmares must be really serious if they could reach him through the sleeping herbs.  But he didn’t say anything when Aang went screaming to Sokka, ordering him to climb a nearby rock face because he’d had a dream he’d died from not being a quick enough climber.  He didn’t say anything the next morning either, when he went again to Sokka, yelling about having slept through the invasion.  He was out of ideas.

“Well, have you tried chaining your pants up in your dream?” he asked the little monk at breakfast, stirring fireflakes into his congee with his chopsticks.

“Yeah, I did that last night, but then Ozai just reminded me that I forgot about my math test and dropped a giant abacus on me!”

“Oh, that is serious,” Zuko agreed.  “My father loves throwing abacuses at people.  One time I only got a 99 on my math test, and he threw one at me and another at the tutor.  Then he had the tutor banished.”

“Not helping!” the other three shouted in unison. 

“Oh,” Zuko dropped his shoulders sheepishly.  “Sorry about that…  But really Aang, I promise that of all the things you might have to worry about during the invasion, math isn’t one of them.”

“Dude,” Sokka slapped his palm against his forehead.  “That is still not helping.”

“Yeah,” Toph agreed.  “Maybe just leave the pep talks to us, Sparky.  You’re not very good at them.”

“You’re probably right; sorry about that…”

“Well, it’s only fair that your people skills suck, really,” Sokka pointed out.  “I mean, you’re already a master firebender and swordsman, and you can cook and know how to use herbs and you’re insanely pretty and a bunch of other stuff I’m sure we don’t even know about, so you have to be bad at something, or else you wouldn’t even be human…” 

Zuko blushed heavily on the unscarred side of his face and looked away.  Nobody mentioned that Sokka had just said Zuko was pretty.  They had enough issues to worry about in the next few days without helping the water tribe boy handle the burgeoning realization of his bisexuality.

Aang was twitchy and paranoid for the rest of the day, but the real trouble wasn’t until that night, when he just decided that he wasn’t going to sleep the next two days until the invasion.

“But you can’t just…” Katara began, frustrated.

“It’s fine,” Zuko whispered.  “He’ll pass out from exhaustion eventually.  Trust me.”

Aang didn’t sleep that night; Zuko kept watch.  Still, it was only a matter of time.  He was a newbie to sleep deprivation; he wouldn’t make it past the first few rounds of hallucinations.

Said hallucinations were apparently pretty wild, and Zuko had to hand it to Aang; his mind was incredibly creative.

“Appa and Momo are fighting!” he squealed anxiously.  “What do we do?  Zuko, can you get your swords and help me disarm Momo?”

“Well, Momo’s too small to hold a sword, so I’m guessing he’s got a dagger, in which case the best way to disarm him would be with hand to hand combat or another dagger,” Zuko pointed out.

The rest looked at him strangely, but Zuko held up a hand.  “It’s cool, this is where I thrive,” he said.  “I’ve been having sleep-deprivation hallucinations since I left my crib.  You just gotta go with it and he’ll fall asleep on his feet eventually.”

Zuko did turn out to be pretty good at… whatever this was (Sokka added it to his list of hidden talents).  When Aang started chattering at Momo, Zuko chattered some nonsense back.  It apparently made sense to Aang though, because he nodded sagely and went to try to meditate.

“What did you say to him?” Toph asked, and Zuko shrugged.

“No idea, but his mind will hear what it wants to.”

“Are you sure there’s nothing we can do?” Katara asked, biting her lip.

“Not until he either passes out or sees reason on his own; there’s generations of stubborn avatars in there, and he’s not gonna listen to us no matter what we say.  Besides, I’m pretty sure Kyoshi might come out and bitch-slap us if we push him too hard.”

Sokka shuddered at the mental image.  Having his ass beat by the Kyoshi warriors was bad enough; he couldn’t imagine getting a smack-down from the iconic avatar herself, even in spirit form.

“We could start building him a bed, though,” Katara suggested, going to grab one of the unwilling sheep and telling Sokka to grab his razor.

Sokka might have wanted to argue about using his razor on those fluffy monstrosities, but one look at his sister’s face and he just went with it.  

“Ugh, any chance we could share yours, after this?” he asked Zuko later, trying to pick the fluff out of it while Aang was off having some sort of hallucination with Katara a little ways away.

Zuko shrugged.  “Sorry man, I don’t have one.  I guess my family are a bunch of late bloomers, because I only need to shave about once a month, and when I do I use my dagger or one of my swords.”

“Yeah, maybe I’ll just grow a beard…” Sokka muttered, looking at the wicked edge of all their weaponry.  The you’re fucking crazy, man… went unsaid.

[]

Later, when Aang finally collapsed into the new bed they’d made him, Zuko smiled to hear him mutter “no, Firelord Ozai, you’re not wearing pants!” in his sleep.

[][][]

Aang had slept well, which was excellent.  Katara, however, could have slept a little better.  For the first time, Zuko’s scar was tugging on her new senses.  Before, she’d been too busy focusing on his more obvious injuries and adjusting to the new awareness that bloodbending had given her of people’s bodies, and of water in general.  But now that she had a fair grip on them and wasn’t overwhelmed by absolutely everything, her awareness kept getting pulled to Zuko’s scar.  Once they’d used all of the spirit water on his chest, she figured that there was nothing she could do about it or his reduced vision, and didn’t bring it up, knowing it must be a sensitive topic.  That was, of course, before she realized that it was still actively hurting him.  There was fairly extensive nerve damage, nerve damage that she knew instinctively must still be causing him chronic pain.  And with the atmospheric pressure affected by the eclipse, he would be in more pain than usual today.  The damaged nerves and singed, ruined tissue demanded her attention, awareness of the injury to her friend itching against her own senses.

She pulled him aside, manhandling him until he was sitting on a rock.  He looked up at her, confused, his hair pulled back into a battle-ready style similar to her own, hair-loopies secured with some of her extra beads.

“What’s wrong?” he asked her, concern in his eyes.

“Your scar,” she told him.

He looked at her in a mixture of bemusement, alarm, and perhaps a bit of shame as well.  She didn’t like that.

“Uh, I’m sorry?” he began, and she had to keep herself from smacking him.

“Don’t you dare be sorry,” she snapped, a bit harsher than she meant to, but it was a big day and everyone was on edge.  “I just meant that I know that it hurts you.”

Zuko didn’t ask how she knew; Katara was more of a prodigy than Azula, even, and with her newly-woken abilities and the fact that human beings were, apparently, more water than anything else, he figured she’d somehow felt it.  Perhaps having two people who were supernaturally capable of reading people near him all the time should bother him, but he grew up with Azula, so he was used to it.  Besides, these girls had his best interests at heart, he knew, even if one of them was currently glaring at him.  But he had sort of figured out, by now, that when she glared at him like that it meant that she was mad for him and didn’t really know how to handle it (she was also a little bit mad that Zuko wasn’t madder on his own behalf, but Zuko hadn’t figured that out yet).

“It’s fine, Katara; I got used to it a long time ago.”  He waved off her concerns, and the glare intensified.

“Well, that’s stupid.  Besides, I know that injuries like that hurt worse when the weather changes, and it’d be dumb to go into battle when you’re already in pain- and so help me Tui and La, if you say that you’ve done it before, I will smack you,” she interrupted him before he could begin.  “So you’re going to sit down and let me work on it; I can’t fix your vision or the cosmetic damage, but I can at least stop it from hurting all the time.”

He gave her a tight nod and didn’t say anything else, and she began the all-too-familiar routine of putting her healing water against his skin, down into the nerves of the old scar tissue.  It was too late to restore any kind of normal sensation, but she figured having his face mostly-numb would be better than having it either aching or sparking with the misfiring of broken nerve endings all the time.  It was a complicated job, and not one she had time to finish today, but she’d at least eased the pain and the tightness when she stepped back.

The scar was as red and angry as ever, but his face at least looked more relaxed.  He put a hand to it, amazed.

“It… you’re amazing, Katara,” Zuko whispered reverently, ghosting his fingers against the rough skin.  “It’s so much easier to move this side of my mouth now.”  His sigh was one of relief, like someone sinking into a long hot bath after a very hard day, and his smile was more brilliant than ever.

“I wish I could have done more,” she said, not nearly as satisfied as he was.  “But it’s too old; I couldn’t fix the vision on that side, obviously, and it still looks the same, and you’re probably noticing that you still don’t have a lot of sensation, but if you let me follow up a couple more times then it shouldn’t hurt anymore…”

“It’s perfect; thank you.”  He slung his arm over her shoulders.  “Now let’s go meet the others.”

Zuko wasn’t wearing the hanbok that they’d all grown used to seeing him in; there was no point in disguises anymore, because they were planning on ending the war today and soon Uncle would be on the throne and Zuko would be crown prince again.  Not that he minded the dress; in all honesty, it was less constraining than pants were, but for practicality’s sake, they were all wearing clothes that were easier to fight in.  

So he wore a sandstone-colored kimono over red pants, which would make it easier to blend in in a city made of brick and cobblestone.  The sunlight glinted off his dark hair, flashing in a halo and making rainbows against the blue beads (he’d left those in, for sentimental reasons), but that wouldn’t be a problem during the eclipse, when the sun would go dark and his hair would blend into the shadows just like the rest of him.  His dao were slung over his back, he had a knife in his boot, and one of the water tribesmen had given him a spare recurve bow he’d had on him.  He wasn’t a perfect shot (by which he meant that he was no Yuyan archer) but he was passable (which everyone else understood meant pretty fucking good in Zuko-speak, since the kid had a knack for underestimating and undervaluing his own abilities).

They were as ready as they were ever going to be, even if Sokka had kind of flubbed it on the public speaking.

“It’s okay man; I was a prince and even I sucked at that,” Zuko comforted Sokka after his disastrous attempt at briefing the group.  Sokka was not comforted by Zuko’s awkwardness the way he normally would be: if even Zuko, who had all the social graces of a deaf-blind baby turtle-duck, was taking pity on him, then it was even worse than he thought.

Aang did a pretty good cheer-up speech though, and he was right.  He was here to prove himself on the battlefield, not the podium.

And Zuko’s awkwardness was soon cheering him up again.  Riku the shopkeeper and his group of rebels were fawning all over the poor prince, and for someone who grew up in a palace, he did not seem to know how to handle it all that well.  Piandao and some other old people they didn’t recognize in white-blue robes stood smirking in the background at his obvious discomfort.

“Lord Zuko,” one of them said, a man with dark brown eyes and gray hair and a Wang Fire-style beard.  “It is such an honor to meet you, and to thank you for your sacrifice.”

Zuko looked like a cornered feral pygmy-puma, but he managed to gather himself and surprise Sokka when his response was not just a stuttering “um…”

Well, of course he began with an “um…” but he actually managed some words after that, which for Zuko was quite an achievement (and okay, maybe Sokka should give him a little more credit, but where was the fun in that?).

“You have all sacrificed far more for the Fire Nation than I have, and it was rewarded with treachery from my father.  Please don’t bow to me.”  He was practically begging, the poor guy.  Sokka couldn’t figure out why bowing would make a prince so uncomfortable, but then he did suppose that spending three years as an exile and then a refugee might change a person like that.

The men, reluctantly, stopped bowing.  “Very well, your majesty.  But please, let us know if there’s anything you need, anything at all.  We are ready and willing to follow you into battle, and to die for you if need be.”

“Please don’t!”  Zuko panicked.  “Die, I mean.  Nobody is dying today, for me or anyone else.  That’s an order.”  He stood up straighter, puffed up his chest, and found a bit more of that particular energy he’d drawn on when he was trying to pretend he had any idea about captaining a ship (of course, half the time the crew hadn’t listened, and there was a more even power structure than one might have expected, but when it counted, his men and women had looked to him.  And now, so were these).

“Yes sir,” they all began to bow again, before remembering Zuko’s former request and awkwardly stopping themselves.  All in all, it was an utterly painful interaction to watch, and Sokka wondered if it was just a fire nation thing?  But no, he’d met Azula, and Zhao.

It had to be a Zuko thing, he decided.  He was just so honest and so painfully earnest that it had an effect on people.  And these were people whose lives he’d stood up for, and it had gotten him scarred and banished by his own father.  Sokka supposed anyone would be awkward in that situation.

There were about fifty men, all told, out of a division that had once been a hundred.  And Zuko asked for every single one of their names, even though he looked like he’d rather ask Toph to bury him deep in the earth than continue this awkward conversation.

“I appreciate your loyalty,” he told them all, as they looked at him, slack-jawed after he had asked and repeated each of their names.  “But I’m going to have to ask that if any of you have children, you turn around and leave.  I refuse to risk making any more war orphans today on my behalf.”

Sokka startled, looking sideways at him.  He hadn’t expected that; after all, their dad was fighting today, but then again, so were they, and he supposed that the chief would rather be there to protect his own children.  But he’d left for war when they were young, and nobody had given him that option, to stay and help keep his family together instead of going off to try to keep the world from falling further apart.

There were a few scattered protests, but Zuko stopped them with a single raised hand.

“We appreciate you, all of you, but with all due respect, we planned this invasion long before we even knew you were still alive, let alone willing to help.  You are helpful, but not essential, and I will not risk leaving children fatherless if there are any other options.  You’ve been sent off to die by my father without any regard for your welfare or your families once before.  I will not be my father.  I’m not ordering you as your prince, but asking you as someone who valued your lives enough to fight in an Agni Kai for them.”  

Zuko knew that he was, perhaps, hitting too close to home for them all, and that it might be a low blow.  But he did not care.  He’d lost a mother to Ozai’s cruelty, without even the small consolation of knowing what had happened to her.  He wasn’t going to let that happen to any more children if there was any chance at all of preventing it.  It might be harsh, hearing that your troupe could go on without you, but it was a lot less harsh than being a young child and waking up one day to find out that you no longer had a parent.

All told, about fifteen men exited the groups, giving him respectful nods that bordered on bows but not, thankfully, actually prostrating themselves before him again.  He thanked each of them by name and sent them off, telling them to hug their children when they got home.  They might be upset with him, but it didn’t matter and he wasn’t good enough at reading people to know either way.

Sokka, however, was fairly good at reading people, and he could see the barely-concealed relief and gratitude in their eyes.  As soldiers, they no doubt would have found it dishonorable to back away from fighting for what was right, no matter the costs.  

But in some cases, it’s a blessing to have the hard choices taken away, when you feel like either option could lead to dire consequences and you’d end up with regrets and what-ifs regardless of the choice you made.  Zuko, a commanding officer, had ordered them to go home to their children, and the honorable thing was to follow the words of your commanding officer.  They had made a choice that they might end up regretting, because it had been the right thing to do, because they felt they had to, but Zuko had sent them home instead, and they could now go without guilt.  A hard choice had been made for them, and Sokka knew that they were grateful.  They could go home to their families and say I went to do my duty, and was ordered not to; my hands are tied, and they could all be safe and together for another day. 

It was almost time to load the subs.  When Zuko saw Pipsqueak, The Duke on his shoulders, about to shove himself down the porthole, Sokka knew that his Mama Platypus-Bear instincts were about to kick in again.

“You’re bringing him?!” he nearly yelled at Pipsqueak.  “The kid is like, six!”

“Six and a half!” The Duke protested.  

“Nope, absolutely not.”  Zuko shook his head.  “You’re staying here, with Druk and Momo.”  Some people had suggested bringing Druk into battle, but even though he was now about half the size of Appa, he had only just started hunting on his own a few days ago and was still not fully weaned, and he couldn’t fly that far anyway.  He might look fierce, and yeah, he could breathe fire, but he was still a baby and an endangered species, and Zuko wasn’t going to risk it.  Aang understood, and Druk hadn’t been part of the original plan anyway, so it was fine.  They would pick up the animals afterwards.

“But I wanna fight!” the Duke protested.

Zuko had perfected his ‘mom-glare’ from the past couple of months pretending to be Aang’s mom whenever the avatar ran into trouble in a town, and it showed.  He stared The Duke down, and the combination of the mom-glare and the scar had The Duke, brave as he was, cowed into submission.  He could just sneak after them when Zuko wasn’t looking, anyway.

“And you will not be sneaking off to follow us,” he scolded.  The Duke gasped- was he a mind reader?! (he was not, but children were very predictable in these sorts of cases).

“Druk,” he turned to the dragon, who, the newcomers mused, must have some sort of mental link with the Prince, since the seemingly-savage beast appeared to understand him perfectly.  “You are going to stay here and guard Momo and The Duke, and we will come collect you after the eclipse.  If you don’t see us in a day, then you need to go find a cliff to hide in.  Hunt for The Duke too, and I’m going to leave a campfire for you to eat from.”  Druk, although he really rather would have gone with his Mom, bobbed his scaly head in acquiescence.  Zuko started a fire in only Druk’s favorite colors, and those who hadn’t seen him bend before widened their eyes at the purples and greens mixed in with the orange.

“Should we uh… should we be worried it’s going to start a wildfire with nobody here to watch it?” Hakoda asked eventually.

