Archive of Our Own ^beta

"i am the fire," says the fire.

His father breaks his arm when he is nine. 

He finds him practicing with his swords, the ones he isn’t supposed to play with anymore, and he gets mad because of course he gets mad - Zuko is doing what he explicitly told him Not to do, what did he think would happen?

Zuko tries to hide the swords behind his back, on instinct, and his father says "show me your hands," so Zuko shows him his hands, and his father says "this is why your bending is so poor, you waste it on nonsense like this, what good will this do you in a fight against a bender?" 

"I don’t know," Zuko tells him, even though what he wants to say is: it could do something, because I’m good at it. He doesn’t want to admit to his father or to himself that right now, he’s better with his swords than he is with his bending.

His father grabs his wrist and twists the swords out of his hand, knocking them to the floor, and then he pulls him forwards, pulls him off balance, and uses that to twist his arm behind his back hard - Zuko has to bend at the waist to try to keep the pressure off of it, muscles taught.

"Reach for your swords," his father tells him. Zuko doesn’t know what else to do - he reaches for his swords with his free hand, but his father doesn’t let up, bends his arm at the elbow and pins his wrist to his spine. It hurts. "What good will your swords do you now?" his father asks, voice calm and unbothered. Zuko just can’t seem to get his footing, heart pounding in his chest, in his throat. "If this is all it takes, you’re as useless as a non-bender. Giving all your attention to your useless swords instead of your bending."

His father’s grip on his wrist tightens, tightens, Zuko squeezes his eyes shut and then feels it snap; the rush of pain all up his arm comes after it, after the sound of the bone breaking pops in his ears. He cries out because he’s nine and scared, and his father puts a warning hand on his bent elbow, and Zuko claps a hand over his mouth. 

"Now look what you made me do," his father says, voice heavy and low with this disappointment that seeps down into Zuko’s very bones, "now you can’t practice either of them." He holds Zuko’s broken wrist tight in his hand, thumb rubbing the skin of his palm thoughtfully, like he’s contemplating doing something else. Zuko stays absolutely quiet, absolutely still; he doesn’t cry much anymore, not since his mother left, but he’s trying so so hard not to right now. 

He’s already disappointed his father enough.

The fingers on his elbow dig into the joint there, and for one terrified moment, Zuko wonders if he’s going to snap that one, too. The moment passes, and he doesn’t. Another moment passes, and his father lets go of his wrist.

Zuko falls forwards and onto his knees, catching his wrist in his other hand and cradling it to his chest.  His head pounds; his heart pounds. His father tells him to stand up, so Zuko stands up. He clasps his hands behind his back, even though it hurts so so bad.

"I don’t want to do these things," his father says, "but you force my hand, Zuko, you truly do. You never learn, unless I teach you." 

Zuko swallows, and nods, because he’s right - Zuko never learns. It always takes a few times before he really gets it, and sometimes his father has to go the extra mile to make it sink in. 

"If I ever see you playing with those things again," his father says, voice that scary kind of calm, "you will regret it. I assume you’ve learned your lesson."

“Yes, father,” Zuko says. 

Ozai nods, Zuko forces his fingers to curl into a fist, and bows. His father leaves, and Zuko sits down on the ground, cradles his broken wrist to his chest, and cries. 

(Still. Still, he gathers up his swords with his good hand, and takes them with him when he leaves.)

Breaking a wrist is not the worst thing that can happen, even when he has to duck his head and tell his uncle that he fell out of a tree, and it is not the worst thing that his father does to him. Zuko learns this four years later, and he continues to learn this for three years after that. He never had stupid nightmares about his stupid wrist, but Zuko wakes up four nights into his exile with fire on his skin and a thick, awful fear clawing at his throat. Stupid, stupid, trying to breathe and trying not to cry and trying not to touch his bandages for fear of messing them up. Stupid, stupid, childish, he thought he outgrew nightmares a year into his mom’s disappearance. 

He blames it on the pain of his burn, not quite healed and scarred over. Blames it on weakness or some kind of fucked up homesickness once it does. Doesn’t know what to blame it on anymore, when he wakes up with his father’s hand burning his lesson into his skin, with his knees pressing into the cold concrete of the arena, with his breath gone like he’s still fucking screaming. 

