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A crack resounded, and light filled the limbo he was trapped in. Sensations came back in slow, interrupted waves, as if the world wasn’t ready for him to fully return. At first, it was the rolling of a ship. Then, heat strong enough to pierce even the ice of the thickest iceberg.
Not his. Nothing could break his ice prison, he had made sure of that, even if he couldn’t remember why or what he had been trying to protect. He just knew it wasn’t time yet. He must wait.
Wait for what?
Lastly, it was the rough voice of a teenager. It came in and out of his consciousness, often enough to become familiar even in the limbo he was trapped in, but always in bits and pieces too small to extract any context. It took him a while to hear the words in the shouts, and even more time to puzzle them into sentences.
By then, the rolling had stopped and the light had turned even, plunging his cold prison into another unchanging state.
“Hello, Zuko here,” the familiar voice awkwardly said. “You probably can’t hear me, but I’m the one who brought you here.”
I can hear you, he tried to answer, but he had no tongue nor throat to speak. Questions bubbled silently on his imaginary lips, trumped by the glassy wall separating him from the outside world. Awareness was slipping by him again when the rough voice resumed, pulling him back towards reality.
“I still can’t believe you are the avatar. For years, I hunted you down, expecting an old man trained in the four elements, but you are what… a little kid?”
Was he?
The impression of he was a vague, blurry thing lost in the screaming echoes of the world around him. He could have been a she if not for the quiet certitude in his heart that he currently was not, but that he had been once, and would be again. His age felt both null and endless, a seed of sentience lost in the vast world’s wisdom.
“I’m grateful, you know.” He got a vague impression of nervous pacing around his iceberg. “Thanks to you, I’m finally back home.”
The teenager finally stopped. “After three years, my honor is back.”
“We even caught the last waterbender of the South when we found you. A little girl, barely older than you. She wasn’t much of a threat, barely able to form a simple bubble of water, but she’d have grown to become a formidable traitor.”
Something uneasy uncurled in his inexistent chest. The last waterbender. Captured.
The implications echoed wrongly in his bones, reverberating the screams of the world that had surrounded him since he’d woken up.
“Uncle argued to let her go, but we couldn’t. She kept trying to break your iceberg, to ’bring the Avatar’ back.” Steps rang anew as the pacing resumed. “She wasted her time. For all we know, you’re already dead.”
He did feel fairly dead. He tried to twitch a finger, to the same result as his earlier attempt to speak: none. It was like the thread that connected his soul to his body was damaged, leaving him scrambling for crumbs of awareness as he aimlessly floated into a strange limbo.
He tried to reach towards the teenager's presence, using it as an anchor to connect back to his body, but as soon as he brushed it, a burning flame ejected him backward. The effort left him spent, awareness slipping past him again. He barely heard the rest of the rough voice’s rant.
“Father sent her away to the Fire Island prison. It’s good, right? I heard waterbenders… bent blood… massacred our people… sent her away…”
The sound fully faded, drowned in the timeless wail of the world.
He wasn’t sure how much time passed before Zuko’s voice roused him back from sleep.
“Hello again. I’ve brought someone. Do you know him?”
The nostalgic chitters of a flying lemur rang in the room, sharpening his mind with a peak of curiosity.
“I met him at the Southern Air Temple on the way back. He was supposed to stay there, but he must have hidden somewhere on the boat, because we found him in the middle of the kitchen devouring all of the cook’s peaches. We called him Momo.”
He reached towards the lemur, memories of flying pies and laughter bubbling unprompted to the forefront of his mind. The animal felt achingly familiar. Air temples… Had he been an Air Nomad, once? He felt he had been everything.
But the lemur felt special, closer in a way. Was he an Air Nomad now? The answer felt right, even as he lacked the body to assert it.
If Zuko had met the flying lemur’s approbation, then he had his as well. The teen was his friend, he promptly decided.
“You know, I’m probably not allowed to be here, but this might be the safest place in the palace. Not that the palace isn’t safe. Safer than the Imperial City, at least.”
Was the Imperial City not safe? He’d been to Caldera City once, in this lifetime, he thought. There had been fireworks and spicy foods and games, not a trace of danger to be found apart from burning your tongue eating fireflakes.
The way the teenager talked about it was strange, as if an unknown threat had begun to lurk on the street in the blink of time that had happened between his tentative memory and the now.