“Nah, don’t worry about it,” Toph told him, completely unconcerned.  “Zuko’s fires always stay where he tells them to, even when he’s not there.  It won’t burn beyond that bonfire unless he gives it permission.”

The invasion group looked at Zuko for confirmation, and he shrugged.  “You learn a few things about fire when you spend time with a dragon,” he said, which was sort of true in that he had learned the secrets of fire from dragons, just not Druk.  Although, he’d only felt his bending grow more powerful and confident since Druk had hatched (something he was trying not to contemplate lately; they had enough on their plates).

Sokka knew his family, and knew the people they had recruited and had scheduled extra shenanigans-time into the schedule,  so despite all their interactions that morning, they were right on time when they finally got into the submarines he’d invented.

[]

Thanks to Zuko, they knew that the royal family would likely be hiding in a series of underground bunkers somewhere in the capital that were created for situations like this, but Zuko said he did not know where they were.  The implication of my father would probably leave me to fend for myself and might see something like this as a non-controversial way to maybe get rid of me was clear, and it bothered them all more than it appeared to bother Zuko.

“So your dad would just leave you vulnerable to attack like that?” Hakoda knew the fire lord was not father of the year or anything, but as a father himself, he could not imagine anyone leaving their children vulnerable on purpose (Hakoda, Katara and Sokka remembered, did not know how Zuko got his scar.  They realized that if he found out, Aang might not have to kill the fire lord, because their dad, who had made it clear that he wanted to adopt Zuko and was willing to fight Iroh to share parenting rights, would do it himself).

“Eh, it’s not that bad.”  Zuko, as protective as he was of his friends, had a very skewed definition of not that bad in regards to himself.  “He’s tried to kill me outright a couple of times, so it’s actually kind of nice when he leaves me a fighting chance.”

Was it too late to change the invasion plan so that he could trade places with Aang?  Hakoda wondered.  Hell, it doesn’t even have to be during the eclipse.  I’ll fight an Agni Kai.  You can do those with a cannon, right?  

It did not matter, Hakoda decided.  He’d use a cannon anyway.  If the fire lord was still alive when Aang was done with him (and he suspected that he would be; Aang would probably find a way to incapacitate him instead of kill him, even if he had to do it last minute), then Hakoda would take care of the problem.  Nobody fucking tried to kill their children on his watch.

He let none of these thoughts show on his face, however, merely squeezed young Prince Zuko fondly on the shoulder.

“When this is all done,” he said cheerfully.  “I’m gonna take you ice dodging with Sokka and I.”

Oh, cool, Sokka thought.  I have a brother now.  He wasn’t sure why that gave him a weird squirmy feeling in his stomach.  After all, why would it be a problem if the awesome, sword-bending, dragon-taming, super handsome firebender was part of his family officially?  He was already family in the gaang’s eyes, anyway.  But for some reason, thinking of Zuko as family was easy, while thinking of him as a brother made him feel weird.

They were landing soon, though, so these were thoughts he’d have to save for later (or never; never was good).

Once the invasion had begun properly, the adults and Katara stayed in the courtyard proper to hold off the defending force while Toph, Aang, and Sokka went to look for the bunker.  Before going to free his Uncle, Zuko said his best guess was that the bunker would be below the palace.  But Toph could not feel anything below the palace.

“Lord Fuckface really liked screwing Zuko over, huh?” she muttered angrily as they ran off towards the dormant volcano, which would be the next-most likely candidate to hold a network of underground tunnels, since Toph could not feel them anywhere in the main city.  “Isn’t the royal family supposed to know this stuff?  I bet his crazy sister knows where the bunker is; she’s probably in it right now.  If there had been a real disaster while Zuko was living there, he’d have nowhere safe to go unless someone told him (and it was very clear to all of them that Ozai probably did not plan to tell him).”  

Toph came from a noble family; she knew that every member of a wealthy family typically had a panic room or underground bunker or safe space of some sort, and that every member, even the youngest, knew where it was.  Even her parents, who trusted her with absolutely nothing and treated her like a glass doll, made sure she could get to the panic cellar on her own.  They’d made her practice it for months, even though she could feel it and didn’t need to learn the route at all, because she already knew it.  For the crown prince of the fire nation to not know where the underground bunker was was nothing short of willful negligence, and Toph knew that better than anyone.

Nobody responded, which was fair.  How could they respond to the fact that their friend’s ‘father’ clearly had wanted him dead for years, besides to go and kick his ass?  They reached the volcano right as the eclipse began, and Toph broke open the volcano leading to the tunnels.

They ran into some magma, but it wasn’t a problem, because of course Toph Beifong, greatest earthbender in the world and inventor of metal bending, knew how to lavabend.  So they just made their running trek over cooled volcanic rock until they found someone and gently frightened them into telling them where the firelord was.

And then it was not the fire lord but motherfucking Azula.  Toph’s day could definitely be going better.

[]

Zuko did not know this, but his ability to feel his inner fire during an eclipse was not normal (in fact, some of the imperial firebenders were so out of touch with theirs that they did not even know the eclipse had started until they failed to summon fire).  Zuko assumed that everybody could still feel theirs the way he could feel his, trapped behind a wall but still very much there, alive and burning, battering at the barrier the moon had created and saying that it could absolutely break it, it could break free and burn if Zuko would just let it try, dammit!  

Zuko told his inner fire to shut up and calm down; he did not need it right now, and he had other talents.  His inner fire did not like this, licking through his veins and throwing a hissy fit, but Zuko was used to it.  His inner fire had always been spirited and passionate just as he was, but it also would never hurt him.  So he let it rage at being put in its little eclipse-time out and drew his swords as he fought his way to the prison where they’d be holding Uncle.

Except that Uncle was not there.  He searched every cell in the place, eventually finding a guard who’d told him that he’d broken out all on his own.  Apparently Uncle had been working out.  Zuko would be proud if he wasn’t so frustrated and missing him so much.  

The prison was mostly underground, cut off from the light anyway, so Zuko did not realize that the eclipse was not yet over as he threw a fireball at the stone walls in exasperation.

By the time he’d come back outside, the sun was back out and his fire roared fully back, eager to fight.  Zuko shushed it, trying to find his friends.  Apparently, their invasion tasks hadn’t gone any better than his, as they emerged into the palace courtyard, Azula on their tails.

“You’ve failed, brother, and I will take great pleasure in capturing you and your friends and delivering you all gift-wrapped for father.”

Zuko rolled his eyes at her, he couldn’t help it.  She was always so dramatic (and no, he did not realize the irony in that statement, because he was not dramatic at all, thank you very much!).  She probably actually did plan to gift-wrap them all (or make the servants do it, more likely) if she managed to get her hands on them.  Which Zuko would absolutely make sure that she did not.

“You go, help everyone else retreat safely,” he told his friends.  “I’ll hold her off and meet up with you.”

“Are you sure?” Aang asked, anxious.  They were all acutely aware that the last time he’d seen his sister, she’d shot him full of lightning. 

“Aang, relax; I’ve got this.”  Zuko did not seem nervous; he seemed fairly confident, although a little sad that he was fighting his sister.  And Aang trusted him; his firebending has been good when he was chasing them, but since they’d found the sunwarriors and the dragons had shown them the secret of firebending, Zuko had been improving leaps and bounds past what Aang had thought was even possible with the element.  So he wasn’t too worried Zuko would get hurt, at least physically.  It just felt wrong to leave him at the site of so many of his childhood traumas alone while they escaped, even if he would come right back to them.

“Go!” Zuko yelled at him, nimbly dodging a blast of charlotte inferno from his sister.  “I’ll see you in a few.”

They were all the way across the courtyard and nearly home free when they felt the electricity building, the crackle of lightning visible behind them.  Horrified, they turned around, but without the distraction of someone to protect, Zuko was capable of easily redirecting it with no harm to himself.  He let it go next to Azula, where it would surprise but not hurt her.

Shocked, Azula went still for a moment, just enough time that Zuko could grab his bow and fire off a shot.  He was aiming just to pin her armor to the wall, but figured that as long as the shot wasn’t lethal, it would have to be okay.  Luckily, they were at close enough range that the three shots he fired off in succession merely pinned her armor and her clothing to the wall, preventing her from moving.  It might have grazed her skin, but she’d be fine, and she was stuck for long enough that Zuko could run to catch up with the others, leaping up onto the palace roof and running through what trees there were to confuse any pursuers (but not before yelling back “hey Lala?  Tell Dad I said he sucks!”).  He flung himself out of the last tree as he reached the rest of the gaang, leaping what must have been about three meters outwards and another three down to land nimbly and on near-silent feet a little ways in front of his friends.

“You’re fucking crazy, man,” Sokka cussed out loud for one of the first times in his life and shook his head in what should not still be disbelief after all the crazy shit Zuko pulled, but nonetheless was.  Their firebender never failed to surprise them. 

“Where are the others?” Zuko ignored the oft-repeated phrase, panting only slightly.  

The others were near Appa, telling them to go back on their own.  They would surrender, they said, and be war prisoners.  The gaang was horrified, but there was no other way.  Zuko was glad he’d sent away all the men with children from the Dragons of the Forty-First.  

“Surrender to the most high-ranking of the imperial firebenders, and make sure to do it with an audience,” Zuko told him.  “My father won’t kill you then; it wouldn’t be honorable.  You’ll be prisoners of war, and it won’t be fun, but you’ll survive.”

“How can you be sure that an audience will keep them safe?” Katara asked.  “After all, the burn your father gave you very well could have killed you, and he did that in front of an audience.”  She’d forgotten, for the moment, that besides the soldiers from the 41st, none of the others knew how Zuko had gotten his scar, and at their gasps, she quickly sent her father a glare that said no, you cannot kill the fire lord, not yet.  They needed to surrender to have any hope of surviving.

“That was an Agni Kai,” Zuko said.  “In an Agni Kai between two firebenders, what he did was technically fair game (even though Zuko was begging for forgiveness he shouldn’t have needed and it was incredibly cruel and any adult with half a sense of a conscience would say it was highly dishonorable).  But for war prisoners surrendering?  As long as you keep your heads down and don’t do anything rash, you’ll survive.  They’ll send you to prisons and they won’t be nice, but they won’t kill you.  If my father happens to be there when you surrender, though, he’ll make you bow at his feet, and you need to do it.  He’s wild and unpredictable and he will kill you if you disrespect him.  Hopefully the imperial firebenders will cart you off without seeing him at all, but I can’t guarantee it.  If you have to, tell him anything he wants to know about me.  If he asks for information, make something up, if he wants you to call me a dirty traitor, do it.  Just… be smart and do what you have to to survive.  Please.” 

There was a severity in Zuko’s face that they could not ignore, and they promised that they would.  Riku privately thought that he’d rather spit in Ozai the traitor’s face and accept death for it than disrespect their Lord Zuko, but Lord Zuko had given them an order to stay alive and he would not ignore it.

Hakoda pulled all the children into a giant group hug before they sent the young ones off.  

“After we pick up Momo, Druk, and the Duke, we can go to the Western Air Temple for a while,” Aang sighed.  “We’ll be safe there.”

Nowhere is safe in this war, Zuko thought privately but didn’t say.  Not while my father still lives.  

The rest of their journey was spent in silence.

[][][]

“I miss Pipsqueak,” The Duke lamented from his position atop Zuko’s shoulders.

“I miss not having blisters on my feet,” Sokka whined.  

Katara rolled her eyes. “Quit complaining about the walk, Sokka.  Nobody else is fussing, and Zuko’s even carrying a six year old.”

“Six and a half!” The Duke interjected indignantly.

They were all rather annoyed with each other.  Appa was too tired to carry them all for very long, so they had been walking for almost two days now to get to the Western temple.  The sun was beating down on them, and although slightly less intense the farther west they got, it was still intense for two teenagers who’d grown up at the south pole, a six-year-old who’d spent his young life growing up in the treetops where it was shadier, and Teo, who had grown up in the cool shadow of the Northern Air Temple.  Haru’s village was in the southern Earth Kingdom, where they still had real winters, so he wasn’t exactly super comfortable either.  Only Zuko and Aang seemed unaffected.  Druk didn’t mind the heat so much either, but the exercise was a lot for a young dragon, and his wings hung listlessly by his side as he plodded along next to Appa.

Zuko himself didn’t mind the walk so much (he’d made the climb from his ship up to the temple at thirteen and with half his face still burning under the bandages obscuring his vision), but he was rather upset about their loss, and dealing with the conflicted feelings that seeing Azula had brought up within him.  He missed her, the little sister he used to have, but she hadn’t been that person in a long time.  And she was so far under their father’s thrall that he wasn’t sure that she would ever be herself again.  She’d been whatever he’d turned her into longer than she’d been his little sister, and he was worried whatever chance he had of saving her had disappeared into the night with their mother.  That didn’t mean he would ever stop trying though, not as long as he lived.  Which, with the comet rapidly approaching, he feared would not be as long as he would prefer.

Their feet plodded forward, Zuko’s good eye absentmindedly scanning the cliffside for signs of the sheer cliff face that hid the temple.  If his memory served, they were getting close, and judging by the way Aang’s dejected posture was gradually perking up, he figured he was right.

It was Toph, however, who noticed it first, and Katara realized next, feeling the water in the air and pooled in various little reservoirs in such a way that could only suggest some sort of man-made architecture.  Sokka expressed his doubt, but he should have known better.  Toph’s feet were never wrong.

They all clambered onto Appa for the descent, eager to finish the final step of what had been an exhausting journey in the wake of a disheartening defeat.  Zuko liked this a lot better than trying to climb down, gripping precarious footholds in the rocks, fingers scraped raw from trying not to fall, as Uncle, unable to talk him out of it, had looked on in badly-concealed anxiety and terror for him, begging him to just “wait for the crew to bring us a rope, Nephew, please!”

“Home sweet home, at least for a while,” Toph declared, opening her arms wide and spinning around.  She was eager not to have to make camp every night and break it every morning, and to be able to make her rock tent in her own room where she couldn’t hear Sokka snore.

[]

For all that they had been eager to have their own space, they ended up in the same courtyard that night, curled under Zuko’s warmth to fight the chill of the high altitude.  Sokka was the closest to him, snoring loudly into Zuko’s ear (it was his bad ear though, so it was fine; he wasn’t that loud…. Okay, yeah, he absolutely was, but Zuko’s weak batting at his nose wasn’t disturbing his heavy sleep, so it was still fine).  Zuko’s soft pile of hair made an excellent soft pillow, and his abs made a firm pillow for a blind earthbender who normally preferred sleeping on rocks.  Katara was nestled under his arm on his right side, and Aang was draped across his legs.  The sun was just beginning to rise, so Zuko was stirring awake although nobody else was.  Idly, he realized that a little rat-viper was slithering onto his chest, drawn to his warmth, and he smiled.  

           The little snake’s tail brushed against Sokka, who groaned something about Druk being too cuddly (like he had room to talk) before opening his eyes and realizing that Druk was down being used as a cuddle-buddy by Aang (the little dragon was finally starting to warm to his ‘great-great-grandpa,’ which delighted the little monk in a way that Sokka refused to admit was adorable).  Looking to his left and seeing what actually brushed against his face, he screamed and hurled himself backward, the rest of his friends falling away along with him (or being pulled, rather) as he upset the tangle of limbs that was their cuddle pile.  The rat-viper reared up, hissing, but Zuko put a hand on its scaly head and pulled it gently back onto his chest, and it calmed down.

“Dude!” Sokka did not squeal, but rather declared in a very manly voice, “those things are super poisonous! Get it away from you!”

Zuko gave him a mom-look, petting the death-beast’s furry ears.  “Oh, come on Sokka; he’s just cold.  He’s not gonna hurt anyone, now is he?”  The rodent-snake’s whiskers bobbed in agreement as it nodded its scaly head (which had very poisonous fangs inside of it, for fuck’s sake, Zuko!). 

Sokka bit back the rest of his protests.  Telling Zuko ‘no’ when it came to dangerous animals was not the way to get him to stop; they had to wait and hope that he either got bored of it (which was unlikely to happen, since Zuko loved animals probably more than he even tolerated most people), or the animal got bored of Zuko (which, judging by the way it was nuzzling up to Zuko’s face like the glorious, sun-warmed rock it was, was also not going to happen any time soon).

Well, Sokka thought hopefully, maybe Hawky will finally come back from delivering that letter to Toph’s parents and he’ll eat Zuko’s new friend.  Which, considering that they hadn’t seen Hawky in ages, he figured wasn’t going to happen.  Toph’s dumb parents had probably kept him, because they coudln’t let other people have nice things.  This was why their terrifying earth bending daughter (who, for some reason that he could not fathom, was generally considered to be a nice thing by their group) had run away: because they wouldn’t share her.  And also a bunch of other reasons like emotional neglect and being misunderstood and all that jazz; whatever.  Sokka was currently more concerned with the fact that they’d apparently stolen his pet.  And now Zuko seemed determined to pick up two dangerous reptiles for every bird Sokka lost.  It was fine (it was not fine).