Spirits, he thinks, palms against his eyes as he sits up. Calm the fuck down. 

A broken wrist heals, even if it aches sometimes. This type of shit scars, scars down to the bone, and never stops aching. Like his wrist, it is something his father had to do. So he could learn. So he could - be better. Grow up. He repeats this for three years, carves it into every bit of his being, so that he doesn’t think about the way his uncle cried over him in the infirmary afterwards, holding Zuko’s hand and pressing it to his lips and saying I’m so sorry, I’m so, so sorry. 

He doesn’t like thinking about Uncle apologizing to him, because it’s Zuko’s own stupid fault he didn’t listen. When Zuko tells him this, the look on his uncle’s face makes sure that he never brings it up again.

A broken wrist is far from the worst thing somebody can do to a person, and so is a twelve year old blowing him into about a hundred different walls over the course of a few months. So is almost starving to death in the middle of the ocean. So is having his piece of shit ship blown up. So is getting his shit kicked up and down an arena by an earthbender.

His father has set the bar for him, and he’s set the bar high. So far, nothing has passed it.

That’s not to say that nothing has come close - there are many times in his life where some part of him thought he was about to die. When he was eight, an assassin broke into the palace and tried to stab him in his sleep in the middle of the night. He only lived because he was a light sleeper, and he’d woken up at the sound of someone opening his door -  living with Azule as a sister had taught him that if someone was coming into his room in the middle of the night, it probably wasn’t a good thing. The someone has snuck up and clapped a hand over his mouth, knife poised all dramatic and glinting in the moonlight, and Zuko had curled his legs up and kicked, and he had curled his fingers around their wrist and burned, and he had run out of his room as fast as he could, yelling for help.

When he’d gotten to Azula’s room, the one that had come for her was burnt up and singeing on the floor, and Azula was crying. He had brushed her hair out of her eyes and told her it was all okay, with the kind of confidence only an eight year old has.

Their father liked to talk about that night a lot, when they got older - about how Zuko had run for help and Azula had stayed and fought, never mind that they were children with simple fight or flight responses. The only half that mattered to him was the Fight. Zuko learned how to care about it quickly enough, in the end.

When Zhao and the pirates bombed his ship, though, he didn’t think he was about to die. He knew he was not going to die, no fucking way, because Zhao was about to invade the North and that where the Avatar was and so he still had some spirits-damed work to do. He couldn’t die yet. Especially not on his own damn ship.

The funny thing, if those sorts of things were funny, was that he almost did actually die that time, trapped under the water by debris and oil and the weight of his clothes. He’d made it to the surface, and then made it to shore, and Uncle had found him half-drowned and coughing up salt. He’d broken a rib or two and definitely fucked up his face, but he lived. He would never let himself be killed by Zhao, he had thought spitefully.

He almost died at sea, and then Uncle had almost died because he made a poisonous flower into tea, and then eventually he had almost died in the dry stretch of the Earth Kingdom desert. He had almost been killed by an assassin at seven and then almost killed by another at thirteen, three months into his banishment. He had almost died as an infant, he’s been told - lucky to be born, his father said. Zuko supposes that death has been trying to catch up with him his whole life. 

Zuko supposes that means he’s just a faster runner. His father has taught him well, and nothing, not his ship blowing up or the vulture crows circling above their raft on the ocean, has come close to his lesson. 

"my body is a graveyard," says the landscape.

“No offense, kid,” one of the regulars tells him one night, after he loses for the second time, “But you look kind of fucked up.”

Zuko doesn’t know how to respond for a moment - is he talking about his scar? Or the fight? Or just him in general?

“Not your -- “ the guy starts quickly and then cuts himself off, the way people tend to do when his scar is brought up, “I’m just saying, you don’t look like you’ve been eating super good. You sure you should be out here doing this shit?”

For a moment, Zuko is stuck. He doesn’t know what to do with this stranger's sudden, weird interest in his well being, so he reverts back to what he knows best. “I’m not a child,” he all but snaps, “I can take care of myself.”

