Chapter Text
The ship stinks of the smoke that powers it--the dirty kind, a fire burned out of utility on coals they are slowly running out of, not a clean flame born from energy, bending--and the air is the kind of cold that makes Zuko shiver beneath his robes. The skin of his scar is burned, ruined, too tight. The ice in the air makes it tighter, like it is a warning from the Southern Water Tribes that he is far from welcome even if they do not yet know he is there. He leans over the railing anyway, watches.
And then there is the light, like a beacon of blue that unabashedly announces itself to all those who may be watching, to the banished prince of the Fire Nation who might finally have a chance to go home.. He turns to find his uncle already there, right where Zuko needs him. He doesn’t look excited. That’s okay. Zuko can juggle enough excitement for both of them right now.
His ship is a harsh shape that is so distinctly, classically fire nation there is nowhere in the world he, exiled prince, shame of the throne, no longer Ozai’s son, can safely dock it. It’s an old model, from an era of the war that has passed and been almost forgotten to the new battles that have taken its place in public consciousness. It is black, too, and the world is white, serene and calm, and he is burning fire below deck and pushing forwards and there is a pillar of light just over the rocks of ice that can only mean the Avatar.
After a century. The Avatar. Zuko’s impossible odyssey is less impossible and he can do this. He tells his crew--small and tired and unenthused--to make quick time in the direction of a nondescript outcropping of ice on the shore. They do. He shouts orders and they listen and here on the Wani ’s slippery metal deck, with his sparse living quarters and meagre allowance, it is almost like he is still royalty.
“Prince Zuko,” Uncle says, and for once it seems like he isn’t quite sure what to say afterwards, just for a moment. Another proverb tumbles from his lips as though he can’t help it and Zuko doesn’t listen to a word. Just like all the others it will be obtuse and meaningless and Zuko is still much more focused on the way that his title, even two years later, even from Uncle Iroh’s lips, feels like a taunt.
Prince Zuko. There is nothing sarcastic about how Iroh says it, nothing sarcastic about Iroh, but still there is something-- Fire Lord Ozai is clear he has no son, Zuko is barely conscious enough to hear him but he knows--he knows. No father, no title, just an exile with half a face and no honour and little chance of survival. He won't be hard to recognise if someone has a half a clue of what to look for--half. The shred of consciousness slips from his grasp. The floor must be cold but he is so, so hot.
He shakes his head. What is left of his hair hits him in the face and he squints at it but does not react. Uncle is staring at him and he feels sick. One hundred years with no Avatar and now he is in the South Pole, right where Zuko is, only two years after Zuko started looking for him. To Zuko they were desperately long years, ones spent healing and searching and learning and seething and wearing his betrayal to his nation, his own immutable cowardice, in every way he could. Anybody who knows the first thing about the Fire Nation will look right at him and know what he has done. It is all part of the punishment he has earned. All of this is. Only now it might just be ending. Weak behind the clouds, Agni smiles down on him so Zuko, for the first time since his banishment, looks up and smiles back. His left cheek is pushed by the stretch of his mouth. It has been two years and the stupid scar still hurts. It is all part of his punishment. He has earned it.
If he looks far enough away from the Avatar’s light, now fading into nothing as though it had never existed, he can see the shapes of a village growing like stubborn plants on the tundra. It is small, ramshackle, he can tell that much even from the distance, a far cry from Caldera, a far cry from the home Zuko just might be able to sail proudly back to. There is no palace here, no towering marvel to encourage awe and obedience amongst the citizens, no winding halls and soulless rooms to encourage obedience amongst the more flighty royals. It isn’t the palace that Zuko misses, though he does reminisce bittersweetly on his mother’s old play scrolls and every other flimsy thing his father surely burned whilst Zuko was still fighting infection. He probably assigned the job to a servant instead; it is a rarity for Zuko to have gotten his time during the Agni Kai, to think that he may have held it for a time afterwards…
The Wani moves closer to the land and Zuko keeps watching the village. If he squints he can see movement, people swaddled in furs going about their day in the biting cold. What he misses is the city, the life of it, the heat, the food, the belonging. He misses his mother, and, so long as he doesn’t think too hard about it, Azula too. The Avatar can’t bring either of them back to him, for different reasons. But he can go back to the Caldera theatre where the actors are actually good at their jobs and passionate about their craft; he can go back to the Fire Festival and spend the day as anybody other than Prince Zuko, his face hidden behind a mask just like everybody else’s, his belly pleasantly full of fire; he can go back to his lessons and sneaking away to train under Piandao even though the master tells him every time that there is little else to teach him. He can go back to being the prince living in luxury, and he can go back to his honour and the turtle-ducks and every childhood memory he has let slip with nothing to prompt his remembrance.