Zuko was still cooing over the stupid rodent-reptile, and this irritated Sokka for the perfectly normal reason that he no longer had his nice warm heated pillow and that he was woken up far too early, and absolutely nothing to do with the fact that touching Zuko made him feel all snuggly and warm inside as well as outside and made his insides do weird but not-unpleasant flip-flops.  Nope; he had a girlfriend (he didn’t know where she was, and she hadn’t been at the invasion because she was in prison somewhere and where had Azula put her?!) and he and Suki were very happy together, and Suki did not have a crush on Zuko either.  Except there was no either because neither of them had a crush on Zuko!

“Ugh, you’re thinking too loud,” Toph groaned, rubbing her sightless eyes with grubby fingers.  

“That would require Sokka to think,” Katara grumbled rather uncharitably.  But hey, it was early, and Zuko and Aang seemed to be the only people who didn’t see being morning people as the absolute crime that it was. 

[]

Dammit!  Katara groaned internally (and maybe a little bit externally).  They’d been having a good morning, despite the fact that Zuko now had a highly venomous snake hanging around his neck to match the young dragon trotting at his heels (who was as tall as them, now).  But those things were just par for the course when it came to Zuko, so she wasn’t really bothered by that.  And they were all together, and (relatively) safe, and they’d had a good night of sleep for the first time since the invasion.

So yeah, their morning had been going pretty great.  Toph had been pelting Aang with rocks and calling it an “impromptu training session,” she’d been warming the jook over the fire Zuko had set (and it almost seemed too pretty, a fire like that, with so many lovely colors, just to cook the sub-par rice porridge at the bottom of their food stores), and Sokka had been dozing while he pretended to sharpen boomerang.  Zuko had corralled The Duke, trying to comb his hair, and Teo was trying to convince Haru to shave his ridiculous mustache.  They’d been happy, and finally feeling a bit of hope and normalcy since the mess of a failure that had been the eclipse.  

And then the fucking combustion bender had to come and ruin their morning.   A blast hit the ground near their campsite, and Zuko quickly contained the flame while Katara grabbed hold of their liquid in their steaming breakfast and pulled it away to keep it from burning them.  And while she normally would have hated the joke about “porridge bending” that Sokka indubitably would have made if they hadn’t been distracted trying not to get blown up, she resented Sparky Sparky Boom Boom Man from taking the opportunity to actually tell it away from him (and the opportunity to make fun of him for it away from her).

Zuko gently put his scary little snake down so it wouldn’t get hurt, and it rapidly slithered away.  Katara couldn’t say she was all that sad to see it go, although she was still mad at the combustion-bending assassin for depriving Zuko of his new pet, because now Zuko would be sad and also the rest of them would have to watch him mope around about it later.  Well, if they didn’t get blown up first.

“I can’t get a clear shot at him!” She lamented, growling.

“I’m on it!” their resident firebender declared, somersaulting out of their safe zone behind the column of rock and out into the open, sweeping flames aside as he nimbly lept his way up the rock towards their would-be assassin.

“That wasn’t an invitation, Zuko!” she yelled after him, exasperated.  One would think she would have learned how to avoid general statements like that by now, since Zuko regularly took them as a directive for him to throw himself into danger for their sake.  Katara cursed herself, on top of the cursing herself she’d already been doing, because if she’d had her water sense extended, she would have felt the assassin coming from way back.  But she’d been using it for days before to make sure they hadn’t been followed from the Caldera, and she’d thought that they were safe here, and that she could relax and not have to deal with the sensory overload of sensing every drop of water for miles around.

Zuko fell (or rather, the cliff side was blown out from under him), and they all screamed.  Katara breathed a small sigh of relief when she felt him catching a vine below the temple, the blood in his body and the water in the vine brushing up against each other as she realized that he would be safe for as long as the vine was still connected to its perch, since he could hold himself up like that for hours or (knowing him and how stubborn he was) probably even days if need be.

That wasn’t good enough for Druk, however, who immediately dove after his mama.  He picked Zuko up by the neck of his kimono and drug him back up to solid ground at the same time as Sokka hit Sparky Sparky Boom Boom Man with his boomerang.  Sparky Sparky Boom Boom Man then blew himself to bits, and Druk angrily immolated whatever pieces that were left of him as he fell from the temple.  Katara sent a prayer of thanks to Tui and La for her brother’s math genius.  She was smart enough to know that his ability to calculate exact angles on the fly like that was beyond the scope of normal weapons’ abilities, and she’d never been more thankful for it.

She might even tell him later, after he’d stopped being smug about saving them all.  For now, though, she smacked Zuko with a water whip.  Not hard enough to really hurt him, of course, but hard enough to convey her disappointment.

“Hey!  What was that for?!” he snapped, rubbing his head, and Katara whacked him again for having the audacity to act like he hadn’t been an idiot running out into the line of fire like that (and no, it didn’t matter that he could bend fire, because he couldn’t bend air or rocks, and rocks had been falling everywhere, plunging him into the air below him, which she would like to state again for the record that Zuko could not bend).  

“For throwing yourself into danger like a fucking idiot,” she scolded, and they all knew it was serious when Katara swore.  Toph of course swore all the time, and Zuko could and would swear when he got flustered or angry enough (which was fairly often), and they both knew a lot of curses from their time in the Earth Rumble and the navy, but Sokka and Katara rarely ever swore (Aang swore often too, but with silly airbender ‘swears’ that none of the rest of them even thought were swears, like ‘monkey feathers’), because that would mean getting their mouths washed out with seal-blubber soap by Gran Gran.  In fact, they’d never heard Sokka swear at all except for once during the invasion (he had more of a fear healthy respect of Gran Gran than Katara did, for some reason, and she’d always been a little more of a rebel at heart), but Katara still swore rarely enough that hearing it was an indication that someone was in trouble.

“I know you’ve got a brain under all that hair,” she continued, working herself into a real good rant.  “So would you please use it and not think ‘immediately risking death’ is the best response to any dangerous situation?”

“Sorry Katara,” he said sheepishly, eyes downcast.  He knew she only yelled like that when she was really worried (at least at him; Sokka got yelled at for being annoying as well as for worrying her), and he hadn’t meant to make her upset.

Seeing his remorse, she relented.  “It’s alright,” she sighed.  “Now c’mere and let me heal your hands.  I know they’re bleeding.”

Zuko knew better than to say that the scrapes from grabbing against the rock as he fell were “no big deal,” even though they totally weren’t anything to waste her energy over (in his opinion, at least; in Katara’s opinion they were a bloody mess that absolutely needed immediate healing).  He would never win an argument with Katara about healing (or, specifically, whether he needed it, because he rarely thought he did and she always thought he did), and they both knew it.  Honestly, he doubted he’d ever win an argument about anything with Katara. 

She put his clean, uninjured hands down when she was finished, eyeing the hair pooling on the ground as he sat.

“Didn’t you just cut that?” she asked him.  She knew it had only been down to his waist when they’d invaded on the eclipse, and now it was brushing his knees again.

“Yes,” he groaned.  “It just grows so Spirits-damned fast.  Normally I would have been expected to shave it after being banished to represent my lost honor, but I didn’t feel like shaving it twice a day around the phoenix plume, which is what it would have taken to keep it from growing, so I just left it.  But I still feel like I’m cutting it constantly to keep it manageable.  At least I only have to shave my face once a month, though.  If a beard grew as fast as my stupid hair then I think I’d lose my mind.”

“I’ll take care of it this time,” Katara told him.  “In fact, my ends are getting kind of natty, so I could use a trim as well.  Why don’t we go to the fountain in the next courtyard and we can have a spa day?”

“I’ll bring the mud!” Toph cheered, picking up on their plans with her excellent hearing and inviting herself.

An interesting thing about being Spirit-touched that not many people are aware of is that it often comes with some interesting but harmless side effects that could range from not affecting the person either way to being mildly useful, the manifestations of which depend on the individual.  Zuko, a personal favorite of Agni, had hair that grew unusually quickly (if anyone had bothered to ask Agni, They might have pointed out that it was kind of poetic, the way that Zuko’s hair mirrored the rays of the sun, extending rapidly towards the ground, thick and soft and ever-present.  It also smelled nice all the time no matter how long it had been since Zuko had the chance to wash it, so personally the Sun Spirit didn’t see any reason for Their favorite to be complaining).  

Toph, a favorite of Oma and Shu, had feet that developed callouses more quickly and rarely ever blistered no matter how much walking she did, and was significantly less stinky than a twelve-year-old constantly coated in dirt ought to be.  Katara, favorite of La, had a temper like ocean waves but also an endless supply of patience that mirrored the depths of His deepest trenches.  She was a contradiction of fiery passion and the instinct towards gentle nurturing, just like He was.  

Aang, of course, was picked by Raava, so he had many of the quirks that one might expect to see (and many that they might not) in someone sharing a being with the spirit of Light and Balance and thousands of past lives.

And Sokka… well, for some reason, a great number of minor spirits had looked at this eccentric, non-bending, intelligent and empirical boy of science and reason and decided “That’s mine.”  So they had to share.  This had a range of effects on the teenager, the most prevalent of which was being a magnet for spiritual energy, able to locate Wan Shi Tong’s library in an hour after many had gone their whole lives fruitlessly searching, or of accidentally stumbling into the avatar after he’d been missing for one hundred years.  

Katara may have freed Aang, but it was Sokka’s spiritual magnetism that led them there.  Not that he knew this; he still did his best not to believe in ‘spirit-y, magic-y mumbo jumbo.’  

Yue had been drawn to him even before falling in love with him, and it was a sense of spiritual kinship deep in her bones that pushed her over the edge into spending time with the charming, funny boy when she knew very well that a betrothed princess should not entertain such ideas.  So Tui watched him as well, her light caressing him as he stumbled his way through spiritual adventures that many sages and monks and brahmens would give an arm and a leg for and which he tried his best not to believe in.  But anyone who knew anything about cactus juice could have told him that it didn’t have that effect on just anyone.  Anyone in their group, perhaps, but their group was all unknowingly spirit-touched, and if anyone had bothered to ask a Fire Sage or Guru Patik or even Uncle, they could have told them that cactus juice only reacts that way to a large amount of spiritual energy in a physical body.  So just in case anyone had the idea to start selling cactus juice as a fun hallucinogenic (Sokka), it wouldn’t work for almost anyone else in the world (are you listening, Sokka?  No selling cactus juice!).

In fact, the only living Spirit-blessed human beings were currently all traveling in a group together.  One of them was picking her toes, another was heating the water in a fountain for a ‘spa day,’ another was pulling out a collection of lovely soaps that she’d bought with some of the money that she and the toe-picking spirit child had won in their one and only grand scam together, yet another was currently wishing he’d kept his hair a little longer because he wanted his hair washed too, Katara, and it just doesn’t feel the same when it’s just your scalp, and the final Spirit-blessed was kissing his boomerang and telling it what a good job it had done.  

Some people might say the spirits had perhaps miscalculated with their choice of humans.  Those people would be very wrong.

[][][]

“So I don’t remember the beginning, but the punchline goes ‘leaf me alone, I’m bushed!’”  Zuko said zealously as he poured them all tea that he’d made.  Seeing they weren’t laughing, he sighed.  “Uncle always tells it better.”

“Maybe because he remembers the punchline?” Katara teased gently.

“Yeah, I love you buddy, but you should definitely leaf the jokes to me,” Sokka added, and they all did laugh at that one, even Zuko.

“At least your tea is better than your jokes, Sunshine,” Toph consoled, inhaling deeply from her aromatic cup.

Zuko cringed as she tossed the entire thing back in a single gulp, not stopping to savor Uncle’s favorite jasmine blend.  But he didn’t say anything; Toph was already laughing at him anyway, having felt it in the way he stiffened and his heart skipped a beat in sorrow.

Okay, wow, he was turning into Uncle.  Not that he thought that that was a bad thing, but he could have used this newfound deep appreciation of tea when he’d been spending his every waking hour in a tea shop.  

Also, Uncle’s tea would taste better.  Yeah, his was fine, better than fine, according to the group, but it was missing something uniquely… Uncle.  He was glad that Uncle was safe, of course, but he’d wished that the man had just waited ten more minutes before busting himself out of jail, so that they could be together.  He missed Uncle so much.

Parental figures seemed to be on everyone’s minds tonight, as Sokka pulled him aside later asking about where they might keep war prisoners.  Zuko was under no illusions as to what he planned to do, and he wasn’t about to let him do it alone.  But he also wasn’t going to tip off everyone else.  Katara might say that it was too dangerous, and Aang and Toph were not exactly the image that came to mind when he pictured who he’d want to take on a stealth mission.  

So he ordered Druk to stay and be good, and he crawled up onto Appa after everyone else had gone to bed (and they grumbled about missing their human heated blanket a bit, but Zuko not going to sleep at a reasonable hour was not suspicious in and of itself, thankfully), knowing that his friend would try to take the bison.  Not that that would be a good idea.

“Prisons don’t have bison daycares, Sokka,” he told the other boy after waiting up half the night just for the drama of it.

“Oh?  Well then what do you suggest we do, your flaminess?”

Zuko rolled his eyes.  “Combustion man had to get here somehow, right?  And walking and climbing is not a practical way of getting around the fire nation, since we’re a chain of islands.  So we’re going to find his war balloon.”

“Okay, so we take Appa to his war balloon?” Sokka asked.

“No; if the others notice he’s gone it might jeopardize the mission.”

“So we take Druk to the war balloon?”

“No,” Zuko told him again, and Sokka was a little irritated that Zuko jumped on his mission just to shoot down all his ideas, even if he would be great to have along.  “Druk is too small to ride still.”

“So we’re gonna just climb off the air temple and then hike until we find the damn balloon?”

“Not exactly,” and Oh Yue, Sokka did not like the way that Zuko was smirking at him.  

“I already wrote a note to the others telling them we went fishing and giving Aang firebending homework, and I left a fire for Druk to snack off of.  So we’re good to go.  Just don’t scream.”

“Why would I-” Sokka began to ask, and then almost screamed anyway as Zuko just hoisted him into his arms and then started fucking flying because there was fire shooting from his feet and oh Yue and Tui and La he did not like this!  

“Cool right?  I figured it out earlier, after Katara yelled at me for falling off the clifface, so now she won’t have to worry about it anymore,” the completely fucking crazy ex-crown prince of the fire nation said far too calmly, and Sokka didn’t think that the fact that Zuko decided to go around flying by shooting fire from his feet would make Katara worry any less about Zuko’s propensity to fall/jump off of high places.

“So you just learned this?” Sokka definitely did not squeal in a voice that was totally normal and deep and definitely not far too high.  “And you’re just… taking me flying with it?”

Zuko rolled his eyes.  “Relax, I won’t let you fall; I wouldn’t be taking you if I wasn’t completely confident I could keep you safe.”

And okay, the flight was pretty steady, which Sokka appreciated.  It was almost as steady as flying on Appa, and the feeling of Zuko’s muscular (but still too-thin) chest underneath him was not exactly unpleasant.  He might go so far as to say that it was kind of pleasant, if he were pressed like, under torture or something.  But only then.  And not even torture would force him to disclose how nice Zuko smelled, like ocean water and mountain air and moon peaches with an undertone of the chili-ghost pepper powder he poured onto all his food like it wasn’t torture of its own to eat something that spicy.

They found the balloon pretty quickly, hidden in some foliage.  Zuko gently ushered out the badger frog that had made itself at home on the floor of the basket, and Sokka definitely did not lean as far away from the animal as possible.  Because he was not scared of or disgusted by badger frogs in any way, shape, or form.  He was a manly man who knew badass things like how to wield a sword and a boomerang and could kind of use a fan and put on kyoshi warrior makeup.  He was not scared of badger frogs.  He just… didn’t see the need to get close to the thing, was all, so if Katara’s voice in his head could stop laughing, he’d appreciate that.

They had been in the air for several hours by the time day broke, and the clouds were lovely and fluffy.  They both commented on how lovely and fluffy the clouds were, and Sokka wasn’t entirely sure why he felt as awkward as he did.  He also wasn’t sure why finding out that Zuko had a sort-of girlfriend who he’d reconnected with back in Ba Sing Se while his sister was trying to lure him back to her side made him feel slightly dismayed.  It didn’t matter if Zuko had a gloomy girlfriend who liked knives; he was happy for his buddy to have one more person who cared for him and didn’t treat him like absolute dirt the way that most of the people he’d grown up with in the fire nation had (and not the way Toph treated dirt; the way normal, non-crazy-earthbender-people treated dirt).

So he did the only thing that could be done when talking about sort-of ex-girlfriends who they’d still probably be with if there wasn’t a war.

“My first girlfriend turned into the moon,” he said.