The man doesn’t look convinced by either of his statements, and Zuko doesn’t know which half of that pisses him off more.

“Not saying you can’t. You’ve held up pretty good so far, even though you aren’t an earthbender. Zuko’s shoulders relax minutely, and he sees the man eyeing them, “But if you’re ever in a bad way, there’s this place down by Xing’s bakery where you can get a hot meal or two, and a place to stay the night. Refugees and the like, you know?”

“I-I’m not - ” Zuko starts to say, but doesn’t know how to finish the sentence. 

The guy is full on looking at him at this point, and Zuko feels his shoulders tighten up despite himself, feels his hand slide behind him in search of swords that aren’t there right now. The regular seems to notice this, and ducks down a bit - to make himself less intimidating? To give Zuko some space? Zuko doesn’t know, but he hates it.

He hates that this person is being nice to him even though Zuko is a stranger to him. He hates that it’s an Earth Kingdom citizen. He hates that this same man might hate him if he knew what Zuko actually was - he’s never felt ashamed for being who he is, never Not Wanted people to know. He hates that he looked at his scar and felt bad for him, felt the need to help him  - because people seeing that and doing that means it’s something Bad - must mean it, and Zuko cannot bring himself to delve too deeply there.

“Hey,” the regular says, and his big voice is irritatingly soft; it reminds him of Song, in some bizarre way, even though the two of them are nothing alike, “They help all kinds of people. It’s not an official government-regulated thing, if you’re worried about the police,” because if there’s one thing people who spend their nights at illegal fight club tournament things don’t like, it’s the police, “You’d be safe there.”

Zuko almost says I’m not safe anywhere, but that might blow his cover and he’s maybe a little slow, but he’s not stupid.

“Just think about it.”

Zuko swallows down the bile and discomfort in his throat, and turns back to the match, forcing his fingers to uncurl, “Fine,” he finally relents, “I’ll think about it.”

The regular lets out a sigh next to him, and pats him on the back. “Alright, kid,” he says. Zuko should leave.

He should leave, right now, but he’s running out of the little bit of money he had and there’s not much to catch out in the woods. He misses his uncle. He knows this man is trying to be nice to him, even if he hates being pitied.

So he goes to the homeless refugee house, or whatever the hell you would call it. Only for a meal. Maybe one night, if he’s even let in. He doesn’t know the protocol, so he leaves his ostrich-horse in the woods, and knocks on the door.

An older, distinctly earth kingdom woman opens it. She looks at him for a moment. He looks back, unsure of what to do, what to say.

“Um,” he says, “I was. A… friend? Told me that um, I could…” 

He doesn’t really know what he could say that wouldn’t sound like he’s outright asking for free charity, even if that’s basically what he’s doing.

Surprisingly, the woman’s mouth curls into a warm smile - it reminds him almost painfully of his uncle - and opens the door wider, gesturing for him to come in.

“Of course,” she says, “Our door is always open to those who need it,” he can almost feel eyes distinctly on his scar as he hesitantly steps in, “But you can never be too cautious. We’ve had a few people who have gotten quite… violent, quite quickly.”

She says it so loftily, like Zuko passed some sort of test even though he didn’t do shit. Like it’s safe to just… let him in. He’s the prince of the Fire Nation, and she just let him in. He swallows down the sudden mouthful of guilt that rises up his throat. Feels like he’s invading something he shouldn’t.

“Dinner will be ready shortly,” the woman tells him, leading him down a hall and into a room full of cots and people, “For now, just rest as long as you like. Most of the beds are taken, but you’re still welcome to stay the night.” 

He shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be here. 

He bows, correcting his hands at the last second. He doesn’t know if firebenders are welcome here - all kinds of people, the regular had said, but Zuko isn’t stupid. He bows like an Earth Kingdom citizen, and feels like a fraud.

The woman smiles, and bows back. 

He carefully avoids looking at anyone, and finds a space against a wall, near a window. Two windows, one door; he can get out if he needs to. 

He jumps at the sudden hand on his shoulder, and the person - a woman, younger than the one who welcomed him in - pulls back quickly.

“Here,” she says, and he sees that she’s offering him a blanket. A complete stranger, and she’s offering him a blanket. 

