Chapter Text
On an island, on the very top of the oldest volcano, one-hundred years past the time of Sozin, a child stood up for his countrymen.
He was right to, you see- the old man shocked by his insolence should have been more shocked at his own ability to throw away lives like so many burnt-up embers- but he paid the price all the same when the same old man demanded he fight for his honor.
And when the child stood up to defend his actions, bathed in Agni’s light and allowing his prayer shawl to slip from his slight shoulders unimpeded, he found not the old man, but his father, who had intended to give up his countrymen as piglet-lambs for the slaughter, a sacrificial offering the spirits never asked for and did not want.
“Stand,” his father said, “stand, and fight.”
And the child did not hold himself in the regard that he held his countrymen.
And the child fell to his knees and begged mercy.
And the child, still swathed in the gold light he had been granted at birth, received no such succor.
“Please, Father, I am your loyal son-”
“You will learn respect, and suffering will be your teacher.”
And the child burned.
“Zuko, Zuko, can you hear me-” Iroh leans over and- spirits, he has never seen a burn this bad, not in decades of campaigns-
The air smells of cooked flesh.
Zuko’s face is charred black.
The child moans, tries weakly to move away from the physician who is preparing a basin of water. Iroh bites his lip till he tastes blood, holds his nephew in place, and feels his broken heart wrench into dust when the child screams.
“Opium.” Dr. Aito grunts. A nurse forces Zuko’s mouth open and drips a liquid down the back of his throat- one, two, three, four-
By the time she gets to ten, Zuko is unconscious.
Iroh has only ever seen ten drops used on soldiers to ease pain that could not be fixed.
On soldiers who did not make it off the field.
“Doctor-” Iroh lets out, strangled.
Aito shakes his head, grim, and finishes applying the thick balm to Zuko’s face. “We need to move him, now.”
Zuko startles awake from the cold, dark ceremonial tiles and stares straight up into a golden-yellow sky.
“Hello, child.” A woman says.
Zuko scrambles up. A woman with flowing white robes and light hair like golden thread and unlike anything Zuko has ever seen before sits at the bank of a river, and looks at him with steady, copper eyes.
Copper eyes that look so familiar, so familiar it hurts-
“Mom?” He chokes out and falls back on his knees. Is he- is he dead? Is this the spirit world?
The woman smiles softly and tucks her light hair behind her ear. “You are my child, yes, but I am not your mother.”
“I- I don’t-”
“I simply take the shape of that which you love most.” She says. “Come and sit by me.”
Zuko does. He sits by the water and stares at his reflection in the clear blue water. Half of his face looks as it always does- the same as Father’s, with pale, blemish-less skin, dark hair. The other half-
“You are injured, my child.” The woman says, her voice tight with pain. “And thus, so am I.”
She turns, and Zuko sees that her cheek drips red and burnt black. He stands back up, throat closing in a familiar panic. His left eye is beginning to burn hot.
“What happened to me?” He whispers. “Where am I? Who are you?”
“You were burned.” She says simply, allowing the blood to drip from her cheek unimpeded into the clear water. “Where you are does not matter.”
The woman stares directly at him and the gold of her eyes burn too bright.
“And you have known me your entire life.”
On Iroh's second sleepless night in the infirmary, Zuko wakes.
“Lu Ten?” he mumbles, garbled, staring at Iroh from under one half-lidded eye. “Lu Ten-”
“No, Zuko, it’s me,” Iroh murmurs, gently sweeping back what remains of his dark hair. “You’re going to be alright.”
“Lu Ten’s here.” Zuko insists, voice thick.
Iroh swallows, swipes roughly at the tears that seem ever-present in his eyes before they can get anywhere near Zuko’s bandages. “Well, tell him I miss him very much, and that I love him.”
Zuko’s hazy eye focuses on Iroh for just a second. “He misses you too. He says- he says he’s sorry.”
And with that, Zuko collapses back into the bed. Iroh hovers a hand over his forehead and knows deep in his bones that the heat radiating off of him is not simply Zuko’s inner flame burning bright.
“The fever’s started.” Dr. Aito confirms grimly. He turns behind him, ordering his assistants. “Get me a washcloth, a basin of cold water, and make me some willow bark tea.”