“It’s strange,” Zuko echoed. “I used to wander in the capital all the time with Mother, but now the guards won’t let me out.”
He felt more than he saw a weight lean against his glassy prison. “The guards around are very incompetent. It’s really easy to slip by them. Perhaps I should say a word about it to Father.”
A shudder wracked his numb spine. No, he thought, whoever this ’Father’ was, it was better for everyone if he never knew.
The next time he woke up was from a flare of warmth, not unlike the one that had followed the crack the first time he rose from his shapeless prison.
At first, he leaned towards the heat, greedy for a sensation that wasn’t the maddening emptiness and vague glimpses that surrounded him here, until the flames leached at his soul and he jerked back. His mind ached from a non-existent burn where the fire had brushed him.
More flames followed, and this time he made sure to keep far away from them as they washed over his prison. He frowned as he observed the traces the fire left in the strange spiritual limbo he was in. It felt twisted and wrong.
“What do you think? It’s the last kata I learnt.” More whooshes of fire followed. “The Firebending teachers here are much better than Uncle, they haven’t told me to redo the basics once.”
He would have frowned if he could as twisted flames filled the room, uncomfortably heating it up. It felt unfair to be trapped as a formless spirit and yet still be aware enough to hurt. He felt an itch to bend the hot air away, but his bending stayed as unresponsive as his body.
Thankfully, Zuko soon tired of his demonstration and stopped mid-kata, directing fire in front of his fists into the ground.
“It sucks, doesn’t it?” The teenager let out a rageous growl. “I finally have someone to teach me the more advanced set, but I can’t even manage them properly. I don’t understand. It’s like something in their katas is… off”
Something definitely felt off with the fire the teen had just bent. He remembered fire to be warmth, to be life. Not this bitter all-encompassing rage he could feel echoing from those flames.
“I almost burned Momo while training with lt!” his visitor continued his rant. “I— I haven’t lost control like that since remastering the katas two years ago.”
He winced in sympathy for the flying lemur. Firebending accidents were reputedly dangerous, and— from the glimpses he had gotten of the room during his visitor rant, the teenager was not ignorant of that fact.
“It can’t be the fault of the teachers. They are professional firebenders, good enough to teach the imperial family. I must be the wrong one. I never was good at firebending.”
The teenager’s inner fire felt bright and warm behind the twisted bitterness. He had the heart of a master firebender, good enough to make dragons proud.
Somehow, he doubted his visitor was the problem.
He awoke to more flames and rageous shouts as his only visitor stomped into the room. The guards must really be incompetent if they didn’t even hear the violent slam of the door.
“I don’t understand! I’m the heir, yet these days it feels as if Azula is the eldest child!”
He neatly folded into his mind the information that the teenager was, apparently, the heir of the Fire Nation. The prince barely gave him time to collect his thoughts and chase some of the lingering doze from his previous catatonic state before resuming his rant.
“When I brought you back, they finally welcomed me home. They told me my honor was restored! How can it be restored if I’m stuck inside the palace instead of out there, helping our people?”
The teenager was pacing in an angry circle around his iceberg in dizzying rounds, flames dangerously escaping every orifice of his body with each breath. He wished the prince would just stop and meditate instead. Surely Fire Nation heirs were taught morning meditation?
Having no way to communicate the idea, his wish went ignored as another burst of twisted flame escaped the teenager's teeth.
“I didn’t speak out during the council this time, I waited later for Father to be alone.” The teenager's fury finally dwindled down into controlled frustration as he closed his fists. “We need better supply lines for the colonies. Dissident soldiers have been pilfering their farms, and they’re starving.”
Uneasiness shook his heart once more. The Imperial City was not safe. The Fire Nation prince’s firebending felt corrupted and wrong. People were starving.
The world was wailing.
He felt a pull towards the ice trapping his body, the vague sensation of cold over his skin and the buzz of the power to free himself at his fingertips, but something stopped him.
It wasn’t time yet. He must wait.
“Father— father turned me down,” his unaware companion hoarsely choked out. “He said that it was a waste of resources we couldn’t afford if we wanted to win the war. That I couldn’t see the big picture yet.” Zuko took a deep breath. “But I see it. I’ve read the reports, even the ones the clerks didn’t want to show me. I’ve seen the numbers. They’re starving.”
Zuko was the prince. Then… his father must have been the Fire Lord. From what he’d heard so far during the teenager’s visits, he was getting a bad feeling about the Fire Nation leadership.