“Oh, um, thank you,” he stutters, like a child, and the girl smiles at him. Doesn’t try to speak to him further, thank the spirits. 

Dinner is served, and it’s not fancy, but it’s warm. It reminds him of his ship, the last few days of the month before they would go to port to restock, and they were down to their last bit of food. The cook had to get creative, sometimes. 

He eats against the wall, in his little bit of space he has greedily claimed, and hopes that nobody will come near him. He doesn’t want these people to see him, doesn’t want them to speak to him. Doesn’t want them to catch him in the act, somehow. He has stolen before, but he doesn’t like feeling like he’s stealing from these people, too. 

He eats his food, and he stays against the wall. Conversation comes and goes, but mostly goes. 

Just as he’s taking his last bite, the door bursts open, and a man staggers through, the woman who opened the door on one side and another man on the other. He can barely stand up, and he’s making these awful sounds. 

“Please,” the other man is saying, “Please, help him, he’s — his arm — please.”

Zuko’s breath catches — the man’s arm is burned, wrist to elbow, bright red and vivid against his skin. Zuko suddenly wishes that he hadn’t just eaten. 

“Please,” the first man is saying, again and again. One of the women who helped hand out the food rushes in, some water and some bandages in her hands, and helps them prop the man up against the wall. The other people in the room seem to collectively move back, giving them room or maybe not wanting to see it all. 

The man is still moaning in pain; Zuko wonders if this is what he sounded like, in front of all those nobles and his father, and shivers. He can’t look away. 

The woman with the bandages looks up at the older one, eyes wide and panicked. “Should I — do I clean it? Or should I bandage him up —“

“Just help him,” the first man shouts, and the girl shrinks back.

Nobody knows what to do, Zuko realizes suddenly. This isn’t a hospital; they’re not like Song and her mother. Nobody knows how to treat a burn this bad, this fresh, this severe. 

Shit. Shit. He forces down the feeling of dread rising in his chest, and stands up. 

“You have to clean it first,” he says. 

He feels everyone’s eyes look his way. He feels everyone’s eyes look at his scar, watches the man’s eyes widen as he just fucking stares.

“I can show you how, if you want,” he offers before he can think about it, because if the man with the arm doesn’t stop crying soon he’s going to throw up.

The uninjured man barely hesitates — Zuko’s scar has made his mind up for him. Zuko crosses the room and bends down next to him. Spirits, it’s even worse up close. It smells just like he remembers, awful and raw.

He lifts the man’s arm carefully by the hand, where it isn’t burned. The man cries out, and Zuko breathes a soft apology. 

“Do you have any water?” He asks.

“Water?” The man repeats blankly. Zuko pushes his irritation down. 

“To clean it, and then wrap it,” he turns to the young woman, “If you have any burn cream or aloe vera, that would also help.”

The woman hands him the bucket of water and bandages, and hurries to the kitchen. 

Is this how Uncle felt? he wonders, watching the man’s lidded eyes. Is this how Zuko looked? He doesn’t remember a lot of what happened after the Agni Kai, but he remembers Uncle, and he remembers pain, and he remembers Uncle talking him through the treatment months afterwards, changing his bandages and making sure it didn’t get infected. Those first few months were fucking awful. 

They don’t have any burn cream, so the older woman sends the younger out to buy some, even though they don’t need it immediately. Carefully, and as clinically as he can manage, Zuko helps treat the burn. He flinches every time the man flinches, but his hands are steady. Think of it like a fight, he hears his father tell him, keep your hands steady or risk losing — losing his composure, losing the man’s arm, losing something . Slowly, the man’s cries die down. The younger woman bursts back through the door with the burn cream, and together they wrap the man’s arm up, wrist to elbow. He loses consciousness near the end, but Zuko tells the other man that it’s fine, his body is just exhausted, and needs to rest.

“Thank you,” the man says, gripping Zuko’s arm so tight it might leave bruises, “Spirits, thank you so much.”

Zuko feels strangely like he might cry. “Well,” he says, too uncomfortable to accept his gratitude, “As long as you keep his arm elevated and keep using the cream while it’s healing, he should be fine.”