Zuko thought he deserved a lot of credit for the fact that his face stayed blank except for the slight widening of his good eye.  He also thought he deserved a lot of credit because instead of saying ‘hey, what the fuck, dude?!’ or ‘what kind of crazy water tribe metaphor for a messed-up love life is that?’ or ‘wait, like the moon moon?!’ or ‘hey, I know I already said this but what the actual fuck do you mean by that, my fellow hotman?! (and dammit, Aang, stop making him think in severely outdated fire nation slang!), he just looked at Sokka, put on his best sympathetic face, and said, 

“That’s rough, buddy.”

[]

The trip was going well right up until the landing, which went… not so well.  It was Sokka (genius, brilliant Sokka, Zuko thought gratefully), who realized that it was the hot air around the prison that was making them fall, since it was the same temperature as the hot air Zuko was shooting into the balloon.  Zuko quickly sucked as much heat out of his fires as possible, which made their descent a little bit slower and more graceful.  A little, but not very much.  Zuko was not an airbender, after all, and without any fire to pump air into the bellows, they would have been just splatters on the rocks below.  

“Well, that could have gone better.”  Sokka voiced both their thoughts as they miserably looked at their ride, torn and ruined beyond repair.

“Well, if we’re not gonna get any more use out of it, we might as well cover our tracks,” Zuko sighed, shoving it into the boiling lake.  “Guess we’ll just have to find another way out of here.”

Sokka was grateful that Zuko was so stealthy, and by mirroring the way he stepped, the water tribe boy made only a little noise himself.  So they were easily able to find the extra guard uniforms.  

“We need to keep our helmets on at all times,” Zuko informed Sokka as he finished tying off his hair in a braid with a spare strip of leather.  “My scar is obviously a giveaway, and you’re already darker than most people in the fire nation.  If they see your blue eyes, they’ll know something’s up.”

“Way ahead of you.”  Sokka nodded his assent, re-tied his wolftial, and shoved the helmet on.  “Wow, it’s hot in here.”

Zuko laughed as his friend tried to wipe sweat off his brow underneath the helmet, and Sokka glared at him.

“I hate you,” he lied, annoyed at how comfortable Zuko seemed in the sweltering metal building.

“Love you too,” Zuko elbowed him as they tiptoed out, ready to find their target.  

Sokka didn’t know why he blushed, and he was sticking to that line.

[]

The other guards were actually surprisingly nice in the mess hall, although Sokka supposed that could be because they thought that he and Zuko were part of them.  Well, he supposed Zuko technically was part of them, sort of, although many people in the nation didn’t see it that way  (although, not that many outside of the nobility, but Sokka and Zuko didn’t know that), or at least the firelord didn’t, and in this scenario the firelord’s opinion was kind of the one that mattered.  Stupid, seal-puppy-kicking, child-frying jerk.

Another male guard passed Zuko the bao, with a smile and a blush that was decidedly not from the heat, and Sokka had to bite back a growl.  No need to create any antagonism… but seriously, the guy couldn’t even see Zuko’s face, just assumed that because his hair was all pretty and his figure was all pretty and his hands were all pretty that his face would be all pretty too (and he wasn’t wrong, but still.  Stop being so awkwardly charming, Zuko!).

“Thanks, but I’m married,” Zuko told the man, who had apparently just asked if he’d like to ‘hang out’ after their shift.  “My husband Wan and I were just transferred from a prison near the capital.”  He shoved Sokka forward like a shield to ward off the unwanted advances.

“Oh, Sorry guys.”  Said provider of unwanted advances was pretty graceful about it, unlike some others who had hit on Zuko, so Sokka found himself begrudging the dude a lot less than he really would have preferred.  “I didn’t mean to get in the middle of anything, I just didn’t see a ring and…”

“It’s alright,” Zuko waved him off, now that the dude was being friendly again.  “We don’t wear them, for practical reasons.  Easy to get caught on the handle of a sword and whatnot.”

“That’s fair,” crush-on-Zuko-but-respectful-about-it dude said.  “I’m Zuko, by the way.”

Sokka tried not to gasp.  “Like the prince?”

Zuko-but-not-his-Zuko laughed.  “Yeah, pretty common name.  People love naming their kids after royalty.  If I had a copper piece for every Lu Ten that I knew, I wouldn’t need this job.” 

Zuko tensed slightly at the mention of Lu Ten, and Sokka remembered that that had been the name of the dead cousin he’d been so close to as a child.

“Probably not an easy name to have now though, huh?” he changed the subject, and was suddenly glad he was going by JinÅ, since having two Zuko’s around could get confusing.

“Eh, not really.”  He lowered his voice and leaned forward.  “You didn’t hear this from me, but the guy has more support than you would think.  But if the warden asks, I’m Daiki and I’m 22.”

“Right…” Sokka realized.  “Because if you’re named after the prince, and he’s sixteen, then that means you’re…”

“A few months younger than that, yeah,” Zuko-Daiki nodded.  “But my ma managed to pull some strings and get me posted here instead of conscripted to the front lines.  They don’t care if you’re too young to be used as cannon fodder, but any of the good jobs want you to be older.  Figures…”

“Quiet, Daiki, or you might draw the attention of less friendly ears than ours,” another guard at their table said, punching his arm and baring her teeth slightly in warning.  “And you shouldn’t be spouting off like this to newcomers anyway.  What if they’re unfriendlies?”

“We’re not, we promise,” Sokka held up his hands.  “Just trying to bring home the sealpig-bacon.”

The others, including Zuko, looked at him strangely.

“Uh, colonial expression,” he lied.  He really had to be more careful about dropping water tribe colloquialisms now that they were in the belly of a maximum-security fire nation prison.

“Oh.  That’s nice.  Don’t get too many colonials around here.  Hard positions to get, ours are.  One of very few where the common folk can actually make enough to live on.”

“Barely,” not-his-Zuko snorted, and the other guard punched him again.

“I’m Aki, by the way, and the others here are Botan, Eichi, and Ronin.  We’re all pretty cool, at least we think so, but be careful around the others.  Some of them take the whole ‘firelord’s glorious mission’ thing way too seriously.  Not that it’s not,” she added quickly but somewhat unenthusiastically, carefully gauging their reactions, so they just nodded with the same amount of faked enthusiasm.  “It’s just… you know, we’re the ones who are kind of more worried about eating and sending money home before anything else.”

Zuko nodded understandingly and did not push the subject any further. “Nice to meet you all,” he said instead, and gave the fire nation bow that represented one commoner greeting another as an equal.

“You too, JinÅ and Wan.”  Then they all turned into the direction of the yard, and Zuko had to strain his good ear to figure out what was happening.

What was happening was a loud clanging outside of the walls of the mess hall, and Aki groaned.  “Ugh, another fight in the yard.  I bet it’s fucking Ringo bothering the prisoners again.”

“Two coppers says it’s Chit Sang,” another of their new companions said. (Zuko wasn’t great with faces, but he was pretty sure it was Ronin, since he was pretty sure that Ronin was the one with the silver bracelet).

“Nah, I’m not taking that bet when we both know you’re probably right,” Aki punched his arm again.  Sokka thought that Aki reminded him of Toph, with her proclivity towards punching her friends.

It was, apparently, Chit Sang, who got taken kicking and screaming to some place called ‘the coolers.’  He asked what they were.

“Basically hell on earth for firebenders; well, more hell than this place generally is for prisoners.  It’s so cold that it snuffs their inner fire temporarily and makes them miserable.”

“Why can’t they just firebend themselves warm?” Sokka asked, since he’d seen Zuko do it in the North Pole and then again at night in the Western Temple.  Shouldn’t firebenders be good at handling the cold, since they were basically walking heaters?
Their five new fake-coworkers looked at him like he was stupid.  “You can’t just bend yourself warm when it’s that cold; that’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard.  I mean, you could maybe last a little bit longer if you were like, a prodigy or something, but everyone knows that firebending doesn’t work that way,” Botan told him.

Sokka subtly nudged Zuko, as if to say see? You are so a prodigy!  Zuko just rolled his eyes.

“You’ll have to forgive my husband,” he said.  “His hometown was mostly earthbenders and non-benders.”

Ronin shrugged.  “It happens.  Lotta earthbenders in the colonies.  Most firebenders wanna stay in the home islands.  Especially the ones with any talent.  My cousin had a friend who had this other cousin who was a firebender in one of the smaller colonies, and he couldn’t get a good instructor.  Ended up losing control and burning down the house while trying to light the cookfire.”

“Oof.”  Sokka knew that Zuko was making a face under his helmet.  “It’s just the worst when that sort of thing happens.”
“Tell me about it,” Botan agreed.  “Anyway, we’re supposed to be patrolling cell block B right now, so I guess we’ll see you tonight.”

“See you tonight,” Sokka and Zuko agreed, getting up and setting out to try to subtly search for Hakoda.

[]

Absolutely no luck and a very awkward and utterly unhelpful (although Zuko was trying, which Sokka thought was cute- in an absolutely platonic way, obviously) speech about a silver sandwich later, Sokka laid eyes on Suki, and Zuko thought that he might just be about to starting leaking little pink hearts like a lovesick sap.

He was watching her cell for their lover’s reunion when another guard walked by and tried to get in.

“No! You can’t!” Zuko cried, voice dropping to his normal register in panic. 

She looked at him in disgust.  “What, your buddy in there trying to take advantage of one of the only female prisoners we have right now?  Not on my fucking watch!”

“NO!  He’s just… asking her to teach him how to fight!  He heard she was a Kyoshi warrior, and he thinks their fighting style is really cool, is all.”

“You can’t lie for shit,” angry girl grunted, knocking his helmet off as they tousled.  Her eyes went wide.

“Prince Zuko?!” she hissed, surprised but not antagonistic.  The fight went out of her and she shoved his helmet back towards him.  “Quick, put that back on!  I don’t know what you’re doing here, but you can’t get caught or this whole country is fucking screwed!”

It was too late; they’d been spotted by the guard that had been taunting Chit Sang earlier.  

“Pin me down!” Zuko whispered to the angry girl.  “I’m done, but there’s no sense in you going down too.  And watch out for my buddy.”

Shaking herself out of her stupor, she did as told.  “I caught this imposter pretending to be a guard,” she grunted.  “I’m going to get him a set of prison clothing and put him in a cell.”

“The traitor prince?  I think I’ll do it,” the guard (Something-ingo, Zuko remembered.  Pingo, or Dingo, or something like that...).

“No way!” Angry girl growled, and despite the fact that she was a good foot shorter than Pingo (?), he backed off.  “This is my collar, Ringo, and I’m getting credit for it!”

Oh, Ringo! Zuko thought triumphantly, glad to get that puzzle off of his mind.  Although, he realized, that should probably not be his biggest concern.

“Fine,” Ringo grunted, clearly unhappy but not wanting to bother his coworker further for fear of what she might do to him.  

She dragged Zuko away just as Sokka came out of Suki’s cell, and Zuko shot Sokka a look that said leave it.  Sokka, luckily, obliged, although Zuko knew he’d find him soon. And 

“You have to leave now, Prince Zuko!” Angry girl ordered quietly as she led him away, and he shook his head firmly.  

             “No.  Not without the people I came for.  Besides, if I disappeared now you’d take the fall for it.”

“I’d be alright with that.  It’s the least I could do; my cousin was in the 41st.”

“I’m so sorry,” Zuko whispered back, eyes down.  He knew what the use of the word was meant, that her cousin hadn’t made it out.

“It’s alright; you did more than anyone else did,” she told him.  “Are you sure I can’t smuggle you out of here?”

“Absolutely sure.  Just take me to a cell and then don’t get caught up in whatever happens next, uh….?”  He looked to her, and she realized after a minute that he was asking for her name.

“Roku,” She grunted.

“Oh, cool!” Zuko beamed at her.  “He was my great-grandfather on my mother’s side!”

“He was also the avatar that didn’t stop all this madness 100 years ago, and having his name isn’t exactly easy.  Especially with people like fucking Ringo walking around.  Oh, and Prince Zuko?”

“Yeah?” he asked her, still smiling.

“Don’t you fucking dare die.  There’s nobody else that can take the throne when all this is over.”

Zuko was about to complain and ask why does everyone keep forgetting about Uncle? when they reached his cell.

“Here.  The closest unoccupied one by the Kyoshi warrior’s.  There’s a set of robes on the bed.”

“Thanks again,” Zuko told her, and Roku thought that he was entirely too grateful for someone being locked in a cell.

[]

Suki swept him up in a hug while they were mopping together, burying her face in his shoulder.

“How does your hair still smell so good in prison?” she grumbled in lieu of a greeting.  “It’s not fair.”
“It’s good to see you too, Suki.”  She was still hugging him, and while Zuko couldn’t say he minded, he was wondering just how long it was appropriate for him to allow Sokka’s girlfriend to keep clinging to him.  Years of being touch-starved (besides cruel ones, like Azula chasing and hitting him or father backhanding him or the firelord’s flaming hand against his face) and wanting human contact warred with the urge to be a loyal bro until she eventually let go first.

“Thanks for keeping our cover back there,” she whispered in his ear, but it was his bad ear so he only caught “thanks,” and “cover.”  Regardless, it was enough to get the message, so he nodded.

[]

When Zuko walked out of the cooler after the next phase of their plan, Chit Sang’s eyes boggled.

“You’re not shaking, and your lips aren’t blue,” he noted, barely able to believe it.

“No, I’m not,” Zuko agreed, not knowing what else to say.  Chit Sang pressed a hand to his forehead, and it was still warm to the touch.

“What are you?!” he whispered, awed, and Zuko rolled his eyes.  

“A firebender who wants to get out of here.  See you in the blind spot tonight with the others.” 

There was a bit of pig-chicken with his bowl of rice that night, and a cup of green tea, which Zuko knew wasn’t standard.  It was terrible tea, of course, but the thought was nice.  He sipped it and tried not to cringe.

He had just finished shovelling the last of the rice in his mouth, too famished to worry about manners when he was alone in his cell, when an unfamiliar guard pulled his door open with an unpleasant screech that hurt his ear.

“Warden wants to see you,” the guard grunted, seemingly unconcerned with what was going to happen either way.  “I’m to escort you there.”

“Well, I wasn’t really looking to go out with anyone right now, but I suppose if there’s nothing better to do…” He tried for a joke, but this guard didn’t seem so friendly.  Or he just didn’t find it funny, which Zuko found less likely.

They walked in silence, and Zuko wished that someone had slipped him a needle and some embroidery thread on his dinner tray.  This prison tunic would look a lot nicer with little turtleducks sewn on it…

When they got there, the warden looked him up and down in a manner that wasn’t completely hostile, and Zuko began to have hope that the man wouldn’t try to kill him right away.  Not that he’d let it happen either way, not before he got to chew his father out for fucking over his two perfectly good kids (well, they used to be perfectly good, anyway, and Zuko had hope that they could be again.  He wouldn’t give up on Azula, not while they were both still breathing).

“Prince Zuko; you’re not in the prison logbooks yet,” the man remarked, and Zuko wasn’t sure where he was going with this.

“Alright,” he responded neutrally.

“My niece is coming to visit me tomorrow,” the warden continued.

“Okay?” now Zuko was confused.

“You do not see the family resemblance?” the warden deadpanned, and Zuko shrugged.  He wasn’t good with faces; he hadn’t even known the color of Azula’s eyes until he was ten and she’d had him pinned long enough so that he’d had nothing better to do but actually pay really close attention.

“She seems to have quite the infatuation with you, although I cannot for the life of me figure out why,” the warden hinted, and Zuko brightened.

“Mai?” he asked hopefully.  “How is she?”

“I’m worried that crazy sister of yours is going to get her killed, so I’m going to make you a proposition.  I get you out of here with her, and you take her somewhere safe.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t leave until I have what I came here for,” Zuko told him, not sure how to get out of what would surely appear to be a great opportunity without exposing that he was implicated with other people.

“Very well then,” the warden said shortly, knowing of the prince’s loyalty and knowing that, while he surely was here to free others and had maybe brought a friend with him, he could torture him for hours or days and he still wouldn’t talk.  But this was a delicate situation, and the safety of his niece was at stake, not to mention his own safety if his little Mai found out that he had so much as laid a finger on her boyfriend.  “I will leave you off of the log books for one more day, Prince Zuko, but be warned.  I have never had a prisoner escape on my watch before, and I’d sooner jump into the boiling lake myself than see it happen.  If you were to leave with my niece, of course, it would be a simple matter to make it like you had never been here at all, but I will not extend that same courtesy to anyone else.  My niece is fond of you, but I will do what I have to to uphold the reputation of this prison, and if you choose to interfere with that, I cannot and will not guarantee your safety.”

Zuko inclined his head, eyes glinting.  “Yes sir.”  He knew that they were walking a fine line, and he regretted that he wouldn’t be able to see Mai again, but he wasn’t about to risk Sokka and Suki’s safety over wanting to see her.  She could handle Azula; she was strong.  Right now Suki was in more danger than any of them, and Sokka was only marginally safer in his position as a guard.