“I– I know I’ve been away for a long time, but Uncle still taught me. I’m not wrong. I’m not.”
From the flickering inner flame of the prince, he wasn't the only one.
Staying awake felt a bit easier now, as if the regular visits rejuvenated him. He still couldn’t move or ’see’ more than the room his iceberg was stored in, but the glimpses he was getting of the world were becoming something closer to a permanent vision rather than the irregular flashes he’d gotten so far.
He was dozing off when familiar stomps entered his perception. By now he almost expected more rageous flames to accompany Zuko’s visit, but was surprisingly met with bitter embers instead.
“Azula raised her voice during today’s war council. She interrupted the Defense Minister mid-speech. It would have been funny, if everyone hadn't nodded to her suggestion as if she’d said the wisest words and promptly adapted their strategies to include it.”
Zuko’s inner flame flickered as he whispered. “Azula always lies.”
It rang like a truth. It rang like a desperate wish for that truth to change.
“Her strategy was sound, but it also will sacrifice hundreds of the citizens who moved to the colonies.” A low warmth crossed past the frozen wall of the iceberg as the prince leaned against it for support. “I don’t understand.”
Zuko’s voice quivered. “I think— I think I’m scared to understand.”
Yes, he thought, wishing more than ever that he had a hand to reach out and comfort his friend. I think I am, too.
“Uncle left.”
He honestly wasn’t sure who Zuko’s uncle was, only remembering a passing comment about firebending teachers and education, but from the way the teenager's voice broke, it must have been someone he cared about.
“He just left in the middle of the night like a coward,” his friend growled. “Like mom,” he added, softer. “He didn’t even say goodbye.”
Not for the first time, he wished he had enough corporality to comfort Zuko and show him how bright his inner flame shone with potential, beneath the corruption smoldering the world. He wished he could properly claim him as his friend and tell him that even if his uncle left, even if Azula was mean, even if his father didn’t see his proper value, he wouldn’t abandon him.
A thump echoed as Zuko let himself fall on the ground, head in his hands. “Did- did I do something wrong?” The prince shook his head. “No. Father must be right. I’ve been blinded by my determination to find the Avatar during the journey. Uncle was always a traitor.”
No! He wanted to shout, feeling the truth ring through the weave of the world. He wasn’t. You are not.
But his bending still evaded him even as his awareness increased, keeping his body inert as the world whispered to wait.
He was getting tired of waiting.
With awareness came a strengthened sense of corporality, but also of botherdom. He passed time between Zuko’s visits trying to feel the air around him. He’d just managed to nudge enough of a breeze to make a torch flicker when the prince entered the room, wasting all his effort as every surrounding flame brightened tenfold.
“The Beifong daughter ran away,” the prince said to no one in particular, pacing. “The nobles have been gossiping about nothing else these days.” Zuko took a contrived voice and waved his hand like a fan. ’What a shame!’ A weak, pitiful blind girl all alone, out there. Some hooligans must have tricked her!’
He snickered.
Zuko resumed his normal voice, disdain filling his tone. “With how they speak about her, she was probably right to run. It’s not as if she had any reason to stay. She’s just a noble’s daughter, not a prince with duties and responsibilities.”
Not like me, he heard loud and clear in his friend’s silence.
Zuko turned his head, staring right at the center of the iceberg, where he guessed the blurred shape of his body could be seen. “I think you’d understand. Air Nomads are all about freedom, aren’t they?”
He could feel the broken thread linking him to his body slowly mending. He was beginning to remember things from the air temple beyond the flying lemur and pies; games of pai sho with a monk, bisons’ moans as they brushed their fur, rolling balls of air you could climb on, toys—
The memories generally stopped there, flashes of lightning and rain drowned in bottomless fear.
He focused on feeling the elements around him instead. The air had come the easiest, and he now could confidently say the flickering of the torches was his. He could also faintly feel the frozen water of his iceberg, the weight of the walls surrounding him, and the faraway large ball of fire that made the sun. He’d even begun to feel the presence of guards beyond his room door, and mischievously enjoyed their uneases as rumors of ghosts changing the temperature or putting down the lights rose amidst their rank.
He wished he could take credit for those rumors, but most of the ghostly acts, he knew, had to be attributed to his friend. How the brash prince slipped so easily in and out of the underground cavern he was locked in was a mystery he was determined to resolve once free from his caging.