“Will it…?” The man trails off, eyes darting to Zuko’s scar. Either unwilling or unable to actually say the word.

“Probably,” Zuko says, “But probably not as bad as… as mine.”

The relief in the man’s face stings, just a bit, but it doesn’t sting as much as his friend’s arm does right now. He can’t blame him. He doesn’t. 

“Thank you,” the man says again, and bows.

Startled, Zuko bows back. “Of course.” 

Zuko goes back to his wall. Nobody follows too closely, but the people whose eyes he catches smile at him. It’s like a win for one of them is a win for all of them. They share their pain, and now Zuko shares some of it with them. 

Now that the danger has died down for now, people talk, and some of them talk to him. Like he’s a part of them now; like he deserves their stories, or deserves to share their pain. 

He doesn’t know what to do with these people’s stories, with these people’s pain. So he just kind of… holds it. Takes it in his hands and feels it, and then doesn’t know how to let it go. Doesn’t know where to put it. Doesn’t know how to put it down. 

A woman tells him about how she lost her husband, and he feels it in his bones: what it’s like to be alone. How you don’t know what to do, to fill the absence. An older man hobbles when he walks, and when he catches Zuko watching he waves off his apologies and says that his leg got badly burned when he was younger, and even though it’s all healed up, as well as it can be, he can still feel it when he walks. It’s something bone-deep, he says, and it never really goes away. He looks at Zuko’s scar when he says it, and Zuko doesn’t look away. He wonders if this man has ever looked at his leg and wondered what it would look like without the scar, if he has ever compared his left leg with his right and ached at the difference. He doesn’t ask. He thinks he already knows the answer. 

He only stays for one night, true to his word and for once, himself. 

He says goodbye to the man on his way out, and reminds them to change the bandages. His friend is still dead asleep, but the man says “I’ll be sure to tell him what you did for him; it was a great service.” 

Zuko doesn’t know what to say to that, so he doesn’t say anything at all. Bows, and leaves. The old woman grips him softly by the elbow, and tells him to take care of himself, and that he’s always welcome. 

He tells her thank you. 

He’s two blocks away when he realizes that nobody ever asked for his name, and that he didn’t feel compelled to tell anyone. He was nameless, and it didn’t matter. 

He doesn’t know what to feel about that, so he folds it up and pushes it down and decides not to feel anything. 

He hopes the man’s arm heals better than his own scar did. It wasn’t as bad as his, so it won’t be as bad. Bizarrely, Zuko is… not happy for him, because it’s a permanent burn scar, but glad that it won’t be as bad. Glad that he won’t carry the same thing that Zuko will, or at least not as heavy of a load. 

Spirits. 

There’s this kid that he sees on his way out of town to get his ostrich horse, who can’t be more than eleven, tweleve at most, sitting on the side of the road with a metal bowl in front of her. Begging. Like he and Uncle did back before they split up. He thinks of the man who made Uncle dance for a coin like a circus animal and is suddenly fiercely afraid of the same man doing the same thing to this kid he doesn’t know.

She looks up at him and she has bright eyes even though her clothes are dirty. She has dark hair. She reminds him of Azula at age what, seven? And it makes him ache. If Azula was stuck out here like this, like him, would she ever resort to begging? She would probably die before she would ask her enemies for help. But this kid is not Azula, and neither is he, and she’s looking up at him so hopeful and so resigned, like she’s done this dozens of times today and there are only three coins in the bowl.

This girl might be dead a year from now. Her eyes are so bright. There were no children like this in the Fire Nation when he left. He hopes there aren’t any like this now. He thinks that his father would say that this is one more reason that the people of the Earth Kingdom are peasants and savages - they can’t take care of their own children. ( But neither could Ozai, some traitorous part of him whispers. Look at you. He pushes that shit down, too).

His father isn’t here. He feels like he’s eleven years old and picking up the swords his father just told him to stop using, cradling his broken wrist against his body. He feels through his pockets and finds what he can - which isn’t much, considering he just spent the night at a homeless refugee house place because he couldn’t afford his own food, but her tired little face lights up regardless. He drops the four coins he has, and feels his something in his chest just fucking ache. 

