Archive of Our Own

Zuko is a smart kid. He knows many things, like the first five katas from the advanced set his tutors started him on, and the defeat of the Xachu Island rebellions of 44 AG. He knows that Azula was the one who stomped up all of the garden roses two weeks ago, even though she told their mother it was a servant boy. He knows that when he notices a faint burn on the inner curve of his wrist and hears the ticking of clock gears when there's no clocks to be found, he should tell exactly nobody. 

He figures that it’s probably nothing, at first. He’s had sunburns before—both Azula and Ozai claim this is because he’s too weak a firebender to avoid them—and although the inside of his wrist is a strange place for sunburns, the skin feels tight and hot like one. So that must be it

And when the pain gets worse, well, it's still not that bad. Then, the pain gets worse. It’s like when his firebending tutors press hot fingers to his shoulder when he starts to lag, or if he laid his arm over the metal of his training sword after it was out in the sun all day. There’s no burn when he checks, though, and his tutors never burn him badly enough or long enough for it to hurt like this, and who would grab hot metal like that anyway? Those explanations make no sense.

It really must be just nothing, he concludes. An allergic reaction, maybe, a very small one. So he just ties a chilled cloth around the area and ignores it.

Of course, that’s about when he starts to hear the ticking. The ticking, he decides, is too strange for him to avoid. It clicks in his head, round and round like gears turning. He doesn’t even notice when it appears—it swells up, faintly, between his ears, so slowly that he can’t even tell it’s there until, one day, he’s sitting in the garden and he hears it. 

He thinks it’s a clock, at first, like the one in his classroom—but there are no clocks in the garden, so that can’t be it. It itches in his head, and he can still hear it between his palms when he puts his hands over his ears. It’s maddening. He can’t concentrate anymore, which is why he takes action and goes to the library.

He and the librarian have a deal. Zuko gets to hide out behind the old scrolls and books in the back of the halls when Azula chases him, and in return he dusts the shelves a bit and picks up any books that have fallen to the floor. It’s a great deal, and Zuko is almost suspicious of the librarian for letting him get away with it, since she gets almost nothing in return. But when he brought that up to her, she just gave him a strange look and told him he was a good prince. This was strange, but either way the deal was good for Zuko, so he’d let the matter drop and went to dust the shelves some more. 

He finds a few scrolls after a lot of searching. He didn’t know where to start looking, so he started at the first stack and worked his way down, pulling out medical journals and some spiritual reports and other things he think may have anything to do with what’s happening to him. He finds some reference to similar symptoms in the medical journals, but has better luck with the spiritual stuff.

He learns the word “soulmarks” from one of them. He isn’t sure what it means, but it seems to be about ticking and burns, so he goes with it and looks for more books with the same word. There are surprisingly few for how common the book says soulmarks are. The entirety of the Fire Nation seems to have decided unanimously to simply Not Talk About It, whatever it is. 

This, Zuko thinks to himself, is incredibly inconvenient. 

It’s even more inconvenient when that turns out to be the day Zuko’s clock actually appears. 

Zuko looks at it, puts everything back where he’d found it, and looks for his mom.

Zuko’s mother is sitting at the turtleduck pond, her legs tucked under her and her hair down. The ducks chirp happily at him when he arrives, and the day is bright and cheerful. He allows her to hug him a bit even though he’s eight and too big for that now, and shows her his wrist.   

Her smile drops into a confused frown, and she takes up his arm and raises it a bit so she can see better. “What’s this?”

“I don’t know ,” Zuko complains to her. She just frowns more, running her thumb over the mark.

It’s a clock, centered right over his pulse. Beautiful, dark wood, with a reddish tint like his favorite table in the library, and five notches rayed around the edge like sunbeams on a stylized art piece. When he turns his wrist side-to-side the clock shimmers in gold and ruby, and he can see dark black gears slowly spinning in his skin. It has one, dark bronze hand that sits all the way to the left and hasn’t moved at all, even though he hears it ticking still in his head. 

It looks like something his mother would buy at a marketplace, except stamped onto his skin. 

“Five soulmates,” she says eventually. “Hmm.”

“This is a soulmark,” he informs her, confident now. The drawings in the scrolls looked different—the notches were pictures, tiny, multicolored symbols—but they were clocks too, or some sort of timer. “Right? I found some stuff on it in the library, but they were all super vague.”

“Yes,” his mother says, “you must be curious.”

He is. “Do you have any?”

His mother pauses, letting his wrist go. Her eyes flick to the side like she’s thinking things through, but eventually she begins to undo a fancy metal bracelet on her own wrist. Zuko fixates on it, excitedly. 

Her clock is a burnished gold, gears exposed and silent. The hand has fallen from its pin and sits at the bottom of the clock, unused. One notch has crystallized into what he recognizes as the fire lord’s crown. The other two notches are white and raised, scarred over like someone took a pin and carved them out of her skin.