[]

The cooler took off into the lake without them that night, as the three of them held out hope that Hakoda would be part of the shipment of new prisoners the next day.  They were taking a big risk, but Zuko was glad that Sokka had taken the jump and decided to do it.  His speech about the importance of failure and getting back up might have actually helped, for once.  They were all walking a very dangerous tightrope, but Zuko had grown up with Ty Lee; he was just fine with tightropes.  Plus he would maybe get to see Mai before they left, which was nice.

He actually slept a good two and a half hours that night, which was more than he’d expected, what with being in an actual prison and on the eve of a very risky jailbreak that they now had no plan whatsoever for, so that was nice.

[]

He was slightly worried that Mai might yell at him the next day, when she came in with a slight uptick of her eyebrows that he knew meant she was experiencing turbulent emotions behind her indifferent facade, but instead she just wrapped her arms around him and kissed his forehead before dismissing the guards with a look that very clearly said not a word to anyone that I showed affection, or it’ll be your heads.  

“I’ve been so worried about you, you giant idiot.  We weren’t even sure if you survived.”  She lifted his shirt and angry lines formed on her forehead as she saw the new scar on his chest where Azula had shot him.

“It takes more than a little lighting to keep me down”  He smiled softly at her as she wound her fingers in his hair, pulling strands loose from the braid and bringing her body even closer to his, until she was nearly sitting on his lap.

“Why would you risk so much to save the avatar?  You could have come home, you could have been safe.  We could have been together… was that so bad, that you felt the need to run away?”  She wasn’t crying, she absolutely wasn’t, but the look in her eyes was hard as she forced them to stay dry.

“Oh Mai, you know it wasn’t.”  His hands, warm and rough, came to wrap around her face, his long fingers brushing her own hair off of her cheeks where it came down from the half-bun that she normally kept it in.  “But you know I couldn’t come back, either.  What we’re doing to the world, what we’re doing to our own people; it isn’t right.  I can’t watch our people suffer anymore, and I know we both want Tom-Tom to grow up in a world that’s peaceful, and a world that’s safe.  You know why I had to leave.”

“Why didn’t you take me with you?”  Mai knew that she was perhaps being unfair; Zuko had been dragged out of Ba Sing Se unconscious, and barely alive.  She wasn’t sure he would have made it through the night, but Agni be damned if she wouldn’t have wanted to be there if she did have to say goodbye.  Thankfully it hadn’t come to that, but she was still hurting.

“I couldn’t drag you into that, Mai; I couldn’t ask you to turn traitor in the middle of a battle.  That’s a decision that shouldn’t be taken lightly, and it wouldn’t have been fair to make you choose then.  If I’m being honest within myself, I’d been leaning that way for months, but you hadn’t seen the things that I have, Mai.  I couldn’t ask you to uproot your whole life in the space of a second; it would’ve been selfish of me.”

“And what about now?” She asked him, lips ghosting against his nose.  “I’ve had more than a second to think, and I trust you, Zuko.  You have more honor than anyone I’ve ever known. If you say that what we’re doing is wrong, then I believe you.  Please, take me away from here.”

“It won’t be safe,” he told her.

“I don’t care.”

“We’ll be helping the avatar.”

“I don’t care.”
“We’ll be on the run, risking death daily.”

“I don’t care.”

“We’ll be fighting against Azula,” he sighed.

Mai pulled back and snarled.  “I don’t give a flying fuck about Azula!”  Her eyes were alight with fury, and she’d brought her knives to her hands without even fully being aware of it, throwing one against the wall.  “I care about you, Zuko, and I want to follow you!  Whatever you’re going to do, and whatever we are to each other; it doesn’t matter.  I’m going with you and that’s final!”

“Yes ma’am.”  Zuko’s eyes were a soft gold, gleaming as he chuckled, and his soft smile was the most beautiful thing Mai had ever seen.  The world generally bored her, and most people outright disgusted her, but Zuko had been a constant since they were children, since he’d shoved her into a fountain to try to save her from his demented little sister.  She loved him, and it didn’t matter if he loved her back or how he loved her back; she would follow him.  He was Agni’s light in a broken world and a backwards nation that needed to see it truly again, and she wasn’t going to sit back and watch him die, not without her by his side (well, she wasn’t going to let him die at all, but whatever happened besides that, she was going to be there for him).

Besides, she didn’t know the avatar or any of his other friends, and she had to make sure there was someone competent to keep Zuko safe from his own self-sacrificing tendencies.  She didn’t know if she could trust the people Zuko was traveling with, or if they really cared about him or only saw him as an asset for inside knowledge of firebending and the fire nation.  

“So, what’s the plan to get out of here?”  She asked him, quite done with feeling things for the day.  Seeing his sheepish look, she sighed loudly.

“Let me guess,” she said.  “You don’t have one.”

“Well we did, but…”

“Just come with me,” she ordered, and he followed her gladly.

A guard tried to herald them back into the room when they exited.  “There’s a riot going on, miss, and your uncle has ordered us to protect you.”

“I don’t need protection,” Mai declared, baring her teeth slightly.

“Believe me; she doesn’t,” Zuko agreed, smiling like a fucking dork, and Spirits, Mai loved him against all her better instincts.

“But your uncle…” the guard continued nervously, trying to herd her back towards the metal door without touching her, knowing that it would be considered disrespectful and also that she could also probably kill him easily.

“Screw my uncle,” she snapped, and pulled the prince along with her.

There was, indeed, a riot, and Chit Sang was also back, so Zuko figured that that plan had gone awry.

But Hakoda was there, and he swept Zuko into a hug and cheerfully informed him that he was going to kill his father for burning his face.  Zuko just shrugged; what other people did to the firelord wasn’t any of his business.

“This is Mai; she’s coming with us,” Zuko told Sokka.  “She’s cool.”

“If you say she’s cool, then I trust you,” Sokka agreed, although he looked more than slightly wary of her.  Good, Mai thought.  He was smart, then.

“We’re trying to take the warden hostage,” he continued, “so we can get out on the gondola.”

“I think your girlfriend’s already taking care of it,” Chit Sang grunted, and Sokka and Zuko looked at each other.

“Was he talking to you or me?” Sokka asked, and Zuko shrugged.  Mai cast a critical eye over the Kyoshi warrior.

“She’s cute,” the girl shrugged.  “I’m cool with it.  But you have to share.”
Sokka squawked.  Zuko laughed.

“I’m not joking,” Mai said.  Zuko squawked too.

“Figure out your relationship dynamics later,” Hakoda instructed them.  “We’re leaving.”
Of fucking course Azula had to show up and throw a wrench in their plans.  And then the warden was actually fucking crazy enough to order them to cut the lines with the very-much-not-disgraced princess of the fire nation on them.  If they lived, Zuko knew that she’d get him for that.  But then the guards by the line were stopped by Roku, not-their-Zuko, Aki, Botan, Eichi, and Ronin.  Making friends with the guards had worked out, although Zuko worried about what would happen to them.  And then he’d had to push those thoughts aside as he and Sokka dealt with Azula in perfect synchrony, and Mai and Suki fought together like they’d known each other their whole lives and not five minutes.  And then Ty Lee had chi blocked Azula while she was distracted making a speech about how Mai had betrayed her and should have feared her more than she loved Zuko and blah-blah-blah, and the cheerful acrobat had tossed Azula on the safe gondola going back to the prison as they hit landfall, tossed the hog-tied warden to the ground, and ran off to hijack Azula’s airship, which Ty Lee was happy to lead them to.

“Goodbye” Mai told her uncle with all the genuine affection she would ever use in public.  “I’ll see you at the next fire festival, if we’re all still alive by then.”

And thus concluded Sokka’s life-changing field trip with Zuko.

[][][]

Katara was very happy to see her dad and Suki, and not so happy to see Mai and Ty Lee.  She was also not so happy that Zuko and Sokka had snuck away to infiltrate a maximum security prison without even telling them the truth about where they were going (which, she supposed, made sense tactically, since she absolutely would have tried to follow them, and she knew the others would have too, and that could have gone badly.  But still…).  Mostly, though, she did not trust Mai and Ty Lee.  They had helped Azula take Ba Sing Se, and Azula had tried to kill Aang.  The only reason she hadn’t succeeded was because of Zuko, her own brother, and she didn’t seem to feel bad about nearly killing him at all.  And Mai and Ty Lee were her best friends.  So yeah, she didn’t trust them, and she was barely suppressing the urge to reach across the fire and pull Zuko away from their evil, dangerous clutches.

Zuko did not seem to be feeling the same apprehension.  Mai (Katara still preferred to think of her as scary-evil-knife-girl, but that was a mouthful so she would grudgingly use her name) was cuddled up against Zuko, practically hanging off of him with a bored look on her face.  Katara crossed her arms and glared.  Zuko was their heat pack, thank you very much!

Zuko and Ty Lee seemed to have a… strange relationship.  They were joking and laughing about things that made no sense to the rest of them, but they were clearly old friends beyond her just being a friend of Azula’s.  Katara had to stop herself from growling; neither of them deserved Zuko, who was kind and caring and who held to his innate sense of morals despite his best efforts even when he’d only ever been told that the right things that he believed in were the wrong things, and had only gotten (literally) burned for his efforts to do the right thing.  He was too good for this world, and he was certainly too good for the likes of Mai and Ty Lee.

“Your face is gonna get stuck like that, Sugar Queen,” Toph teased from beside her, and Katara was about to snark something back at her when she caught herself.

“Ha, ha.”  She couldn’t help rolling her eyes despite the fact that Toph wouldn’t see it.

“Seriously though, I can feel you radiating anger from here.  Just chill out; if Zuko trusts them, then we should give them a chance,” Toph said, like it was that simple.

“He trusted his father too, before he fucking burned half his face off!”  Katara hissed, and oh… that had been loud.  Everyone was looking at her now.

“Oh, Zuko!” Ty Lee broke into the awkwardness, and if Katara didn’t know that she was such a lying little snake, she’d have thought that maybe she didn’t even notice it.  “I learned this really cool new move in the circus- wanna see?!”

“Sure, Lee-Lee,” Zuko replied, smiling brilliantly (and glad for the distraction), and Katara, who still had almost everybody’s eyes on her, had to bite back a gag- Lee-Lee, seriously?!

Tye Lee demonstrated some sort of weird triple back handspring with a full aerial somersault thrown in somewhere, and Zuko’s eyes lit up the way they always did before he did something stupidly dangerous (or, as he referred to it, ‘super fun.’).  Katara very purposely bit her lip and didn’t say anything when he kissed Mai’s cheek and disentangled himself from her grasp to get up to try it.  Toph already teased her enough for being a ‘motherly nag,’ and she wasn’t going to give the newcomers the satisfaction of seeing the little earthbender mock her in front of everyone.

“That’s amazing, Zuko!” Ty Lee told the firebender when he pulled off the move nearly perfectly, only wobbling a little and tipping backwards onto his ass during the final handspring.  “The best first try I’ve ever seen; aside from me, of course.”  She giggled like an innocent little girl and not one of Azula’s evil cronies, and Katara wanted to scream.

She calmed down slightly as she watched Zuko, who, with Ty Lee’s 

suggestions, only wobbled slightly the second try (but stayed on his feet), and managed it perfectly by the third go round.  So she wasn’t trying to kill him in front of all of them, or, if she was, it had failed.  That was alright.  Plus, he was smiling and his eyes were sparkling and he did look happy to have them here.  So Katara would begrudgingly put up with them for now and be there for him when the inevitable betrayal came, and would make sure that he didn’t fall apart.

The two girls had chosen to share a room, and so Katara waited until everyone else had left them to get settled in before she slunk in.  Ty Lee smiled brilliantly at her, and Mai’s face didn’t change, but Katara wasn’t buying their acts.  She put her hands on her hips and took a few steps forward, until she was as close as she felt comfortable getting without being in the range of the knives Mai no doubt had in her sleeves already.

“You two listen to me; you might have everyone else here buying your transformation, but not me.  So you make one slip-up, one step backwards, or give me one reason to think that you might hurt Zuko, or Aang, or any of the rest of my family, and you won’t have to worry about your destinies anymore.  Because I’ll make sure that they end, right then and there.  Permanently.”  She snarled at them one more time before turning on her heel and stalking away.

Ty Lee’s eyes were wide and somewhat distressed; she didn’t actually think Katara could hurt her, but she wanted the group (including Katara) to like her, at least.  Mai, on the other hand, looked boredly at her nails.

“I like her,” she said simply, before turning and reaching for the rest of their meager possessions.

[]

The adults were off somewhere enjoying some stolen sake and celebrating their release from prison, and Haru, Teo, and The Duke were tucked away in their own beds, as were the two new girls, so it was just the core group all curled up in their usual cuddle pile (with the addition of Suki, of course).

“Hey, you know what I just realized?” Zuko asked.  “You guys haven’t made any jokes about my honor in a while.”

The rest of them froze, and Druk looked up curiously from his position by their feet, sensing the abrupt change in the atmosphere of the group.

“Well, um…” Aang began.  “It just… well, they aren’t so funny anymore?”

“I thought they were pretty funny,” Zuko protested.

“Well, it’s just that…” Katara tried again.  “So like, when we found out, about, you know…”

Toph put them all out of their misery.  “We found out why you had been banished, it stopped being funny.  Like you’d gotten your honor, which you’d never lost, all mixed up with your asshole father’s love, which he never gave you in the first place because he’s a dick and an idiot and wouldn’t know what a good son looked like if we ran up and swung you at his stupid face.”

“Oh…” Zuko was shocked to silence, and his body heated up a little more.  They all said no more, and pretended to be asleep, although none of them actually drifted off for a long while.

[]

Katara was dumping fire flakes and ghost-pepper chili powder into Zuko’s congee the next morning when Ty Lee looked up. 

“Oh, I’ll have some of that too, please!” she requested cheerfully.   Katara just glared at her and handed her a plain bowl from the bottom of the pot, where the burned bits were.

She relented, however, and reluctantly handed over the spices when she spotted Zuko apologetically spooning some of his into her bowl.

“Thanks!” she told Katara brightly, as if it had been her choice instead of Zuko’s innate kindness forcing her hand.

“No problem,” she forced through gritted teeth as she topped Zuko’s bowl back up despite his protestations.  She then turned to Sokka.  “We’re almost out of smoked fish, so if I asked you guys to go out with dad on an actual fishing trip, could I trust you to bring back food and only food?”

“Sure thing, my little iceberg,” Hakoda answered for him.  “We can take all the guys, and Toph, if you want to go.”

“Yeah I do!” Toph cheered, punching the air with her fist.  “No offense, but a guy’s trip is way better than a spa day.”

“I thought I made excellent grape-lemon water, but alright then,” Zuko grumbled.  Then he brightened, turning to his girlfriend,  “Do you wanna come with us, Mai-flower?”  (seriously, did everyone get a nickname from Zuko?  Katara thought that was their thing!  Well, theirs and Toph’s…).

“Dirty river water and gutting fish?  No thanks,” she drawled, wrinkling her delicate nose.  Zuko just laughed as if he hadn’t expected anything else and kissed her nose to make her disgusted expression relax into her normal one of smooth indifference.

“I know you wanna come, Lee-Lee.”  He turned to the pink-bedecked acrobat, and she smiled and nodded her head so rapidly that it looked as though it might bobble off.  

That would be one less problem to worry about, Katara thought, more than a little bitterly.  She’d thought that Ty Lee would have been even more girly than her brooding friend, and thus would have turned up her nose at something dirty and gross like a fishing trip.  She didn’t like being wrong about people.  She especially didn’t like being wrong about enemy people (and make no mistake; those two were still their enemies in her eyes, and it irked her that the rest of them couldn’t see that they were surely only going to bring misery down on them all).

Katara pulled her dad aside as they gathered all their equipment and prepared to leave.

“You’ll watch out for them, won’t you?” she asked him anxiously.  “Make sure that the… new addition doesn’t try anything.”

“You know I will, iceburg, but I don’t think we have anything to worry about.  They both seem like nice girls who love Zuko to pieces, and they helped us escape.  That has to be a good sign,” Hakoda said, and Katara crossed her arms and sighed.

“They could just be playing the long con,” she pointed out.  “Besides, if they’re really just here because they care about Zuko, they might not actually want to defeatthe fire lord.  They might just wait until we’re not looking to try to take him away.”

“You know as well as I do that that boy would never leave you all,” her father chided gently.

“I also know that those girls might not be above kidnapping.  And Zuko trusts them, which means his guard is down.”

Hakoda just exhaled sadly and didn’t say anything else. When had his sweet, trusting daughter become a jaded, war-hardened waterbending master?  He’d been gone too long, and he couldn’t keep his children out of war.  He couldn’t keep any of them out of war, and now the young were supporting the burden of saving the world almost completely on their own small shoulders.  It wasn’t right and it wasn’t fair.  But he knew he couldn’t say this to Katara; it was already done and there was nothing for it now.  