This isn’t greatness, he thinks. This isn’t what it’s supposed to be.

He tries to smile weakly at the girl, because he thinks that’s what you’re supposed to do here, and thinks that it must look fake and unpracticed. She smiles back, world-fucking-weary, and he stands up and walks away. 

"you’re welcome," says the landscape. gold bodies on the red, red ground. i paint in the wounds.

The thing is, if he thinks about it long enough - Song and Li and Li’s village and the man with the bum leg and the little girl begging in the streets of her own nation. It’s all wrong. It has to be all wrong. But if it’s wrong, it means that all of it is wrong. Everything is wrong. If the war is wrong it means the Firelord is wrong, and it means Zuko’s father is wrong and it means that what he did is wrong

That’s not something he can bring himself to think about, all the way. If the war is wrong, it means his scar is wrong and if his scar is wrong it means the war is wrong. His nation is wrong. Everything he’s been trying to do his whole life would be wrong. And what is he supposed to do with that? He can’t go back to the way it was - and that’s all he’s ever wanted: to go back to the way things were before.

What has he been doing all this time? If the ends is bad, that makes the means even worse, doesn’t it? All he has ever done is try to do what he’s supposed to do, even if he got in his own way a few times. All the time he spent trying to live up to whatever he thought he was supposed to live up to - this shit, this mess that permeates the entire Earth Kingdom, has just… been there. It’s been there all his life, and he never knew

What is he supposed to do with that? What is he supposed to do with his name in the face of all of this?

Never forget who you are, his mother told him. He’s not sure who the fuck that is, anymore, and he’s so, so sorry.

"grant me freedom from objects," says the painting.

When Zuko gets home, he finds that he doesn’t quite fit right. 

He steps off the boat when they reach the harbor, and it doesn’t feel as relieving as he dreamed it would. He walks through the same halls he did three years ago, and they’re familiar. But they’re smaller. They’re colder. It doesn’t quite feel like it used to. He doesn’t know if it’s because it changed, or because he did.

His room is just as he left it, right down to the folds of his bed. All his old clothes are too small now. The bed is bigger than he remembers it being - maybe he was just spoiled, back then. It’s soft, and it’s too soft, and halfway through his first night back he curses, throws his pillow on the floor and drags the blankets with him. He wakes up to a very uncomfortable looking servant standing above him, looking all apologetic and like he wants to be anywhere but here.

“Your majesty,” the servant says, “Um. The homecoming ceremony will begin soon.”

“Oh,” Zuko says, sitting up. He’s still too groggy to have the decency to be embarrassed, or wonder what servant gossip will spread about him. 

“I’m here to assist you in - “

“Oh,” Zuko breathes again, comprehending, “No, it’s fine. I can dress myself.”

The servant just looks at him like he has no idea what to do with that, and Zuko sighs, feeling suddenly and viscerally out of place. “I don’t think I have the proper armor.”

The servant’s eyebrows furrow, “Of course some was made for you.”

“Right, of course. Just… give me a second.”

He stands up, and the servant goes to make his bed for him, even though that’s what Zuko was just about to do. They dress him, and do his hair - tie it up into a topknot, and they all ignore the way it just barely stays; his short hair is an obvious source of shame, an indicator of his time as an exile, as a traitor. 

They wash his face for him, and help slide on his shoes. Where before it felt natural, comfortable, it now just feels like Too Much. He’s the prince of their nation, he can put his own shoes on. It makes him uncomfortably aware of how different his life was a month ago. 

Can you forget a lifetime of habits in three years? He walks out in front of his nation, and the nobles who probably talked shit about him for all the time he was away cheer for him, and it all feels so Off he supposes that maybe you can. 

When he was younger, back after Mom left and he felt himself shrink under the weight of his father and sister, he used to sneak around the halls and listen to the servants gossip. The servants loved to gossip, and Zuko loved to listen. He liked the feeling of knowing things that he wasn’t supposed to, shit other people didn’t. Affairs, who was falling in love with who, what cities were being invaded that week and what that would mean for whatever noble family had a role in it. Once, he heard them talking about his uncle, back before he got back from Ba Sing Se. Coward , they had whispered. Deserter. It’s shameful, giving up like that. As if they understood anything, Zuko remembers thinking, nails against his palm, as if they could ever understand anything.