He was proven right once more when the prince inexplicably opened the door, unseen by the guards he could hear chatting beyond the walls.
Deep bags rested below Zuko’s eyes, worsening the permanent scowl of his bad one, and there was a tired slouch to his shoulders. “It must be good, in there,” the prince said. “Nothing to worry about but to sleep all day, unaware of the repercussion you have on the world.”
I’m not sleeping though.
“Father is too busy to see me. Uncle has disappeared out of the Fire Nation borders and been declared traitor. The guards still insist I stay inside, as if I hadn't spent three years at sea. Meanwhile, Azula just got placed in charge of the invasion of Ba Sing Se.”
“Sometimes I wonder… would it have been better if I hadn’t found you?”
Then he would have slept on, unaware of the increasing wails of the world. Perhaps it would have been better.
Or perhaps it would have been worse.
He felt like he had been running from something for a long time, but that his race had finally come to a stop. He couldn’t quite regret waking up now.
He was focusing on the course of the sun, trying to determine what time of the day it was, when he felt its flame abruptly dim. Zuko entered a few seconds later, inexplicably landing from the ceiling, dust covering his clothes.
“It’s the eclipse today,” the prince hoarsed. “I can’t feel my fire.”
He couldn’t either. The world felt strange without the sun. It felt out of balance, like a carriage missing one of its wheels. It moved on, but it was one road ridge away from collapsing onto the path, stuck.
“Azula and Father are in the bunker waiting for the rebels to arrive, I think. No one told me where I should be, so I came here. It’s as good a place as any, right?”
Yes, he would have said if not for the familiar unease Zuko’s words made crawl under his inexistent skin. He was glad for his friend's company, and now that he could faintly use his bending he could try to protect him if anything happened, but the circumstances put him on edge. What did that mean, that the Fire Nation prince felt safer with a ghost trapped in an iceberg than in the royal bunker with his family?
What did it mean that they needed to hide in the first place, instead of celebrating the eclipse with a grand festival like the Fire Nation did in the past?
“I’m not invited to war councils anymore,” Zuko began to say, likely more to hear his own voice in the stifling darkness of the room than to bring him to the news. “I wasn’t ever formally invited, an official invitation must be superfluous for the prince whose attendance is part of the expected royal duties, but now they won’t even give me the time and place. I asked the little scribe intern the other day. I haven’t seen her since.”
He was pretty sure he knew what happened to the little scribe. Now that he could hear the guards, he had paid attention to their whispers; and the mention of an overeager servant being lucky to be sent home hadn’t escaped him. He’d wondered, then, what the servant had done.
The monks had been wise when they said ignorance was a blessing.
“Everything here is so different from the boat. I’ve yearned to come home for years, and yet now that I am home… it doesn’t feel like home at all.”
He could empathise. He still wasn’t sure what home was, but he thought it must have been one of the air temples. His heart ached when he thought of it. As soon as he could return to a corporal shape, he’d go to see it. Even if the temple must have changed during his absences… he couldn’t wait to return to it.
He wondered if he’d get the same feeling as Zuko, then. He hoped not.
But then, Zuko’s family had an off-putting vibe about them. Perhaps he could introduce his friends to the monk? Adoption wasn’t that rare for Air Nomads, and they’d both be home that way.
He didn’t see Zuko for the next several days. When the prince did come, he looked even more tired than before, a sick flush coating his skin.
“Do you remember the waterbender I talked about?” his friend cracked, leaning heavily against the wall. “Well, she is gone. Her tribe assaulted the Fire Island prison during the eclipse, and she escaped.”
Zuko’s gaze flickered towards the door before it returned to the ground, a blank haze covering his eyes. “I envy her, a bit.” The prince gulped before letting out a hoarse whisper. “I think I'm turning traitor.”
His heart ached as his friend distressedly tangled his fingers in his hairs. “I have everything to be happy: a home, a family, one day a whole Empire to rule. Yet it keeps feeling like something is wrong. Like something is missing.”
He bended a slight breeze to brush Zuko’s hair in comfort, but the act went ignored as the teenager curled into a tight ball. “I wish I could attend the war councils again. They’re preparing something big. Something horrible.”
He could feel it too. It made him wiggle nervously in his trap, reaching out for a body that refused to answer as the slow rising tension threatened to make his heart burst.
He needed to stop it.