He had left and his kids had become 

independent, and after he’d been gone so long, he had no standing to tell them to go home and be safe.  For all they knew, if the twelve-year-old bald monk currently hanging upside down from his bison’s horns didn’t save the world by the comet, home wouldn’t be safe anymore.  It certainly hadn’t been safe in the past, and now Katara had a reputation as a formidable fighter and the last southern waterbender that put a target on her back.  And neither she nor Sokka would ever leave Aang and the others.

He could no more take his daughter out of war than the war out of his daughter.

[]

Sokka’s fishing skills had always been decent, but they’d only improved while he was gone.  Whether that was because fish were more plentiful in warmer waters or his son had made more improvement in a few years than many hunters made in their entire lives, he couldn’t say, but he figured it was probably both.

Zuko didn’t really have the heart of a hunter.  He wasn’t a vegetarian like Aang, but Hakoda had the feeling that if he had to hunt all his own food he probably would be.  He wasn’t bad at catching the fish, but he’d take one look at their breathless gasping and bulging eyes, get a guilty look on his face, and toss them back with a sheepish smile.  Sokka rolled his eyes and Ty Lee giggled and bet that she could throw it farther if she’d caught one.  Hakoda put them both on smoking duty, which Zuko’s firebending was good for.  And since the fish were already dead when they handed them to him, there was no risk of losing their food stores.

There was barely a flame shooting from Zuko’s fingers, but there was a warm, pleasant-smelling smoke as the prince gently ran his hands along the fillets, invisibly adjusting the heat coming from them until a task that took days in the water tribes by traditional means was done in minutes.

“Hey chief?  Is it okay if I spice a couple of these before smoking them for Mai, Ty Lee and I?  I’ll keep them separate from the others so they don’t get mixed up.”

“Of course, kiddo, and how many times do I have to ask you to call me Hakoda?  Just Hakoda,” he added quickly, feeling that Zuko was about to reply with ‘of course, Chief Hakoda.”

He was right, and Zuko’s cheeks lit up as he bit his lip.  “Yes si- Hakoda,” he corrected, when the man’s raised eyebrow suggested that ‘sir’ wouldn’t work either.  If he played his cards right, he might be able to get the kid to start calling him ‘dad’ within the next year or so, but for now he’d settle for ‘Hakoda.’

Ty Lee was excellent at stringing the dried fish along spare bits of fishing lines so that they’d be easier to store, and when asked she cheerfully informed them that she’d spent a lot of time making friendship bracelets.  Azula had burned them all, of course, but that was only an excuse to make prettier, better ones.  And Mai had kept hers, at least, even if she didn’t wear them in public because they were ‘too bright.’

Chit Sang, as it turned out, did not have Zuko’s talent for delicately smoking fish.  He had a talent for charring them to blackened bits, to be sure, but apparently excellent food-preservatory skills were not a standard fire nation ability.

“Well, it takes a lot of fine-honed control,” the ex-con had grunted, when asked.  “Fire blasts are easy, but stuff that requires a steady hand and the ability to regulate temperature and keep the flames small or even nonexistent for minute details like that?  Not everybody can do it, and honestly few can.  Almost any bender can scrounge up enough raw power to throw fireballs at the enemy, which is what the infantry typically do.  But when it comes down to it, high-level combat isn’t really all that different from the arts; you need to have far more control, and you have to be graceful.  I’m not bad at hand-to-hand combat, and I can work my way through a few of the trickier, higher-level katas, but stuff like fire-dancing or glass-blowing or cooking with my bending?  That’s beyond the level of training I have, and even if I got it I doubt I’d ever achieve the ease and control that Prince Zuko has.”

Zuko looked up at him in surprise.  “You know I’m like, not that good right?  I’m basically the worst bender in my family.”

Chit Sang let out a booming laugh, and the rest of them looked at Zuko incredulously- even Toph’s unseeing eyes were focused on his form, from where she was over playing in the mud by the river bank (she couldn’t ‘see’ in the water, and to be honest she much preferred her good, wet dirt.  She could find spider-worms for them to use as bait).

“Your highness, if you’re a bad firebender, then I’ll stick my tongue in Ozai’s ear.”  (He was thinking something besides ‘ear,’ but there were children here, soo…).  “Your father and sister might be able to fight well, and they might have good form and be graceful and strong, but none of them understand fire the way that you do.  You so much as breathe, and every flame in the vicinity flickers in time, and Ozai and the princess could never make those rainbows the way that you do.  And I bet, if it really came down to it, you could take them in a fight.”  Toph, Sokka, Hakoda and Ty Lee nodded their agreement.

“The only reason you don’t fight like them is because you don’t want to fight like them.  They fight to destroy, and you fight to protect.  You always have, and they saw that as weak.  But you never had a real reason to fight until now,” Ty Lee said, squeezing his shoulder.

Zuko didn’t really know what to say to that; not when his reasons to fight and the people he had to fight against were all people that- in one way or another and for better or for worse- were part of his family.

[][]

The boys caught a decent amount of fish, Katara had to admit, although she knew that they would have caught more if she’d been along.  But she didn’t particularly like fishing, and besides, someone had to keep an eye on Mai while the others were gone, and the rest seemed to trust her far too much for Katara to delegate that responsibility.  So, as much as she wished the girl and her pink friend had never joined their group at all, she made sure to keep Mai within her sights at all times, and then Ty Lee again when she returned with the others.  Their heartbeats and the water moving through their bodies were a grating irritation against her senses, unlike the soothing feeling that water usually brought her.  Even with the others, the water in their bodies had come to be a reassuring sign that they were alive, that their hearts were pumping strongly and that no-one was hurting them.  With Zuko’s body, it was especially comforting, knowing that his blood was clear of sedatives or toxins or anything else that the two fire nation girls might be able to use to get the drop on him and take him away from them.  And even if they wouldn’t hurt him physically, any chance that they might try to take him away from them, from his family, was a threat she was not taking lightly.

Logically, she knew that Mai and Ty Lee were now fugitives as well, but that didn’t convince her that they wouldn’t try to abscond with Zuko to La-knew-where.  They were shady and couldn’t be trusted and probably had all kinds of underground contacts that could help disappear them and Zuko to somewhere that they thought was safe.

But nowhere was safer (for Zuko at least) than right here, and she knew it as well as she knew every drop of water and every tiny cell in her own body.  She was more powerful than she’d ever been, and she’d sooner rip all the water out of someone’s body and leave them to die in agony than she would let anyone lay a finger on any of hers.  And she didn’t entirely discount the possibility that she might have to do it to Mai and/or Ty Lee.  She tried not to dwell on the fact that a small dark part of her even relished the possibility, and told her that she could make corpses of the two far more easily than she could make friends of them.

It scared her more than she would like to admit, this dark part of her that had been rearing its ugly head since her mother died, and even more so since she’d left the tribe and seen what the fire nation had done to people, had had the constant reminder of everything that they’d done to remind her of her own loss.  The more powerful she became, the more she realized she could do.  She realized that all that she had to do to enact vengeance on anyone she wanted would be to wiggle one finger.  She could stop hearts and bend the blood from bodies or even make people choke on the very water that gave them life.  She could lay waste to armies, and the only thing that stopped her was her own morality.  And some days, that morality seemed stretched to the limit.

She swore to herself she’d never use her power over people’s bodies for anything other than to heal them, but by the spirits, some days she really, really wanted to.  Some days she looked at Mai and Ty Lee and felt like a raging ocean losing control of its own waters.  And maybe she couldn’t drown, but everyone else could.

Water was comfort and life and everything that made Katara who she was, but more and more lately it felt like a dark siren song.

Zuko’s warm hand on her shoulder jerked her out of her morbid thoughts, and she jumped.  She’d been so caught up in her own head that she hadn’t even registered his pulsing heartbeat moving closer to her.

Zuko could tell as well, and this worried him.  But neither of them said a thing as she looked at him and he looked at her.

“What’s up?” she asked him eventually. 

He shrugged, shifting around awkwardly.  “I just thought it looked like you could use a hug…” he trailed off, unsure, and Katara’s heart softened just a little bit.

“I could, thank you,” she sighed, relaxing into him in a puddle of limbs.  “Now come on, I think I can help your scar just a little bit more.”

Yes, Katara could hurt, but maybe if she stayed close enough to the people she wanted to heal, she could keep those dark urges at bay for just a little bit longer.

[][]

Sokka looked across the fire at where Zuko was sitting.  Katara had finally done all she could for his scar, and all the pain was gone at last.  Sokka couldn’t feel that sort of thing the way his sister could, that was true, but he could see it in the way that Zuko’s face was more relaxed, his smile brighter.  And even though the scar was just as prominent and stark against his skin and his bad eye as unfocused as ever, the difference was apparent to everyone who actually looked.  The good side of his face could be more expressive without the tightness of the bad side trying to force it into a permanent scowl, and his hand did not come up to rub the scar at all during the meal.  Sokka hadn’t realized how often he’d done it until he’d stopped, that he’d been rubbing his scar so frequently, as if trying to massage away the stiffness of the damaged skin.  Sokka knew the old burn was completely numb now, but for how happy Zuko seemed about it, it might as well not have been there at all.

The joy made him look more radiant than he usually did, and Sokka found himself resenting Mai for a completely different reason than his sister did.  She was hanging off of him like a spirits-damned pentapus, and for some reason that Sokka could not understand, this enraged him.  He wanted to go vent about it with his sister, but Katara had been in such a dark mood these past few days and had only just seemed to come out of it for a little while, so he was reluctant to drag her into it.

“Do you wanna talk about it?” Suki seemed to know what he was thinking, and Sokka shook his head.  He was with Suki, his beautiful, amazing girlfriend who he loved and adored beyond all reason, and he’d just gotten her back and shouldn’t be dwelling on this inexplicable anger over Zuko’s girlfriend.

And yet, even the sight of Suki tonight was giving him weird, mixed feelings.  Zuko had loaned her his spare set of clothes, and Sokka couldn’t entirely put a name to the tight feeling in his chest that seeing her in Zuko’s beige silk tunic and sunset-red pants gave him.  It was pleasant, but it was also… yearning?  He wasn’t sure why seeing his girlfriend in one of his best friend’s clothes would make him feel that way.  If anything, it should make him feel a little bit jealous, and maybe even kind of possessive.  But instead it made his heart swell until he was worried that it wouldn’t fit his ribcage properly, even though he logically knew that that couldn’t happen.  It felt so unbelievably right, but also gave him this unnamable feeling that he was missing something- that they were missing something.

He swallowed, and tried not to think of it any more.

[]

Sokka was woken up the next morning by the sounds of fire and explosions.  Zuko and Aang, he knew, had been up since the sun rose (although Aang, not so much by choice), and even Suki had pulled herself out of his embrace some moments before.  Katara and he had been the only ones still in their bedrolls, and even she would have been awake before him if they’d been allowed to rise naturally.

Which brought his attention to the reason why his forced awakening was decidedly not natural, and he looked over to see Azula leaning over the railing of a giant fire nation airship.  Something in her eyes was off in a way he couldn’t quite put his finger on, and it scared him even more than she usually did.

“Isn’t it obvious?  I’m about to celebrate becoming an only child!”  Sokka shivered, but Zuko just looked sad.  His fire blasts as he fended off his sister were as powerful as ever, but the normally vibrant colors were duller, and his eyes full of a pain that Sokka hoped never to see in them again, even if he knew that that wasn’t a practical wish in the middle of a war against his own nation.

Zuko looked at his sister, and all he could see was the first memory he had, of his own pudgy little fists reaching for the squalling bundle in his mother’s arms. 

“This is your sister, Zuko,” she had told him then.  “You will be her protector, and she will be your best friend.”

Zuko, all chubby cheeks and unscarred skin and soft baby hair pulled into a topknot at his father’s insistence, looked at his beautiful, beaming mother, covered in sweat and exhausted and glowing with pride for her little family, just the three of them.  And he nodded, and giggled, and put a clumsy hand on his baby sister’s forehead.  To his delight, she’d stopped screaming and looked up at him with far too much awareness for a newborn .  Those few moments, when it had been just him and his mother and his sister, before his father had come in and named her, and in doing so, forced on her a legacy of cruelty and pain and power and suffering, had once been one of his fondest memories, before it turned into one of the many that hurt him.

He remembered her first flame, before she’d turned it on him.  Her tiny face had been alight in awe at three years old, and his at five had held delight and joy and pride, pride that was not yet crushed by an envy that burned in his lungs and choked him.

He remembered what he’d said that day, not yet poisoned by their nation’s propaganda.  At five years old, perhaps he should have known better, but he’d always been too soft for his own good.

“You’re a firebender!” He’d told her eagerly, and then a thought had occurred to him.

“Maybe you bent first b’cos I’m not ‘sposed to be a firebender.  Maybe ‘m gonna be a waterbender, and we’ll be like the sun and the moon.”

Azula had rolled her eyes at him, and laughed.  “Course you’re sposed to be a firebender, dum-dum.  You’re my brother, and so you gotta be.”

Their father had overheard their conversation that day, and it had been the first time he’d laid a hand on him.  Zuko couldn’t remember ever being held by his father, but he remembered the first time he was hit. He didn’t remember every single time after that, since it happened so very often, but he remembered  the first time (and the last, burnt into his face so he could never, ever forget). He remembered his lip wobbling and his tears threatening to fall and never telling his mother.

“Why would you say such a thing, to imply that someone from Sozin’s line would ever bend anything but fire?!  Are you stupid?  Do you actually want to be a water tribe savage!” his father had hissed at him.

“No…” Zuko honestly wasn’t sure why he’d said it.  He’d just… well, as proud as he had been, he was also worried his sister would burn herself with her new flames (even though firebenders instinctively knew how to avoid being burned by their own fires, but Zuko was only five and fear for his baby sister had overridden that knowledge) and he’d thought suddenly that if he was a waterbender, he could always put them out before that could ever happen.  

“Then why would you say it?” Ozai demanded, and Zuko knew, even then, that the truth wasn’t going to please his father, and that he’d probably be hit again for even suggesting that someone from Sozin’s line could ever be burnt (and oh, what an irony that would become...).

“I just… I think the moon’s pretty, ‘s’all,” he mumbled.

“Hmmph,” Ozai didn’t even dignify him with a response, just dismissed him by shooting a ball of flames that threatened to lick his heels as he ran away.

These memories haunted him as he looked at Azula, searching her eyes for any hint of the sister that he once knew, but seeing only the cruel, deranged young girl that he still couldn’t help but love, despite everything.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Zuzu,” she teased cruelly, shooting hot blue fire at him, and he sighed as he flicked a hand, effortlessly dissipating her flames around him.

“Yeah,” he sighed, using a fire whip to draw her attention away from his friends as they prepared to launch Appa, but making sure not to actually hurt her.  “I think I have.”

She laughed without any real joy, and they fought until she got knocked off the side of the ship.  Without really thinking, he dove after her, fire springing from his feet to keep himself upright as his only thoughts were to keep Azula alive.  

But she stopped her fall with her hairpin, and all he got for his efforts was a brush against a hand that used to cling onto his for reassurance but now only sought to hurt him as it shot a fire that, in his rush to reach her, he hadn’t bothered to block.

“At least let me take you to the top of the cliff,” he begged, cradling his burnt arm, and she laughed again.

“That won’t be necessary; I could climb, and besides, if you can figure out that fire-from-the-feet thing, then I’m sure I can.  Now leave before I burn you again, and aim for the other side of your face this time.”

The pain he felt as Katara healed his arm when he got back to Appa wasn’t physical, but something deeper.

[][][]

Katara was particularly nasty towards Mai and Ty Lee that night, irritated by what their old ‘friend’ had done to Zuko that morning, and she sighed as she finished washing and packing away the dishes.  Zuko had tried to help her as he usually did, but she’d insisted that he rest his arm a little more.

He decided to go talk to Sokka, so focused on his mission that he forgot to knock, and was thus greeted with an eyeful of Sokka and Suki, both disheveled and making eyes at each other but still clothed, thank Agni (and yes, he was grateful, so if the weird voice in his head wondering if he wasn’t would please shut up, now…).

“Oh hi Zuko,” Suki said, not looking at all ashamed even though Sokka was blushing as deeply as his brown skin would allow.  “Wanna join us?”

Sokka squeaked but, strangely, didn’t retract the offer, and Zuko just stammered.

“Uh…” he began, and then his broken brain jumped into the next topic a lot less carefully than he probably should have.  “What do you remember about the day your mother was killed?”

“Wow, um… okay,” Sokka began, all traces of romance (and whatever weird, awkward tension Zuko’s presence had struck up in him) suddenly gone from the tent.  “What… uh…. Why?”

“I think Katara is conflating her anger with whoever killed your mother at Mai and Ty Lee, and I think helping her get closure with the murderer might help her let go of her anger for Mai and Ty Lee and then maybe things won’t be so awkward in the group anymore…”

“Pretty sure things will always be awkward in the group as long as you’re here, buddy,” Sokka replied, but his face was fond and his hand was gentle on Zuko’s shoulder, so at least he wasn’t mad.  “But yeah, I can tell you what I know.”