They are close enough to the Avatar beacon that he has lost sight of the village to his right so he turns his head, good eye to the expanse of nothing but white that stretches out in front of him. There is snow and there is ice and there is a hint of the cold grey of a cliff face but it is featureless. There are people not far over who consider this sad stretch of nothing a home. The Fire Nation treats its people with much more dignity, takes over cities to better them, builds homes that cannot be melted and infrastructure that stands up to scrutiny, schools that teach the truth, cultural institutions for the good of the people. It is a noble pursuit, some struggle to see it but they will come around if they have sense and be squashed like gecko-ants if they do not.
The nothingness grows before Zuko, turning his head so that he can take in the barren stretch in full with the one eye he has which is equipped for the task. He can see slightly from the other, nothing more than large shapes, blurring at the edges. He closes just his right eye for a moment and sees nothing but white stained at the edge with the Wani ’s black and the ocean’s blue.
The perfect silence of the plain is broken and Zuko holds frozen air in his lungs as he waits for what comes next. There must be something further to his left that he can’t make out, a vague shape that is a different colour, because there are children headed in that direction. They are clearly distracted, foolish, young. One is clearly of the Water Tribe, with her brown skin and fur-lined parka, but the other…
Even from this distance Zuko can see that he is dressed in oranges that turn his nervous nausea into something more sour, making him feel truly sick to his stomach. His ventures to the air temples and all of his studying, in spite of all the destruction, the century-old remnants of a battle won, a people--not massacred, the Fire Nation is honourable, fights fair. Fair. His father cupping his face almost like an act of love, the warmth in his heart at the possibility of forgiveness before the heat across his cheek began to sear. Since the time of Sozin it has been a dishonour, a stain upon one’s win to leave the loser alive. Unless one is the Fire Lord and the loser is one’s son, then it is mercy, then the shame is all Zuko’s. Fair-- Zuko is much better prepared than most to recognise an air nomad on sight. Flimsy orange-yellow garments, shaved head, tattoos, arrows pointing down the qi pathways.
This boy, a scrawny thing, slight, short--that much Zuko can tell even from his poor vantage point--is a child and an airbender. Zuko is not an idiot, he knows what that means. This is the Avatar. The Avatar is a little boy, a child. Zuko knows intimately what Fire Lord Ozai does to those.
He turns his head to follow the little girl and the little boy as they move to an abandoned ship that is even more out-of-date than the Wani. They are going to explore. Zuko’s determination catches in his throat.
The price for going home is capturing a child and taking him to the Fire Lord. For the child to be both an Air Nomad and the Avatar he would have had to be removed from time--frozen, perhaps--for a century, which is to say he will be woefully underprepared for this war, for the Fire Lord, for everything. He will need teachers and help and-
And if Zuko cannot go home then he needs to go somewhere.
He shakes his head. It is an asinine thought, perhaps amongst the worst of his many ( many) ill-planned schemes. And still it sticks. He has his bending and his swords and even his knife should things get truly dire, but the avatar is a child and Zuko’s home will not be as he left it. Azula is older, crueller, more like their father (and it isn’t so much that he knows it as it is that he cannot find a spark of hope within himself to doubt it), and his mother will still not be there. It is likely that neither will the turtle-ducks, nor the staff he recognises--either laid-off because Zuko was no longer there to tend to or driven away by a palace full of royally explosive tempers and no hint of kindness he isn’t sure he has left in him to soften the blow. As for his quarters, they will not have been reassigned but they will not have been maintained. He has been banished which means there will be nothing of him left in there. The war meetings he is now old enough to attend and the Agni Kai room he cannot forget: there will be rooms he will have to enter and will not be able to.
So much for home.
He turns around and looks for Uncle. He is still right there, right behind Zuko. they should be practising the same moves and control as they have been over a thousand times but they are still and silent and there is something on his face that is different, changed, like he can see in Zuko’s eyes that he is even more of a coward than the Fire Lord had feared (no, not feared--the Fire Lord does not feel fear. Known, perhaps, is more apt). The lump in Zuko’s throat won’t go away no matter how hard he tries to swallow it.