It’s something he never really grew out of; something he grew into, more than anything, whatever the hell that says about him. It helped. With Avatar-catching and stealing food and the rest. He has a lot of free time, now that he’s not busy running a ship or washing dishes or serving tea, and so he finds himself slipping back into old habits. 

He’s the talk of the whole damn Fire Nation, right now. The servants have a lot to say about him.

He’s different, he hears. Less civilized. It’s that time at sea, around those thugs and sailors. It’s all that time in the Earth Kingdom, all those peasants in Ba Sing Se and Agni knows where else he’s been. 

For some reason, he doesn’t care nearly as much as he did when they were talking about Uncle. He might have, a year ago. Two years ago. Back before - before. He doesn’t, now. 

Came back all changed. 

There’s a party he has to go to a few nights later, some official welcoming back, or maybe someone’s birthday. Zuko doesn’t know. He lets the servants dress him up, and is disappointed when he hears that Mai can’t make it, but Azula can. Of course.

If noble parties were intimidating as a child, they’re strangely more so now. Once, back when he was a kid, he had talked Lu Ten into sneaking him some champagne - “Uncle told me you had some when you were like ten!” - and he had almost coughed it up when he tried it, he and Azula crouched behind one of the curtains so their mother wouldn’t find them. She had laughed at him, and then done the exact same thing. 

There is no older cousin to sneak him Adult Drinks, this time, so he just grabs some for himself. Who’s going to stop him? He’s the fucking Crown Prince, and if he has to be at this party and Mingle, he’s going to have some disgusting champagne. 

He gets caught up in some conversation with some older nobleman who wants to tell him all about his blossoming business and how it’ll definitely help the nation’s future in - “What do you sell, again?” Zuko asks him.

“Land,” the man smiles, “Acres and acres of it.”

“Oh,” Zuko says, taking a sip of his champagne; spirits, it’s so gross. Shit, he has to sound interested. This man is trying to pitch to him early, or whatever, secure his Support before he becomes Firelord; vaguely, he wonders if he’s tried this pitch with his father or not. “What, um, kind of land?”

“I’m so glad you asked,” the man says, and holds out a bottle to refill Zuko’s glass; Zuko gratefully accepts it. He launches into a spiel about the war and the greatness of their armies, and all the valuable resources they gain everyday, and about the colonies and about how there are so many citizens interested in owning property beyond the capital. 

Something about it catches Zuko’s attention. “So, what, you take the Earth Kingdom land that we conquer, and you sell it?”

The man smiles his achingly wide smile, “Precisely.”

“What about the people, you know, living on it?”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“You don’t conquer land, you conquer people. Do you sell the people, too?”

It must come our harsher than he means it to, because the man’s disarming smile wilts for a moment, “Of course we aren’t slave drivers, your majesty,” he says, laughing it off with a wave of his hand. “The people are thoroughly compensated.”

Zuko thinks about the girl that looked like Azula, begging on the street corner, and wonders if maybe she didn’t come from that village after all. He takes another long drink of his nasty fucking champagne to hide his sudden urge to hit something. Or maybe scream.

The conversation continues, and he nods at what he hopes are all the right times. 

“You know, your majesty,” he says some time later, drawing Zuko’s attention, “I must say, he scar isn’t nearly as bad as everybody said it was.” 

He smiles, like it’s a compliment, and maybe if Zuko was better at reading people he could hear whatever bullshit hidden meaning there might be. He grips his glass so hard it hurts, digs his nails into the palm of his right hand, and forces out a “Thank you.”

Then, he turns and leaves the conversation without looking back. 

Azula catches him halfway through his next glass of just awful champagne, and eyes him up and down. “Don’t get wasted, Zuzu,” she warns, “You’ll just embarrass yourself.”

“Fuck off,” he says, and she grins, amused. “I don’t know how to do this.”

“What, speak to people?”

“All the little politics and formalities and shit. I was too young to learn them before I left, and then when I was supposed to learn them, I was off in the middle of the ocean.”

