Chapter Text
"The mutineers are secured, sir" Lieutenant Jee says. He addresses the words to Iroh, a not-subtle snub to the young prince that the child must notice. wild-eyed and frazzled, and only holding himself still with visible difficulty. "We have seven remaining unaffiliated crew members, of which we require six to man the ship at any one time. We can't continue like that."
Zuko's expression is an agonising mixture of fury, distress and shame.
Iroh sighs. "Prince Zuko?" he prompts.
The deer-rabbit in the the torchlight look is not reassuring. Nor is the open-mouthed, blank-eyed pause. "Stand by to await orders," Zuko bites out, after too long a wait.
There's a pause. Lieutenant Jee glances at Iroh questioningly, but Iroh merely tilts his head towards his nephew. Zuko is the commander of this vessel. It wouldn't be proper to intervene.
"Dismissed," Zuko eventually remembers to say, fumbling the word a little. Jee withdraws with thinly disguised relief.
The moment the door clicks shut, Zuko turns on his heel and strides to his futon. He throws himself down on it, covers his face with his arms and makes a sound like a half-strangled scream, then leaps to his feet and starts pacing again.
With all the neutral jing Iroh possesses, he makes himself stand and wait.
"Uncle--" Zuko turns on his heel and starts pacing again. His voice is sharp, strained. He doesn't continue the sentence.
Still too proud to ask for help, Iroh thinks. Even now.
The boy is fourteen. He hasn't forgotten that. And these things take time. But Zuko never used to hesitate about asking him for help. It's one of the many things that's changed since Ozai-- Well. No sense in rehashing what cannot be changed.
(No sense in rehashing Iroh's own inaction. Even if there were no better options is starting to sound increasingly thin as a rationalisation.)
"I don't know what to do!" Zuko bursts out, like he can't hold the words back any more.
At last. "What did your lessons in command teach you about situations such as this?"
"What lessons in command? Only Azula got to learn that."
Iroh had started to wonder about that. Even with professional agitators aboard it should have taken more than the five months they've been sailing to drive a crew to mutiny. "History, then."
"The only one I remember is Captain Qin, who killed his entire troop for rebelling. But--" he cuts himself off.
"And were Captain Qin's actions wise or unwise?"
"I don't know. I don't know! But they were horrible so they were probably wise."
"What makes you say that?"
Zuko gives a terrible broken laugh and makes, then aborts, some gesture. He starts pacing again.
"I thought sacrificing new recruits for ..." he waves his hands "...military gains ... was dishonourable! And the entire Caldera knows how wrong I was! So obviously Qin was the wise one here!"
It was dishonourable, oh it was so dishonourable. Only one person came out of that horrible day with his honour intact and it was not Ozai or General Bujing.
(It wasn't Iroh either. He remembers that every day he looks his nephew in the eye.)
" ... do i have to do it myself?" Zuko asks in a very small voice.
Iroh stares at his nephew in horror. The idea of forcing a fourteen-year-old to-- "You are always jumping to conclusions, Prince Zuko. We have military tribunals to deal with people such as mutineers and deserters." What Iroh doesn't know is whether the Tribunal will order the execution of the crew members for mutiny or merely order them whipped for not succeeding at their mutiny, and then assign the ringleaders to another ship captained by someone who has lost the Fire Lord's favour.
"... I didn't know that."
"That is something a ship's commander should definitely have known. Why did you not ask for lessons in command, knowing you would need them to run a ship?"
"Who would I even have asked? They didn't exactly send tutors with me, and even I know I'm not supposed to look weak in front of the crew."
For a moment Iroh is struck dumb. Oh, that stings. "I am literally here to be your teacher, nephew!"
"I didn't know that! You just decided on the spur of the moment that you wanted to come with me even though you didn't do anything wrong and can go home any time you want to--and you treat it all like a pleasure cruise! You didn't say why you were here!"