He left the tent with a name- The Southern Raiders- and a mission- to take Katara on a life-changing field trip.  

[]

When Zuko told her that he knew who had killed her mother, and that he could take her to get closure (finally, after all these years), the dark, angry part of her had jumped up in glee, twisting up her insides.  And she knew that she had to go, even if Aang would disagree.  But there were things to be considered first, like making sure that the rest of them would be alright for a few days with her and Zuko, the main homemakers, both off on a mission (of revenge? Of justice? Of closure?  Katara wasn’t sure, but she knew that she had to go).

“We should really wait a couple more days; your sister really did a number on your arm…” Katara said reluctantly as she changed Zuko’s bandages.  Even with her healing abilities, blue fire at close range was not something that could be fixed in a day, and the wound was still red and raw and blistering as she finished another healing session and rebandaged it with new salve.  She knew that it would scar despite the fact that she could say without any arrogance (only honesty) that she was probably the best healer in the world.  She hated that he’d have yet another scar from family, and the knowledge that the arm would be black and charred and useless without her intervention did not make her feel any better.  And even if she’d been able to bring it down from an inevitably debilitating fourth degree burn to a merely-painful second degree burn, she wasn’t sure he was ready to go charging off with her to find her mother’s killer.

“It’ll be fine.” Zuko waved her off with the typical lack of concern for his own welfare that Katara hated so much.  “Besides,” he continued, “you’ve basically banned me from firebending with this arm for a while anyways, and so we might as well go now, when my capacity to teach Aang is already reduced.  That way, we won’t have to take away any real training time from him that we wouldn’t have had to already.”

Katara had to admit that the logic, although depressing and something that only Zuko would have gotten out of ‘too injured to fully use one arm for a few days’, did track.  And he’d really only be coming along to help her track the man, since this was her mission and she could take care of herself, and she’d be right with him the whole time…

“You’ve waited long enough, Katara.  Whatever happens, you need to face him, for your own peace.  And I’ll be right there with you,” Zuko promised, sensing her silent argument with herself.

His response tipped the scales.  “Alright,” she agreed finally.  “We’ll leave after lunch.   But you use that arm as little as possible, and when I say it’s time for a healing session, no fighting me on it.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Zuko declared with a wry quirk of his lips.  

Anything else that could have been said was interrupted by Aang running up and skidding past them.

“Zuuuuukooooo!” he whined.  “I can’t find the bison-fur sweater that you knit for Momo!”

“Did you check the saddlebags?” Zuko raised his eyebrow at him.

“Yeeeeesssss,” Aang whined again.  “But it wasn’t there.”

“And did you look anywhere else?” Zuko asked.

“Well no, but…”  Zuko leveled him with a mom-glare.

“But you’re so good at finding stuff, and you do it so fast!” Aang pleaded.  “I could be looking for hours but it would only take you a couple minutes.”

Zuko sighed and rolled his eyes.  “Fine,” he grumbled.  “But if I find it in the saddlebags…” he let the threat hang, although they both knew it was empty.

It was, indeed, in a forgotten corner of the saddlebags, and Zuko sighed as he handed the fuzzy little sweater to Aang so he could go try to wrestle it back onto an unwilling Momo.  His natural knack for finding things had taken him from hunting a mythical god-like figure to finding lost trinkets and missing socks and other miscellania for said god-like figure (and all their shared friends family).  Funny how life works out.

“If there’s anything else you need help finding, tell me now, because Katara and I are gonna be gone for a couple of days,” he told the boy, who looked at him and whimpered pitifully.

“You’re gonna leave us with Sokka to take care of us?” his lip wobbled, and Zuko told himself sternly that it was an act and not to fall for it (with only mild success).  “But Sokka’s jook is terrible, and his roasted vegetables are even worse.”

“I’m sure you’ll manage,” Zuko promised, once again lamenting just how young Aang was to be shouldering such a burden (how young they all were, really… but Zuko had never really had much of a childhood in the first place, so he didn’t feel the loss as keenly).

“Where are you going?” Aang asked.  “Can I come?”

“Sorry Aang; this is something Katara needs to do alone.  I’m only going to help her track someone.”

Aang looked pensive for a moment as he cast his eyes between the two of them.  He didn’t pry, but he seemed to have at least a vague idea of what sort of mission this was, as he gave Katara some cryptic old air nomad proverb about revenge being a two-headed rat viper.  Katara did not seem to appreciate this advice, and Zuko decided he really wanted a two-headed rat viper as a pet now that he knew they were a thing.

“We’ll be fine, buddy, but Katara needs to do this,” Zuko told Aang after Katara had stormed off to pack the rest of her things.

“So you won’t try to hold her back?” Aang sighed mournfully.

“Even if I could, that would be wrong.  This is important to her, and whatever she decides, we both know that she’ll still be our Katara at the other end of it.  You trust her, don’t you?”

“Of course!”  Aang looked offended that Zuko even had to ask.

“Then you have to let her do this, whatever comes of it.  People heal differently, Aang, and not everyone can take comfort from the ways of the air nomads or any other nation.  It’s a personal journey.”

Aang seemed to accept this, as he looked up at Zuko.  “You know, we really don’t give you enough credit sometimes, Sifu.  You’re pretty smart.”

Zuko beamed at him, and kissed the top of his little bald head before he went to join Katara.

[]

Sokka watched Zuko kiss Mai goodbye with a sour look on his face, and he resented Suki’s knowing smile beside him.

“You’ll keep an eye on everyone for us?” he asked his girlfriend quietly, and she rolled her eyes at him.

“You’re such a mom sometimes,” she chided, but there was the barest hint of an upturning of her lips.  “But yes, I won’t let Sokka burn down the camp.”

“Hey!” Sokka yelled from where he’d clearly been listening in on their conversation.  “I resent that!  Two firebenders here, and everyone always seems worried about me making things go boom?”

“You’re right, oh Great and Wise Inventor, we never have to worry about you making a mess of things,” Toph replied sarcastically.

Sokka returned to sulking silently again.  He was not having a good morning (and no, this had nothing to do with Zuko leaving at all, Suki, so stop looking at him like that!).

[]

Aang knew that he had to let Katara go on her mission, even though he was worried about what might happen.  It wasn’t his place to stop her or to try to control her.  Too many men had done that to her in her life, and she wouldn’t take well to someone else trying it.  That was one of many things he’d learned from Zuko, that he could control his own morals and what he chose was right for him, but that his way wasn’t the only way and that he couldn’t expect others to follow his path.  Sokka, it seemed, had learned a similar lesson, for while he’d watched Katara with a wariness and seemed to want to say something, he’d bitten it back in favor of staring longingly at Zuko instead (why did he keep looking at Zuko like that, Aang wondered?  It was almost like the way that he looked at Katar- ohhhh….). 

Nevertheless, the topic had been weighing on his mind all afternoon, and so he’d sat down to meditate, hoping to find a sense of peace and clarity through the other avatars.  All that really did was leave him frustrated.

“So, I take it that talking to the other avatars didn’t go so well?” Suki asked him sympathetically.

“No,” Aang grumbled, crossing his arms over his chest.  “All the other avatars wanted to do was fight over who got to be Zuko’s great-grandparent.  Roku thinks it should be him, since he’s biologically related, but Kyoshi said that people who don’t stop colonizers don’t get grandparents’ rights.  Kyoshi said that she should get to be grandma, since Zuko has, um… bravery, except I’m not gonna say the actual word she used instead of bravery, and since he’s stubborn and strong like a true earthbender.  And then Kuruk said that he’s a really good swimmer so the water tribe should get him, and then he and Kyoshi got into a really ugly argument about how he didn’t deserve to get to be grandpa since he was a lazy avatar who didn’t actually do anything and died at thirty like a… well, another word that I can’t say, and then Kuruk got really mad and things went south.  And then some other fire nation avatar lady with no arms said that she was gonna be grandma since she and Zuko were ‘firebender disability buddies.’  But then Avatar Yanchen said that he was sweet and loved turtle ducks and other animals and that was very air-nomad of him, so she should get him, and she also made me promise to bake him her special cookies?  So it was really confusing and they were being really loud and mean to each other so I left.”  Aang was rubbing his temples and looking very frustrated.

“Did you suggest sharing?” Ty Lee asked, seeming not at all phased by the weirdness of the spirits of a bunch of god-like figures fighting over who got to be grandparent to a living fire prince.

“Yes!” Aang gesticulated wildly.  “But none of them wanted to!  Honestly, for a bunch of past avatars, they were all being very petty and not so great at balance.”

“Well, I’m just gonna go ahead and throw my hat in the ring for Kyoshi,” Suki added, after just deciding to go with… whatever this was.

“Me too!” Toph cheered.  “Earth benders stick together.”

“I guess I’m going to go with the water tribe guy, then,” Sokka sighed, accepting that he was quite possibly the last person on earth who had any sanity left.

“Fire nation lady,” Mai added, sounding bored.  “Since you all seem to have an opinion.”

“What if I wanted to be Zuko’s great-grandpa?” Aang asked them all, sounding betrayed.

“You’re twelve,” Toph pointed out, flinging a booger behind her.  “You can’t be anybody’s grandpa.”

“Can so!” Aang grumbled, as they truly began to devolve into a mirror of the same argument that was going down in the spirit world amongst the past avatars.

[]

Blissfully unaware that every past avatar (plus the current one and his friends) was fighting over custody of his beloved nephew, Iroh arrived at the White Lotus base in Ba Sing Se after a long and taxing trip from the Caldera, made all the more difficult by his status as a fugitive and thus having to take alternative routes and book passage on shady ships and travel overland under the cover of night on ostrich horses purchased from even shadier merchants.  Despite his being newly back in shape, his old bones and joints protested against such harsh, fast-paced travel conditions.  He was glad to arrive amongst friends, to a roomy tent with soft pillows, a nice tea set, and a lovely pai sho board.

“It is good to be back in contact with our Grand Lotus,” Master Pakku of the water tribes bowed to him.

“It is good to be back,” Iroh bowed back, before moving to clasp arms in the northern water tribe style.  “How did things go with your beloved?”

Pakku sighed.  “She still did not want me, but she seemed open to my friendship, at least.”

“Friendship is a great gift, and not to be underestimated or undervalued.  It is a different kind of love to that of a romantic connection, but it is never lesser,” Iroh chided gently, and Pakku nodded, although still looked rather put out.

Bumi came next, and Iroh traded proverbs back and forth with the crazy old earth bender in a conversation that barely made sense even to him.  Talking with Bumi was always like that; coming up with strange proverbs on the spot that only vaguely seemed connected to any sort of actual message.  Those were ones he never repeated to his nephew, who did not need any more reason to discount the validity of proverbs.

Iroh and Jeong Jeong had only a crisp sort of formality, a chilly veneer of civility that only barely hid what neither would admit out loud was distaste for the other.  They were working towards a common goal, to be sure, but Iroh thought Jeong Jeong’s negative view of firebending as a discipline, and his belief that it was cruel and dangerous and flawed by its very nature, to be folly and a viewpoint far misaligned with the ideas of balance that the White Lotus promoted.  Anyone who believed that firebenders were ‘always walking a fine line and only one wrong step away from complete savagery’ was severely mistaken, in Iroh’s opinion.  Yes, it could be cruel, but so could any element.  Someone with such a hatred for their own inner fire would normally have never been allowed to join the White Lotus, but necessity had lowered their standards.

As for Jeong Jeong, he thought that Iroh should have defected much earlier (which was, it must be admitted, perhaps true, but the fact remained that Iroh had defected now, and that he had realized the folly of his nation’s actions).  He thought that Iroh was unfit for the position of the Grand Lotus, and thought that the man was entirely too comfortable with his own element.  So they could not be said to particularly get along.

Master Piandao, on the other hand, was perhaps Iroh’s favorite of all his White Lotus compatriots.  The man had trained both of his sons in the art of the sword, and had helped Zuko find his confidence.  And while he knew that they both knew that Zuko had far outpaced Lu Ten in the art of swordsmanship, he had never compared the two, and had praised them both to Iroh.  And although they had mostly trained separately, the few times that both of his boys had been able to visit the swordmaster at the same time were some of their fondest memories, where Zuko and his cousin truly got to behave like brothers, free from the pressure of palace life, and Zuko could flourish and enjoy himself with family that loved him out from under Ozai’s cruel glare and menacing, threatening hands.  It was Piandao who had brought up the fact that it seemed likely that Zuko was suffering more than just emotional abuse under Iroh’s brother, and for a while, Iroh had been able to protect him from it.  He would be forever grateful to Master Piandao for that.  He only wished that he himself had seen the signs sooner, and that he hadn’t felt confident that the combination of his ‘talk’ with his brother and Ursa’s presence in the palace would have been enough to keep Zuko safe while he was gone.

“It is good to see you again, old friend,” Iroh said, as they forwent the bows and enveloped each other in an embrace.

“That it is,” Piandao agreed.  “I ran into your nephew a few weeks back, by the way, and again at the invasion.  He tried to break you out, and was upset that he’d missed you.”  He and Fat had only barely managed to escape without getting arrested, at Hakoda’s insistence that they blend in and pretend they were merely spending a day out in the capital.  As a swordmaster of some esteem, and with anyone who could have identified them as part of the invasion either unconscious or dead, he and his partner had been able to avoid imprisonment.

“You saw my Zuko?!” Uncle exclaimed.  He of course knew that his nephew was travelling with the avatar, and had been able to get confirmation from his sources that he was alive, but all he’d known beyond that was that his child, his sweet boy, had been struck by lightning in the fight in the crystal caverns.  Hearing that from a taunting Azula had frozen his blood inside of him, and he didn’t care that she had heard the keening wail that he’d emitted, any facade of stoicism crumbling.  The guilt had nearly destroyed him, and he’d wondered if Zuko was alright, if the lightning had done some permanent damage, if it would have been better if he’d not encouraged him to join the avatar, because then he would have been back in the capital and relatively safe… 

“Please!” he demanded, voice husky with tears.  “My precious Nephew, my child… is he alright? Has he recovered fully?!”

“He certainly fought like it,” Piandao assured, chuckling.  “Sokka, his friend from the Southern Tribe, came to me for training, and Prince Zuko and I had a spar while we were at it.  The way the child fights is astounding; he nearly beat me and I’ve got decades of experience on him.  And he was as light on his feet as ever; the way that boy doesn’t make a sound against the ground has always struck me as vaguely inhuman.”

“Oh, thank the Spirits!”  Iroh’s whole body sagged in relief, and Piandao had to catch him as his feet lost the ability to hold him up.  “I had been so worried.  All I had been able to find out was that he was alive and with the avatar’s group, but I did not know if…”

“He’s fine,” Piandao promised.  “His heart is as good as it ever was in every sense, and Sokka’s sister is a remarkable healer.  He’s being taken care of, Iroh, I promise.”

“I am so glad.”  Iroh’s poor heart had felt like he’d been the one struck by lightning as he worried endlessly over Zuko, and he’d lost his breath control more these past weeks than his entire life before that.  The last time he’d felt so shaky, so uncertain, was after the farce of an Agni Kai where Ozai had burned a son he had never deserved, and Iroh had stayed by his bedside wondering if he would live.  When Ozai had declared, after Zuko had barely survived the infection that had left his continued existence such a big question mark for almost a month, that since the boy had lived, he was to be banished, the only reason Iroh had not challenged him to an Agni Kai right then and there was that he had felt as if he couldn’t breathe.  For as long as his two boys had been alive, Iroh had felt that half of his heart belonged to Lu Ten and the other half to Zuko, and if he had lost Zuko it would have broken him completely.  Every last drop of good that he felt in the world rested in the teenager who he considered his in everything but blood, and if anything had happened to him…

He certainly did not look like the fearless general or the esteemed leader of the White Lotus in this moment.  No, right now he was a father, dizzy with relief over the wellbeing of his beloved child.  These last weeks had been so uncertain, and the knowledge that Zuko was at least alive and the fact that they had a war to end had been the only things keeping him going, but the process had felt automatic.  It was only now that he realized exactly how deep the agony and anxiety had been running since he had been taken away from Zuko in Ba Sing Se; he now felt so light that he feared he might float away.

“Let’s get you to your tent,” Piandao murmured, taking pity on him.  “You’ve had a long journey.”

Iroh could only clutch his racing heart and weep with relief, not caring that the entirety of the people he was supposed to lead were watching as he did.

[]

Far away, unaware of what his Uncle was doing and of how worried he had been, Zuko was holding Katara as she broke down in the saddle, Appa steering himself towards their next destination as he held her shaking, sobbing body tightly, uncaring of his bandaged arm.

“I… I had promised that I wouldn’t… that I would never, not after…” Katara gasped between wailing hiccups.  “But I was just so angry, and it wasn’t even the right man, and…”  She tried to push away from Zuko, afraid of her own power, but he held her fast.