He needed to wait.
“Father would say I’m overthinking things, but— I’m not sure Father is right, anymore.”
He isn't, something in him was shouting. He is part of the corruption of this world. And you will be, too, if nothing is stopped.
“Uncle once said to trust my instincts,” Zuko frustratedly mumbled. “But I can’t.” The prince shook his head. “I'm scared of what my instincts are telling me. They must be wrong. They must be.”
Zuko’s instincts were right. He knew, because his instincts said the same.
Something big was coming. And they were too late to stop it.
Fire flared, closer than ever, more twisted than ever. The world screamed and shook as people died, and died, and died—
He screamed too, he thought, in the muted way his limited shape allowed.
The cries melded with ones from the past, telling the story of an entire population of benders snuffed out by the flames. The fire relentlessly devoured its brethren, lengthening the shadows where it should bring light, burning where it should bring warmth.
Then, it stopped.
The flames returned to their usual intensity, leaving a bitter trail of burning embers where cool earth had once stood. The screams quieted. The world resumed its course with barely a hiccup, already adapting for the new scar embedded in its weave.
His senses were so drowned in the buzzing echoes of the utter destruction he’d felt that he almost missed Zuko’s staggering entrance.
Tears covered the prince’s eyes, and there was a limp to his steps. “I’m sorry,” he croaked. “I’m so sorry.”
The teenager collapsed on his knees. “It wasn’t supposed to go this way. The Fire Nation was supposed to bring peace, not– not this.”
Zuko’s inner fire felt dangerously low. He reached out to his friend’s flame, attempting to stroke it brighter, but passed right through it.
“Uncle was right. I— how could they? This wasn’t a grand victory. This was a massacre.” The prince closed his eyes. “The bodies in the air temple… did the Air Nomads even fight back?”
Unfathomable grief dropped down his soul. A buried knowledge scratched the edge of his mind, but he evaded it. The Air Nomads were fine… right?
“The Earth Kingdom citizens didn’t,” Zuko croaked. “The comet was just–” the teenager stopped, voice breaking. “This isn’t right,” he resumed once his breathing had become less ragged. “I can’t stay here. “
His friend staggered back up on his feet, making them both winces as he pushed on his bad leg, clear pain twisting his features. The teenager stumbled towards the ice. “If you were here… do you think you would have been able to stop it?”
I don’t know.
He thought… he thought he was beginning to understand why the world told him to wait. He had the feeling the Avatar would be dead if he hadn’t, the long cycle of reincarnation broken at last in the most horrid way. The threat had passed and the urge to wait was gone, now.
The urge to wait was gone, but…
“The avatar is supposed to keep the world in balance,” Zuko hoarsed out as he pressed a palm against his prison, letting a flicker of warm travel to his soul. “I think– I think the world has been out of balance for a very long time.”
He was too late.
“You’re dead, aren’t you? You’ve always been dead.” Zuko turned away, fist clenched, and he missed the warmth that had reached towards him an instant before. “You’re just an empty trophy Father keeps for satisfaction.”
I’m not! He argued. But he soon fell quiet. He might as well have been, for how he was stuck as a silent observer while balance fell into ruin.
He desperately clawed at the frozen walls of his prison, desperately reaching for the slow mending thread he could feel linking him to his body.
“The avatar is dead, but our world should never have been the responsibility of a single person. I’m the prince. I should have stopped them.”
A wash of warmth filled him at Zuko’s words, empowering his efforts to free himself. I should never have bore it alone. You shouldn't have to, either.
“Maybe– maybe it isn’t too late,” Zuko brokenly whispered as he limped towards the door, away from him. “I’ve heard of rebellion movements rising in the south, where the waterbender escaped. I think I’m gonna join them.”
Wait! Don’t leave me—
He scrambled to anchor himself into reality, to bend the ice away and get his legs to move.
“Goodbye, Avatar,” Zuko said, unaware of the blinding light gathering itself behind his back. His friend passed the door without looking back, leaving him alone in the shadows.
He didn’t stay alone for long. Generations and generations of avatar filled him with their knowledge as the link binding him to his body snapped back. Cracks drowned his friend’s fading footsteps as they rang, centenary ice wailing as it gave under his request, finally freeing the sleeping cargo in its hold.
We’ll meet again, he promised Zuko’s retreating inner flame.
For the first time in 101 years, Aang opened his eyes.