“Is he-“ Iroh can’t even bring himself to say it.
The look on Aito’s face is dangerously close to treasonous as he lifts up the bandages and checks Zuko’s burn. “It’s infected. I’m going to do everything I can, but…”
He keeps talking, but Iroh can’t hear anything.
Zuko can’t bring himself to remove his arms from around Lu Ten’s midsection long enough to actually look him in the eyes when he asks, incredulous, “What are you doing here?”, so he says it to his chest instead.
Lu Ten chuckles and leans down to ruffle Zuko’s loose hair. “I can check up on my baby cousin, can’t I?”
“Not a baby!” Zuko yells, and for a second, he’s six years old and giggling and Lu Ten is chasing him down a hallway.
“Of course not. Big and strong, you must be, what, ten, now?”
“Twelve!” Zuko says indignantly, and this slight on his honor infuriates him enough that he pulls away from Lu Ten and crosses his arms over his chest, standing to his full height.
But then Lu Ten focuses directly on his burn. And Lu Ten’s teasing expression slides directly off his face and he kneels down, placing a gentle hand on Zuko’s unmarked skin and turning his jaw to look at the wound.
“What did he do to you?” He breathes, low and raging, and if they weren’t- wherever they are- Zuko is sure he would have breathed fire.
Zuko squirms out of his grasp and turns away. He still isn’t sure, really. The woman had said he wasn’t dead, but- Zuko reaches up and tentatively feels the burn. It doesn’t hurt, but his hand comes away sticky with blood and pus and burnt black bits. He examines his hand as if it’s attached to another body.
Maybe it is.
“Agni Kai.” Zuko says monotonically. Lu Ten makes a choked sound.
“You can’t- you’re not old enough.”
Zuko shrugs mechanically and sits back down by the water. He lets the current wash away the evidence from his hand and sits very still. Father had never said anything about how the legal age to participate in an Agni Kai was sixteen. Never seemed concerned.
Lu Ten sits down next to him. “Ozai didn’t care, huh?”
“I disrespected the Fire Lord.”
“Oh, cuz.” Lu Ten knocks his shoulder, and Zuko roughly wipes off the tears blurring his vision enough to look over at him. “If you knew how many times a day I disrespected my dad.” Lu Ten says softly.
“He really misses you.” Zuko mumbles. “Why’d you have to leave?”
“I’m sorry, Zuko.” Lu Ten murmurs. “I didn’t want to. Even the Crown Prince of the Fire Nation cannot escape fate.”
Zuko stares at his reflection in the stream, and realizes with a jolt, that despite the warmth and light diffusing through every blade of grass, every molecule of air, the sun is missing from the sky.
They’ve stripped Zuko of the light sleep tunic they first put him into when he arrived here, and Iroh can now see, firsthand, what he has permitted to happen under his nose. Scars cross his nephew’s chest and wind up his shoulders. Five fingerprints are permanently marked into the back of his shoulder, a light burn inked on the underside of his arm.
Firebenders do not burn easily. These were not accidents.
Last year, Zuko told him the broken wrist he sustained was due to a fall from the tree in the garden. Iroh stares at the splotches of darkened, rough skin around where the break occurred and wonders why he never prodded at that thin story.
The fever has worsened considerably. Zuko hasn’t woken again since he yelled about Lu Ten. Aito keeps him sedated, and Iroh allows it to happen.
It may be selfish of him, but Iroh cannot watch this child suffer for however longer Agni chooses for him to remain on this Earth.
Ozai appears in the doorway as Aito is debriding the wound. He watches impassively as the doctor carefully cuts away the deadened flesh, tries to prune out the infection.
Iroh can only ensure that the child is well and truly unconscious before he gets up and leaves the room, sliding the door shut in front of Ozai’s face.
“How dare,” he seethes, “how dare you come here. As if you care.”
“I hear the wound is infected,” Ozai says as if he is discussing the crop yield in the colonies and not the fate of his only son. “the boy may not have long left to live-"
Iroh has a foot hooked around his brother’s weak ankle and a fist full of flames held to his left eye before he manages to register that Ozai is the Fire Lord, and that Iroh could be put to death for treason.
The Dragon of the West thinks about the burn that wraps around Zuko’s collarbone and decides neither of these truths concern him.