Azula makes a sort of mock-sympathetic noise, “You mean your little sailors didn’t teach you how to make small talk?”

If Zuko wasn’t so tired of it all, maybe he would get angry - angrier than he already was, he supposes, because it’s always there, lately, right under his skin. It was always burning white hot, those three years at sea, but its been waning for a while now, maybe since the North. Maybe since Be Sing Se. He doesn’t know what to do with it anymore, but he’s not going to waste it on Azula at this stupid noble party that Father didn’t even have to show up for. 

“No,” Zuko says, “Not fuckin’ really.”

Azula wrinkles her nose, “They sure taught you how to curse, though. You’ll scandalize everyone here with that mouth - Lady Hana might just fuckin’ faint.”

Despite himself, Zuko snorts into his glass. Azula’s lips quirk for half a moment, and then they both seem to remember who and where they are.

Azula snatches the glass from his hand, downs the rest of it, and sighs. “I’ll cover for you, if you want to leave.”

Zuko wants to be suspicious - is suspicious, especially after the shit she pulled with Father - but he’s also tired of the endless, endless chatter of people with no tangible idea of what is actually happening in the world. The disconnect between his nation and all the others is getting clearer and clearer every day he spends back home, and it makes him feel something that he doesn’t like to think about. 

“Fine,” he says, “Don’t tell anyone I threw up or anything like that.”

She grins, razor sharp, but concedes with a nod of her head. “Don’t say I never did anything for you.”

Zuko would never say that. “Sure.” 

He leaves the party, and he breathes in so deeply that he can feel the night air in the back of his throat. 

It tastes better than the stupid champagne. 

"i will help you," says the paint. 

He has a lot of free time, now, and he doesn’t know what to do with it. He lets Mai take advantage of the power that he has, and lets his sister drag him around, and visits his uncle in his prison cell. He thinks about things; he has a lot more space for his thoughts to float in the big, wide palace. The ship was always too small for anything more than a passing thought, and the Earth Kingdom made him think too much. There’s room, here, if he keeps it quiet.

He thinks about his uncle a lot, and he thinks about Li and about Li’s brother who “would probably like you” if they had ever met. He thinks about the tournaments, and the man whose burn he helped wrap, and about the regular who cared enough about his general wellbeing and health to recommend him help. 

If you wanna move rock, be one. He wonders if that applies to all the elements - like, if you wanna spark a flame, be a flame? If you wanna fly, be the fucking air? Maybe he’ll ask the Avatar someday, if he’s still alive, if he ever sees him again. He doesn’t know whether or not he wants to. 

He spars with his sister one day, because they both have nothing better to do now that the Avatar Is Dead, and she can still goad him into doing shit all these years later. Sometime about halfway through, when she almost shears half his hair off and laughs and says oops , he realizes that his sister isn’t a flame. She’s a lightning bolt. She’s fast and precise and not like the way Zuko bends at all. She’s all perfection; perfect form and perfect delivery where Zuko is sloppy and reactive.

She’s quick, and Zuko slides his foot across the floor like he’s seen earthbenders do in their matches, and he obviously can’t move the ground like they can but he can still scorch it, can still surprise someone. For the first time ever in a match between them, Azula loses her footing.

She stumbles.

The moment is over as quick as it started, and Zuko still loses. But he sees it. And he knows she felt it, too.

“Where’d you learn that?” she asks him afterwards while Zuko is swallowing down the rest of his water.

“Learn what?”

“That thing you did with your leg. It’s not a move we ever learned here.”

“I don’t know,” he shrugs, even though he kind of does, “I must’ve picked it up somewhere.”

“Picked it up,” she repeats disdainfully, like it’s funny, “At sea, or in the Earth Kingdom?”

“Does it matter?” Zuko bristles, and he knows that he bristles. Instinctually on the defense, like he always is around his sister.

She looks at him for a long moment, like she’s trying to pick him apart. He looks right back. 

“I guess not,” she eventually says, “It didn’t do much for you anyway.”

It made her stumble. He knows that, and she knows that, and he’s not sure what that means, but it must mean something.