And this is true, for reasons that Iroh customarily tries not to think about. "I've been teaching you firebending."
"When you feel like it! For an hour a day! And most of what you say is to be patient and work less hard. I won't be able to catch the most powerful bender in the world by drinking tea and losing at Pai Sho! And what about all the other things I'm supposed to learn like history and finance and statesmanship?"
Does Zuko know how close to death he was, those first two months at sea? How uncontrolled his fire is now? "A man needs his rest, nephew. As for other lessons, it was your responsibility to ask for them, and you did not."
Zuko wheels round to stare at him. "What? I was supposed to ask?"
"If you need knowledge, there is no penalty in seeking it out."
"Yes there is!" Zuko roars. "Of course there is! I wasn't about to be ungrateful for the teachings you generously provide and get myself whipped for it."
Oh my poor boy. "I would not have whipped you! When have I ever punished you?"
Zuko glances away. "You weren't my teacher before. And you only had to see me twice a year back home. You never had to deal with my stupidity back then."
There are times when Iroh just wants to hold the boy and tell him, "I will make sure nobody ever hurts you again." But that's not his place, and life would make a liar of him soon enough if he were ever to do that. "Nonetheless, I am here to help you."
"Why didn't you stop me then? Before I messed up so badly the men thought mutiny was their only answer."
"I tried, dear nephew. I couldn't give you unwanted counsel, but did you really never listen to an old man's proverbs?"
"I always listened! But they don't make any sense, and they just left me feeling stupid."
"Because you don't stop to think about them! If you did--"
"I do," Zuko yells. "I do! I listen to everything you tell me! But they're about things like jasmine flowers and dragonbees and you don't even find either of those things on board a ship!"
"They are proverbs, nephew. They use lessons about nature to teach us lessons about life."
"So the thing you said wasn't actually about jasmine flowers?"
"Of course not."
"How was I supposed to know that?"
Iroh suppresses a sigh. His nephew really does have a lot to learn. "Because there are no jasmine flowers around--"
"That makes no sense!" Zuko yells.
"You need to learn patience," Iroh says. "Proverbs hold great wisdom for those who take the time to consider them. But you cannot expect to comprehend their meaning without thought and work. The proverb was about the scent of the jasmine flowers attracting dragonbees. What do you think that means?"
"That dragonbees like jasmine flowers, obviously."
Iroh suppresses another sigh. "And?"
"And ... if you want dragonbees in your garden you should plant jasmine? But I don't know why anyone would want dragonbees in their garden."
This time, Iroh does not quite manage to suppress his sigh.
* * *
"But warthog-flies always swarm to animal droppings and they don't smell like jasmine!"
Sigh.
* * *
"But I don't want dragonbees or warthog-flies following me around! This is why I shower!"
SIGH.
So all Iroh's sensitively-worded lessons on life and loyalty have been flying right over his nephew's stubborn, shaven, and apparently very literal head.
"So you haven't understood any of my proverbs?"
"I thought making me feel stupid was my punishment for screwing up. Since you don't like punishing people properly."
Oh Zuko, Iroh thinks, we really haven't understood one another at all. "I would never do that to you, my nephew. I thought you didn't understand because you didn't want to understand."
"Understand what! Why can't you ever say what you mean?"
Iroh actually does let himself sigh then. "The proverb was about kindness, Prince Zuko, and how it earns the loyalty of good people."
"But what has that got to do with dragonbees?"
"Forget the dragonbees! It was just a proverb, which clearly you are unable to follow." Ugh. Calm, Iroh. Calm. "The point, dear nephew, is that kindness to your crew would have gained more of their loyalties than all that shouting. I have never needed to shout at your crew to gain their obedience."
Zuko goes silent, at last, and looks away. Please think this through, dear child. Please, for your own sake and mine. "But ... everyone already knows that you're a great warrior and leader. So of course they're going to obey you whether you're nice or not. And they all know that I'm ... that I got sent away for screwing up. Of course I haven't earned their respect! And now I've screwed up even more, so it's going to be even harder."