“If that child dies, brother,” Iroh says, low and raging. “I swear upon Agni and the crown of every Fire Lord that has come before you that you will join him on that pyre.”
Ozai hasn’t even bothered summoning a flame.
Ozai just laughs.
An odd heat has spread from Zuko’s chest, through his arms, and out into his fingertips.
“Lu?” He gasps out. He reaches up. Blood has stopped flowing from the wound; it now bleeds sluggish and thick, and a deep pain in his cheekbone is thumping in time with his heart.
Lu Ten looks sad, like when he left for the war. “I’m not going anywhere, Zuko.” He promises. “I’m staying right here.”
“What’s happening to me?”
Lu Ten doesn’t answer for a long time, but when he does, he refuses to meet Zuko’s eyes. “I’m not going anywhere,” he repeats. “it won’t be like mine. You won’t be alone.”
A heavy weight settles deep in Zuko’s chest, but something like relief floods his head. He won’t have to worry about training, about how Azula is constantly better, constantly winning Father’s affection, his approval. She’s the fitter heir, anyways. And maybe, maybe, maybe-
“Will I see Mom?” He croaks out.
Lu Ten wraps an arm around his shoulders and presses him tight to his side. “I don’t know, Zuko. But I’m here. I won’t leave you.”
It happens late at night, in the absence of Agni’s blessing.
Iroh holds Zuko’s hand to his forehead and prays for intercession from any spirit that will listen, anyone at all.
It doesn’t ease the rattling breath that just barely makes it out of his lungs. The inflamed, angry red skin that has crept down his face and neck, sending shooting tendrils into his chest. The tears that drip from his good eye unimpeded.
Iroh begs mercy anyways.
Zuko’s chest feels tight. Like a band is stretched taut around his lungs.
“It will be over soon, child.”
Zuko startles up. The woman has returned. She floats a foot off the ground, and it almost hurts to look at her. The front of her white robes are clasped together with a circular pin, tendrils radiating out, and something in Zuko’s fever-hazy brain clicks.
“Agni.”
He falls prostrate on the ground, whispering every prayer, every devotion, his mother taught him.
“Rise, my child.”
Zuko does, unsteadily, but keeps his eyes averted. Spirits are not to be trifled with.
“I don’t feel well.” He tries to confess, but the words get lost somewhere on the way out of his mouth. The burn has spread down his neck and onto his chest, and his heart is starting to beat an odd tapped-out tune.
“Look at me.”
Zuko forces his eyes up. The glow has dissipated somewhat, and molten coppery-gold of the woman’s eyes are so much like Mom’s-
“Zuko, son of Ursa and Ozai, line of Sozin and Roku.” The woman says as if she is musing. Something about that sentence strikes odd with Zuko, but Agni has already moved on. “Your forefathers have devastated the balance of this world, and now your own father has seen it fit to strike down his firstborn in a sacred ceremony that you were not yet old enough to participate in.”
Zuko wants to say something- maybe apologize, prostrate himself again- but his tongue is glued down, and the heat has reached his head-
“Ozai cannot ordain himself Fate-Keeper. It is not your time yet. Your providence, light-child, lies in restoring balance to the world. Thus, so you shall. Pray to me, child, when you need guidance, and I will answer to you.”
Agni reaches out one finger and presses it gently to Zuko’s forehead, and the world explodes in blinding white.
It takes Iroh a moment to realize Zuko’s heart has stopped beating.
He checks his pulse again. Turns the small limp hand over, two fingers under his slight jaw. Nothing-nothing-nothing beats out a taunting rhythm.
“Prince Iroh-“ Dr. Aito says gently. He pulls away Iroh’s hand from Zuko’s limp one, reaches up to shut his one open eye.
Iroh stands. Looks at the prone body of his nephew- another child he failed to protect- still burning with a fever raging and no beating heart to sustain it, covered in the suffer-marks Iroh himself once knew intimately.
Iroh screams.
The pyre burns.
Ozai does not burn with it.
But Iroh, forcing himself to stare directly at the small body wrapped in white, knows that it is a temporary condition for his younger brother.
Ozai will burn, even if Iroh must burn with him.
Half a world away, in a southern cave made of ice and snow, a child awakes in the darkness.