“You’re not a bad person, Katara,” he whispered into her hair as she soaked them both with her tears.  “You didn’t even hurt him, and just because you succumbed to more pain than you should have ever had to suffer doesn’t mean that you’d do it to any of us, or to anyone that didn’t deserve it.”

“But… I promised myself that I would never bloodbend for anything other than healing ever again, and then I did!” she cried.  “And if I can just go back on my word like that, how can I trust myself with anything?” Her hands clung desperately to the front of Zuko’s black tunic, her wet blue eyes staring into Zuko’s like the bright gold and the light that they caught was the only thing keeping him from fading away completely into the night.

“Sometimes we do things we regret, but that doesn’t mean that they’re going to happen again,” Zuko soothed, pulling some hair back away from her face.  “I’ve done so many things I regret, and yet you still trust me.  You need to be able to trust yourself the same way.  You made a mistake, sure, but you didn’t let yourself go too far, and there was no permanent damage.  You need to forgive yourself.”

Katara had never been great at forgiveness.  She trusted easily, some would say too easily, but once that trust was broken, it took a lot to get it back.  Zuko had earned her trust by saving Aang, and then a thousand times over since then, and he’d never actually actively sought to hurt anyone in the first place, so he was the rare exception to the rule.  But very few others had ever been able to win back Katara’s loyalty after they’d hurt her or broken their word, and right now, that included herself.

“Why should I?” she sniffed.  “I hurt someone without even making sure it was the right person first, and I… I have so much power.  What if… what if I become like Hama?” the words were almost too low to be heard, and if Katara hadn’t been pressed right up against Zuko’s good ear, he wouldn’t have.

“I think the fact that you’re crying into the shoulder of the former prince of the fire nation shows that you’re nothing like her,” Zuko promised, wrapping her even tighter within his arms.

“But…”

“Look at me,” he pushed her back a little, unwrapping the arm Azula had burnt to show that it was only some red skin and a few blisters.  “Look at this; without you, I might not have ever been able to use this arm again, and now two days later it just looks like a bad sunburn because you healed it.  You took your time to pour yourself and your energy into fixing someone who used to be your enemy. You could have hurt me at any time, or killed any of us with barely a thought, but you haven’t.  Not even Mai and Ty Lee, even though you really, really don’t like them right now.  You’re a good person, Katara, and you don’t need to worry about losing control.  There’s nobody in the world better suited to having the kind of power that you have, and I know that if you ever do go that far, it’s going to be because the person deserved it or because you were protecting someone else.  You don’t have to be afraid of yourself, Katara, because none of us are afraid of you.”

“Even after what I just did?” Katara hiccuped, her sobs slowing down finally.

“Nothing has changed,” Zuko promised, holding out his arm.  “Here.”  It was an unspoken gesture of trust that Katara needed at the moment, and as she took a deep breath and positioned glowing hands over the injury, shrinking the blisters and finally healing the injury almost completely but for a bit of still-pink skin and the new scarring that not even the world’s best healer could erase, she stopped shaking quite so hard.

“Thank you, Zuko,” she whispered.

“I think I should be thanking you,” he chuckled, experimentally flexing his arm and finding it only a little tender.  “It would take any other healer months to fix something that severe, if they could fix it at all, and you did it in less than two days.”

“Do you think we should keep going?” she asked him in lieu of acknowledging this.  

“Do you want to?” Zuko asked gently.

“I…” Katara began, “yeah but… how do I know if I can trust myself to do the right thing?”

“There is no right thing in this situation,” Zuko replied.  “Not after what he did to you.  There’s no easy way to fix this, and whatever you choose to do is going to be justified.  But I know that you can face him and do whatever you feel you have to without losing yourself, and I think that you need to, for your own sake.”

“Okay then, we’ll keep going,” Katara sighed deeply, sitting up and wiping her eyes.

Zuko nodded his agreement and kissed her forehead tenderly before pushing her gently back into the saddle and covering her with one of the many soft Appa-fur blankets he’d made over the past few months to occupy himself during long hours of travelling.

“Get some sleep; we’ll be there in the morning,” he told her, climbing back up to take the reins.

Katara wanted to protest that he deserved to rest too, but she was so exhausted from the emotional breakdown that she’d just had that she was asleep before she could open her mouth.

[]

Katara managed to get through the confrontation with Yon Rha without hurting him (well, physically, anyway.  Mentally, the man had been through it, not that he didn’t deserve that and more).

“I don’t know if it’s because I was too weak to do it, or if I was strong enough not to,” she confessed to Zuko as he steered Appa to his biological family’s old vacation home in Ember Island.  They decided to drop Katara off at Ember Island first so that she had time to collect herself before facing the more… exuberant energy of the rest of the group. 

“Katara, you are one of the strongest people that I’ve ever known.  You’ve never been too weak for anything.  I saw how hard it was for you to turn away; you chose mercy, even though it was hard and even though he didn’t deserve it, because you are so much better than he could ever be.  You chose the best thing to do for yourself.  The decision you made had nothing to do with Yon Rha and what he did or didn’t deserve, and I’m proud of you.”
Katara gave him a tired smile, scooting up carefully from the saddle to join him at his perch on Appa’s neck.  

“Thanks Zuko,” she said, resting her head on his shoulder.  “But just so you know, you’re pretty damn strong too, and I’m so thankful every day that you’re part of our family now.”

“Love you too, Katara,” he smiled softly at her, before seeming to think for a moment.  “Wait, that is what you meant, right?”

Katara laughed for the first time in days, and it was such a beautiful, joyful sound and Zuko hadn’t realized just how much they were all missing it until he heard it.  

“Yes, you doofus, that’s what I meant.”

Zuko’s smile was as bright as the Sun Deity who favored him.

[][]

Mai and Ty Lee looked at Katara, meeting her eyes in a gesture of respect, woman-to-woman.

“I don’t think I’m quite ready to forgive you yet, and I still don’t fully trust you,” the waterbender was telling them.  “But I can try not to be so hostile, and try to at least give you a chance to prove yourselves to me.”

“We can work with that,” Ty Lee chirped brightly, and Mai nodded her agreement in a far more subdued manner.

Surprisingly, the conversation that Katara, Mai, and Ty Lee were having was a lot more civil than the conversation between the rest of them going on at the fire pit.

“I’m just saying that Kyoshi would be the best grandma!” Suki was saying very loudly.  “Nobody would ever pick on you, and she would teach you to protect yourself too, and I happen to know from first hand experience that her special secret recipe for Pau buns are the best!” 

“Okay, but Avatar Yanchen gave me her super-secret cookie recipe to make for Zuko, and she never gave that to anyone ever!” Aang argued.

“Okay, but Kuruk would be a super cool grandpa, and Zuko loves it when Katara makes five-flavor soup!  That’s a water tribe thing!”  Sokka attempted to out-yell the rest of them, even Toph.

“Avatar Kuruk was a pussy who died at thirty!” Toph screamed.  “Kyoshi made it to 234, so if anyone deserves to be a grandma, it’s her!”

“What about Roku, though?  Roku was like, his actual grandpa,” Aang felt compelled to stick up for his most recent past life, since nobody else was.

“Boo! Roku couldn’t even beat a volcano, and he was a firebender!”  Toph stomped her feet, making the earth rumble in agreement with her point, and Suki drummed against the rock she was sitting on to back her up.

Zuko put his head in his hands and groaned loudly.

“Can we talk about literally anything else?” he asked.

“NO!” the rest of the group yelled in unison.

“Apparently,” Mai said drolly, replying to Katara’s questioning look, since it was clear that she wasn’t quite friendly enough towards them to ask yet, “the past avatars are all fighting over who gets to be Zuko’s great-grandparent, and now everyone else is too.”  She felt that calling Katara’s dearest friends ‘knuckleheads’ might be enough to strain the fragile truce they had going, so she held back any further remarks.

“Oh, Spirits.  We really can’t leave those guys alone, can we?” Katara groaned as well.

“Wanna go on another field trip?” Zuko asked Katara despondently, but Toph grabbed his arm.

“Oh, no, Sunshine!  Nobody else, and I mean nobody, gets to have a life changing field trip with you until I’ve had one, capiche?”

“Yes ma’am,” Zuko agreed, looking vaguely threatened.

[]

Mai, Sokka and Suki all had developed a habit of watching Zuko train Aang.  Ty Lee also joined them, although that had less to do with ogling Zuko and more to do with cuddling up to Mai’s side.  If asked, Sokka would also say that he was only watching because Suki liked to watch, and no Toph, he was not lying, so stop laughing! 

Zuko was a fine specimen of a man, Mai and Suki silently agreed, trading appreciative looks as they watched his muscles ripple under the thin sheen of sweat as he and Aang sparred, shirtless.  The scar on his chest and the smaller one on his hip from Azula did nothing to detract from his attractiveness, nor did the smattering of various other old wounds that they knew couldn’t have come from mere accidents.  

Sokka tore his gaze back to Zuko’s taut chest muscles, and told himself that it was only so he wouldn’t have to play the ‘did this scar come from Ozai, Azula, or a shitty firebending ‘teacher’?’ game with himself (which, to be fair, was partly true).

“You need to widen your stance, and you’re losing your breath control.  Just because you’re getting tired doesn’t mean that you can afford to let your breathing waver,” Zuko was saying to Aang.

“I’m trying, but you’re so fast, and I’m saying that as an airbender!  How are you so fast?!”  Aang whined, panting.

“Lots of practice; I was always either running towards something or away from someone,” Zuko joked.  Aang didn’t think it was all that funny to remember that Zuko had never felt safe in his own home.

“I want to see your Dancing Phoenix form again, and I want to see your fire hotter and more streamlined.  Your flames were messy last time.”

“That doesn’t look like a traditional firebending form,” Suki remarked as they watched Aang run through it again.  His form was apparently better this time, as Zuko was nodding approvingly as his flames flowed more, and his steps were lighter and faster, and the transitions between the more rooted, earth-bending style moves towards the faster, more fluid waterbending-like spins and kicks were smoother.

“It’s not,” Zuko agreed.  “Uncle and I invented it together; it uses bending styles of all the four nations.”  Here Aang did a spinning flip and a rapid dodge with more ease than he had any other part of the kata, as it was most similar to the bending style he’d known the longest.

“You invented that?” Sokka asked, whistling.  “That’s impressive!”

“It was mostly Uncle,” Zuko deflected, blushing and pulling his braid aside so that he could rub his neck sheepishly.  “I just helped him model the more aerial moves, since he said that his old bones weren’t so good for those kinds of acrobatics anymore.  It was actually the first form I was able to bend with again, after… well, you know…”  Zuko’s uncomfortable expression morphed into a fond, reminiscent smile again as he kept talking.  “Uncle made me run through it so many times without bending that after a while I actually went through half the kata bending without realizing it, and then I suddenly just… wasn’t as afraid anymore.”

“That’s really sweet,” Ty Lee cooed, not having known that story.  “I love that you and General Iroh were able to bond like that.”

“Yeah… I just wish I could have appreciated those years more while they were happening…” Zuko sighed, and Mai walked up to plant a fond kiss against his soft lips.

“We’ll see your Uncle again soon,” she promised him, and Sokka absolutely did not wish that that was him nestling up against Zuko’s side.

“Hey guys!” Toph suddenly stomped into the courtyard, yelling loudly and eagerly.  “Look what Sugar Queen and I found in town!”

“The Boy in the Iceberg,” Sokka read, snatching the poster and turning it around so that the blank side was no longer facing towards them.  He rapidly finished scanning the description as the rest of them crowded in behind him to read along over his shoulder.  “This is exactly the kind of wacky, time-wasting nonsense I’ve been missing!”

“I don’t know…” Katara murmured, reprising the conversation she and Toph had been having all the way home.  “Do you really think it’s a good idea to go to a play about ourselves?”

Zuko had an entirely different set of reservations.

“If any of you have ever loved me at all, I’m begging you not to force me to go see the Ember Island players,” he whined, shoulders slumping.  “They butchered ‘Love Amongst the Dragons’ every year!  Their actors are second-rate theatre school dropouts, and they take so many liberties with the original source material!  It’s like they’re not even trying to convey the spirit of centuries of esteemed tradition!  I mean, there’s absolutely something to be said for adapting the old scrolls to explore a different perspective or appeal to a more modern audience, but this is just…”

“Great job,” Mai looked to them, unimpressed.  “You’ve gotten him on a theatre rant.  We’ll be here all day now.”

“And their costume design is just… I mean, I could do better with some old infantry uniforms and a basic sewing kit!” Zuko continued.

“Do you know that from experience?” Suki teased, and the way that Zuko’s face lit up in a vivid blush gave them all the confirmation they needed.

“I’m just saying, I only have one good eye and I can still make a straighter hemline,” he grumbled, and Suki knew that Sokka would agree with her about his little pout being adorable, even if her boyfriend wouldn’t admit it out loud.

“Well, we’re going to see it,” Aang interrupted decisively.  “We’ll wear disguises; it’ll be fine!”

“It will absolutely not be fine,” Zuko grumbled.  “But if you’re all going, I guess I’ll have to come make sure you don’t do anything stupid.”

“Family outing!” Sokka cheered, throwing his arms up eagerly.  “It’ll be fun!”

Zuko just snorted derisively and went inside to start on lunch.

[][][]

A few hours ago, Zuko thought that going to any Ember Island Players Production would be the last thing he’d want to do.  Then they’d found out that Riku and the Dragons of the 41st were being held at a prison a few hours away from Ember Island, and they’d gone to pull a stealthy rescue mission, deciding to just see the next showing of the Boy in the Iceberg the next day.  That was more than fine with Zuko, and the rescue was easy.  The guards at the prison were no match for the combined power of their stealth team of him, Suki, Ty Lee and Mai.  

The problem wasn’t the rescue. It was the people they’d rescued.  Their endless devotion to Zuko was starting to get on his nerves despite his best efforts at hiding it.  Honestly, he’d always been pretty independent, saying please and thank you to servants as a child and doing things himself, if at all possible.  He thought the servants were nice, sure, but he was a pretty private person who valued his alone time, and the reverence (or fear disguised as reverence, in most cases) they treated him and all of the other nobles with gave him a headache and put him on edge.  Now, after three years on a navy ship, he liked having people trying to do things for him even less.  

It wasn’t like he had a problem with Riku and his soldiers personally; they were good people.  But since they’d rescued them not even 24 hours earlier, they’d been treating him like a prince again.  Not even a prince, really; like he was the fire lord.  Which was stupid; Zuko wasn’t going to be the fire lord, Uncle was, no matter what everyone else seemed to think.  But honestly, if he had to hear one more person ask “Is there anything I can get you, my lord?,” he was going to lose his fucking mind. 

He had been lifting the pot onto the fire and helping Katara with lunch when one of the men had stepped forward and wrestled it out of his hands with a ‘please, let me, my lord.’  When he and Aang were taking a break from training for a few minutes under the midday sun, another had taken a palm leaf and tried to fan him.  When he was re-reading a well-loved copy of Love Amongst the Dragons (the proper version, not whatever in Agni’s name the Ember Island Players did to it) that he’d found in his old room, no less than five of them tried to bring him snacks.  It was putting him on edge, and if going to see what would no doubt be an awful play meant that he got a break from them for a few hours, it was starting to sound like a pretty nice option.

[][][]

Zuko regretted thinking that, as he seemed to have tempted fate.  He didn’t think The Ember Island Players could do any worse than “Love Amongst the Dragons,” but he was proven wrong.  

He would’ve said ‘I told you so,’ but if he were honest, it wouldn’t have actually made him feel any better- it was that bad.  There were no winners here.

“That was the worst thing ever,” Sokka finally broke the stunned silence as they walked back home.  “And not just on stage.  Like… ever.”  

“I wish the fire lord had murdered us all before we got to the theater.”  Katara was still gagging at the hypersexualization of her on-stage counterpart.

“That’s not funny,” Aang protested.  Katara looked him dead in the eyes.

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

“Either way, we’ve seen it now, and we have to live the rest of our lives with those cursed memories.”

“Ugh.”  Toph did not seem to be in the mood to elaborate, but she summarized their feelings well enough.

“Maybe if I stick my head underwater long enough, the oxygen deprivation will wipe the memory away,” Zuko groaned.  “Either way, I’m in no hurry to go back to getting fawned over.”

“How were you ever a prince?” Sokka was laughing now, the reminder of Zuko’s awkwardness around his loyal supporters buoying his mood. 
“It involved a lot of sneaking through hidden passageways to avoid people,” Zuko sighed.  “Plus, for most of my life, I was the son of the second prince, so it wasn’t as bad.  The nobles didn’t see any reason to suck up to me more than the bare minimum, and the servants were too terrified of my father and sister to interact more with any of us than was absolutely necessary.  The majority of our interactions were them asking me if I needed something and me telling them ‘no thank you.’”

“Yeah, Riku’s group don’t exactly seem to know how to take a hint,” Katara admitted.