"Yes, it will," Iroh says, because the alternative is to yell about fathers and cruelty. "But I know that you can do hard things. Maybe," he pauses for dramatic effect; Zuko understands dramatic pauses even if he doesn't understand basic figures of speech, "you could start by not being angry all the time."
Zuko frowns. "How do you just stop being angry? I try to hide it sometimes and that just makes it worse!" Why yes, Iroh did indeed witness the conflagration that resulted when Zuko tried to choke back his rage in the presence of a jumped-up commander named Zhao. It cost half the wardroom, including a few things that shouldn't even have been flammable, and Iroh had lost an entire afternoon trying to talk down a freaked-out teenage bender who was not even close to being comfortable around his own fire yet.
That had not been a good day.
"Perhaps you should try letting your anger go," Iroh says, before he can fully digest the silliness of this statement. Imperial firebenders, even young ones, are taught to fuel their anger, to guide and target it to make flames until it is reflex, a constant banked down sea of fire (of ire) in the belly to be tapped into and drawn on at will. That was why Zuko's flames were so weak when he was a sweet and rather silly child, and why he's so ill-equipped now to handle the storms of emotion foisted on him by the combination of trauma, betrayal and adolescence.
(Other schools of firebending would suit him far better, help him master himself much sooner. But that is a plan for far, far in the future.)
"How? How do you just turn off a feeling?"
"My nephew, nobody can turn off a feeling, and nor should they try. But have you already forgotten the purposes of meditation?"
"You know I do my meditation every day! It's almost the only training you let me do, and I'm not lazy."
"No, Nephew, you are not."
"Then what am I supposed to do? I can't get anything right, not even with you! I just want to go home," Zuko yells. There are tears running down his cheeks. "I .. I just want to reclaim my honour and go home. I want to see the turtleducks again, and talk to Mai, and practice with my dao and read play scrolls and steal mochi from the kitchens. And you just won't help!"
"Nephew--"
"I know I disobeyed you that day and you're angry but don't you think I'm capable of regaining my honour?"
"Please--"
"Do you think don't I deserve it? Is that why you--"
"No! I don't believe you ever lost it!"
And that is very high on the list of things that Iroh should never, ever, have said.
* * *
Here's the thing: Iroh deeply and sincerely loves his nephew and wants only healing and peace for him.
Here's the other thing: the White Lotus has plans for his nephew, which do not allow Iroh to help him find those things just yet.
Zuko is ... an unexceptional child. He is not exceptionally smart, not an exceptionally strong bender, or a gifted fighter or strategist. He is kind, but so are most children; impulsive, but so are many teenagers. Many commoners' children, if given the opportunities Zuko has had, would quickly exceed him. (Most would also be dead by Azula's hand, or Ozai's, sad to say, but that's a whole different problem.) He is however exceptionally persistent, and exceptionally easy to manipulate.
Zuko would not make a good Fire Lord; however, once broken of his self-will and with carefully selected advisers behind him he can be moulded into a more than adequate figurehead. And that persistence will be more than needed, to follow through once his advisers have got him to end the war.
Zuko's banishment was unjust; but it cast a perfectly-positioned pawn right into Iroh's waiting hands. And Iroh hasn't flinched: he's kept Zuko uninformed and off-balance enough to weaken his already rocky self-belief, isolated enough that he has nobody but Iroh to turn to, with the affection and validation every child needs just in reach if Zuko does what Iroh deems the right thing, and a measure of emotional manipulation and subtle sabotage if he does not. Eventually Zuko will come to accept that his own judgement cannot be trusted, and only Uncle knows what's best. And by the time he is Fire Lord, he will naturally turn to Iroh for guidance, will ask himself constantly, "what would Uncle do?", will accept the advisers the White Lotus surrounds him with simply because they come from Uncle. But the first step is that Zuko must learn to mistrust himself.