“Uncle,” he says through it. “The Avatar is a child,” Ozai breaks those. Iroh knows it.
Uncle considers for a moment. “Yes, Nephew, I suppose he is,”
Zuko’s fingers find his own face. He thinks about the pain he feels in his dreams every night and the way that Azula had changed so quickly from a lively, troublemaking little girl to Lord Ozai in miniature. “I cannot condemn him by taking him to Father,” he tries to swallow again. “I understand I am failing my great nation and its great leader but I-” am weak, am pathetic, am hopeless and optimistic and good, hopefully.
He looks down and waits for the hit, the burn, the punishment. It isn’t necessarily like Iroh but he is speaking out of turn and disobeying orders and everybody in the Fire Nation has a temper like a stoked flame. It doesn’t come and he dares glance up. Uncle is beaming, holding Agni in the gold of his eyes and the reflection of the sky on his bright, white teeth. “And what will you do now, Prince Zuko?” He waits until Zuko’s eyes are more or less meeting his before he poses the question.
“Take me to shore,” Zuko tells the crew, perhaps more gently than he has spoken to them since he was strong enough to shout again. “Once I depart, turn around and go your own ways. I do not expect to be seeing you again,” Uncle is looking at him in a way that nobody has ever looked at Prince Zuko before. “What, old man? The Avatar is a child from a dead nation,” the guilt is new, especially because Zuko definitely wasn’t there at the time. “I’m sure he will need teachers,”
Iroh grins. “And you are sure you are up to the task?” Zuko scowls. By royal standards he is a baby, a failure, but by every other standard that exists he is a master, has been for years. He does not dignify his uncle with a response. “Alright,” Iroh holds up his hands in mock surrender. Once upon a time the Dragon of the West wouldn’t have given even that but times have changed and Lu Ten has long since been lost. “But do consider, Nephew, how the Avatar may feel being approached by the prince of the Fire Nation shortly after learning about the fate that befell his countrymen,” Zuko flares with anger again and a torch on the wall licks its flame towards him like a eager raccoon-dog . He slows his breathing and thinks about that properly for a moment. It is not a ‘stop’, it is a ‘stop and think’. He can give his uncle that much, a meagre repayment for following him into exile.
Of course he is right. So what can Zuko do besides stop being the Fire Prince? He takes out his knife and considers how it sits in his hand. Never give up without a fight. And yet here he is, giving up on his father’s mission without so little as an argument. Iroh watches him, eyes wide as Zuko lifts the blade above his head and slices beneath his hair tie before he allows himself the opportunity to change his mind.
To step off of the Wani and approach with a hand offered for any reason other than deceit and capture is an act of treason. It is not the first Zuko has committed and it will not be the last. Hair is important in the Fire Nation, a quietly readable social signifier. His hair tied up on his head and shaved to the skin everywhere else is the sign of a failure, a person who has lost an Agni Kai. It is a traditional rule that the loser should wear their disgrace so publicly, but it is one that the disgraced prince is expected to follow. And now he has ruined that, phoenix tail limp and sad in his hand. He removes the tie and drops the tail, now loose and scattering hairs as it falls, onto the deck with little concern. “Would you shave the rest?”
They find him some black clothes, warm ones with thinner underlayers he can strip down to when they leave the Antarctic, and Iroh hands him a bag with some rations packed away inside of it, as well as a single Pai Sho tile. He drops in his hair tie and considers his uncle. This is a goodbye, at least for a little while, and he is completely bald and dressed in clothes that give away nothing aside from the fact that he is probably rather in need of a warm coat. Little can be done about the scar but he would be naive to think he is the only person the Fire Nation had hurt though, thinking about the airbender child, it is becoming increasingly difficult to think that is earned. He is no prince, he is a traitor and he will not march a child to his death for some ersatz version of a home he won’t truly recognise.
“I will be seeing you again, Nephew,”
Zuko considers Iroh for a moment. He is old, though not as old as he looks, and cold, and not nearly as frail as he would like Zuko and everybody else to think. “Thank you,” Zuko says for the first time. They do not hug but they do not stiffly bow either. Instead they smile. That makes at least twice today for Zuko.
It is in the interest of an army, of a nation at war, to push their fighters’ compliance past breaking and still hold their loyalty like a fox-rat ’s tail between their fingers. And here Zuko is, his loyalty, evidently a fraying thing, snapping at a bare tug.