It is a long, painful game, and not a flawless one--the proper time to start would have before Zuko turned five--but (short of an Avatar emerging somewhere outside of the White Lotus's reach) Iroh has plenty of time.
So long, that is, as he doesn't weaken, and start giving Zuko the reassurance and support that he desperately wants to, and that Zuko desperately needs.
* * *
I don't believe you ever lost it
Zuko stares at him, and sits down hard on the edge of the futon. "You don't really think that," he says weakly. He wipes an arm hastily across his eyes. It catches on the tight skin at the edge of his scar, but Zuko shows no sign of noticing the small cut that it opens. "You don't."
My poor child, what am I doing to you?
Of course l do, he should be saying, with just enough shades of doubt in his voice that Zuko would drop the subject and never dare ask again. Anything else would shake beliefs that it is not yet expedient to have Zuko questioning. Iroh likes to think that he has grown into a good man; and then he sees himself treating Zuko with silent disapproval for trying to figure out how best to obey the last, only order his father gave him. Maybe he is a good man; he's coming to realise he is not a kind one.
But the thousands of lives that the White Lotus can save weigh more than the sacrifice of one child's happiness and peace. Back when Iroh had been a distant but fond uncle, it had seemed like a worthwhile exchange. Selfishly, Iroh had even been grateful, to have a chance to make up for the tens of thousands of lives that he himself had taken.
It was probably inevitable that he'd come to love the boy, just when he could least afford to let it cloud his judgement.
"My nephew," Iroh says heavily. "When Lu Ten was fourteen, he got into a similar dispute, in a meeting with the island representatives," he says instead. "It was about the number of prisoners who steal again on being released, and a minister proposed instituting the death penalty for prisoners who re-offend. Lu Ten pointed out that when someone has neither a home nor a job, they don't have many alternatives." Iroh chuckles, let's himself sit with the sorrow that memories of Lu Ten will always bring. "He wasn't respectful about it."
Zuko gasps, and flinches with almost his entire body. "Was he...? Uncle. I'm sorry. I never ... I didn't know. Was it ... bad?"
He's hunched in on himself and breathing too hard, trying to hide tears behind a hand that isn't even remotely steady. Iroh reaches out impotently, falls short of touching. "Zuko," he says, and then more firmly when he gets no response. "Zuko. I assure you, nobody harmed Lu Ten. He was fine."
"Really?"
"Really."
"You promise?"
"Yes, my nephew, I promise. This isn't that kind of tale."
Zuko sags. It's an extreme reaction, but what happened to Zuko was extreme. Iroh waits until he's calmed somewhat before continuing
"There was an uproar, of course. The justice minister in particular was furious, but Azulon just laughed and said that young people today think they know it all. He gave Lu Ten three days to propose something better and defend it to the representatives and the minister."
"And did he?"
"He did! He came back with, oh, about fifteen scrolls of statistics proving that it was cheaper and safer for all to provide jobs and shelter for prisoners on release than it was to lock them up again."
"Yeah well." Zuko shrinks into himself. "Lu Ten was a lot smarter than I am."
"Do you think he did all that without help? He did not. Fire Lord Azulon gave him a chance. His tutors helped him identify what information he would need to make his case. I wrote him letters of introduction to three nearby prisons, a handful of poorhouses and the Royal Archive, and his mother helped him structure his arguments and listened to him rehearse it."
"Oh." Zuko sucked in a long breath of air, let it loose like a sigh as he sagged. "I'm really glad he was okay."
Not the point that Iroh was going for, but he'll take it, for the time being. "Are you well now?"
Zuko nods, wipes his eyes again. Iroh sits on the bed next to his nephew, unspeakably gratified when Zuko leans his meagre weight against his shoulder. He looks up at the dark metal ceiling for inspiration as he prepares to simultaneously betray the Fire Nation and wreck the White Lotus's plans for his nephew. "Now. Why do you think I told you about that?"