His boots are sturdy and thick and weatherproof and he is infinitely glad for it. Snow crunches underfoot, makes a sort of creak when he steps down hard enough to compress it and leave it nowhere else to go. He needs to find a place where he can hunker down briefly. The Avatar and the girl won’t be long in that old ship and he needs to ensure they find him, so he heads in the direction they came from and finds a spot beneath an overhang of the cliff, almost an alcove, that does a little something to protect him from the blustering of the wind. He doesn’t sit because he doesn’t want to make his clothes wet and just stands instead, dressed in all black against the white. So long as they aren’t trying to, they’ll struggle to miss him.
He watches the Wani go as he waits. Watching it rather than sailing on it makes it seem as though it moves much faster.
The walk to the ship had been enjoyable, as had the escape from it, the middle part, however, had been severely lacking. Katara understands that Aang is a kid who is out of time, whose world is in their history books and some old plays and wives tales but little else. Everything he knew is gone, and she’d be shocked to learn that anybody he knew 100 years prior is still alive. She doesn’t tell him that.
She hasn’t known him very long at all but she likes him much better when he is all sunshiney and happy. When she says the wrong thing he shutters and she doesn’t know what to do because he seems like he is miles away and there is no way at all to reach him. So she doesn’t voice her worries and she doesn’t berate him about getting them into a decades old Fire Nation booby trap on an old warship she specifically told him probably had booby traps all over it. She just laughs with him, and talks as they walk and tries to aid his search for distractions from the fact that he is the last of his people. She gets it somewhat--the last southern waterbender, the final remnant of an element of her culture wiped out and washed away by Fire Nation cruelty, her culture made ash--but it is not the same. Her dad is still out there somewhere, and she has the whole village but especially Gran Gran and Sokka. Aang though, well he only has his bison and whatever Katara has to offer him.
She gets lost in her thoughts for just a moment and crashes promptly into Aang’s back. He has stopped right in front of her and it takes her all of five seconds to figure out why as she scrambles to fix her footing in the snow. There is a man under the cliff not ten metres away--well, not so much a man as a boy who looks to be about Sokka’s age, but a person nonetheless. He isn’t dressed for the weather and he certainly isn’t one of Katara’s tribesmen. There are other tribes around, of course, and there would be plenty of people who might be around here who she wouldn’t recognise, but she is confident in saying that none of them would look like this pale speck of a boy.
She squints at Aang, makes a confused face that he returns in kind, and then approaches. “Hello?”
“Uh, hi!” the boy says, words simultaneously too fast and too slow, like he has no idea how to talk to her. He probably doesn’t. He is shivering and it could just be that he is jittery but he sounds kind of excited, or perhaps nervous. He is completely bald, like Aang, but without the tattoos, and very pale. She leans in slightly. His eyes are a honeyed gold and the eyebrow he has is black and his skin is almost as white as the snow he stands on. Her brain says to take a step back because he is Fire Nation. Her heart says he is a boy of Sokka's age who isn’t dressed for the brutality of their weather and who has a burn scar over his left eye that looks like a handprint. There are Fire Nation occupied territories all over the world, he could be of mixed heritage from any one of them, and she would be writing him off for his eye colour and leaving him to die. The only thing she knows for sure about him is that the gnarly scarring that holds his left eye narrow and angry could not have been made by accident.
“My name is Katara,” she offers, a pea-olive branch, “and this is Aang. Who are you?” The boy just shakes his head like an animal in a cage and scowls at the snow on his boots like it might all melt if he glares at it hard enough. She is almost comforted by the fact that it doesn’t.
“I don’t know,” he grinds out. It sounds very forced but he is also speaking through shivers and to strangers and he is alone in a place that is obviously a far cry from what he is used to.
“Okay,” she tries placatingly. She knows better than almost anyone else how to talk Sokka down and this teenage boy is basically in no way like him but she tries the same gentle prodding with different words and hopes it might work. “Do you know anything? Where you’re from, what your name is, how you got here?”
He shakes his head much too slowly. He moves his body almost as though he doesn’t remember how it fits. “I don’t know anything,” he reiterates. He practically oozes frustration. That is a very strange thing for her to feel reassured by.
“That’s alright. If you don’t have a name could you give us something to call you? Just make something up?”
He nods tersely then grits his teeth against the cold or the burden of having to think and his hands jolt against each other where he holds them in front of him and, she realises, as well as the relatively small bag and whatever its contents are, the only other belonging he has on him seems to be a sheathed sword at his waist. “You can call me Lee,”