“Oh,” he says, tracing over them. He doesn’t know where to start. He’s eight. “Oh no! How did…”

“Most people have them,” his mother says. “Don’t go showing this off, though, okay? We’ll have to order some sort of tie for you… maybe a ribbon, or a bracelet like mine. Your father gave this one to me, did you know?”

Normally she covets Ozai’s gifts. She seems sad about this one, though, fidgeting with the clasp of the metal cuff in her lap. It’s thick, and looks heavy. It’s engraved with suns and the Fire Nation royal insignia. 

“I don’t want to hide it,” he declares. A turtleduck waddles its way into his palm, and he sets it on his knee. They pout together at her. “I like my soulmark.”

She shakes her head. “It’s not something people like to talk about, that’s why there are so few scrolls about it..”

“It feels like lying.”

“No, no, it’s--It’s like… wearing clothes. You wouldn’t go walking around with no shirt on talking about how great you look--think of it like a form of modesty, not lying. Besides,” she adds, “think about the people who don’t have soulmarks. How would they feel watching you brag about something you won’t even use?”

Zuko doesn’t really understand that. He’d want to tell everybody—he does want to tell everybody, but something in her voice is making him falter. He taps at her clock again. “What happened?” 

His mother just sighs.

“These were a gift, from Agni,” she says, taking up his wrist again and tracing over each of the marks with her index finger. “He knew we weren’t meant to be alone, and he knew this world is uncertain. So he gave us something to depend on, people who could lead us when he could not.”

Zuko likes the idea of that, but then his mother folds her hands over the clock and obscures it from view. 

“You need to remember, though, that we don’t need them,” she insists, looking serious. He doesn’t like that very much.  “You’re a prince. Our fates diverge from the common people by necessity. No, don’t look like that, think about it. What if your soulmate is a commoner? Or from a different nation? Your destiny is already laid out for you in the palace, where you will be a leader of others--you don’t need any guides. Right?” She ducks to look him in the eye, then laughs at his expression, squeezing his arm gently. “Relax! You won’t have to look at them for very long, I’m sure. Fate caught on quickly for me anyway.”

Zuko nods like he agrees, takes the ribbon she pulls from her hair to hide his soulmark, and checks it every night. And every night, the marks stay. The clock keeps ticking.

He isn’t sure whether or not he wants to believe it’ll stay that way, or if he’d rather they disappear already so he can get it over with. 

So, Zuko is a smart kid. Now that he knows about soulmarks, he notices them everywhere—bracelets and leather cuffs and ribbons like his own. 

Some people don’t wear anything to hide them. Children mostly, and some old people--mostly people from the city, who aren’t royalty and have no reason to shy away from their wavering, blind fates. One of the maids who comes to clean Zuko’s room every other morning is an old woman with faint gray hair, and one day her sleeve rides up to show a clock full of symbols, flowers and animals and squiggles that Zuko can’t really make out. She catches him looking and explains each one.

A fire lily for her husband. A baby sheep-bee for her daughter. Two twin brushes for her best friend who’s a scholar and professor at the Caldera Common Academy, a broken vase for her younger brother, a pair of glasses for her mother. A thin, paled scar for her father, who died many years ago, but is still with her forever on her soulmark. 

“It’s for remembrance,” she says, brushing her thumb over the clock. “Each time the clock ticks I remember him, even if he’s not with me now.”

Zuko likes that thought. He likes the idea that soulmarks mean people who will never leave him, even when they die. He’s waiting for his mother to show up on his own clock--surely that would be okay, right? He bets she’ll be the first one.

Azula starts wearing her own leather cuff around her wrist, a stately, polished black one with a golden clasp of the royal insignia, but he doesn’t know if that means she got her own soulmates, or because she doesn’t want anybody to know she hasn’t. She never tells him, and he knows better than to ask.

She plays with it sometimes, absent-mindedly--picking the clasp open and refastening it, rubbing her fingers over the material. She comes to Zuko’s room, in the middle of the night, and sits on the tile of his floor. She used to do that a lot more often when she was younger.

“What’s it like for you?” she asks, twirling the cuff around and around her wrist. 

Zuko thinks about that, leaving his bed to sit beside her, a small distance away. “I don’t know , constant?” He wrinkles his nose up, hearing the tick-tick-tick in his ears. “...hopeful. Like. The potential for good things.”

“Stupid Zuzu,” his sister scoffs, looking up at the stars through his window. “That doesn’t even make any sense.”

“I’m trying my best,” he protests, half-heartedly. “It’s a hard question.” He’s taken the brush from the nightstand, and she tips her head into his hand, hair spilling like a curtain. She’s so small, all hunched up like this. 

“It doesn’t matter, anyway,” she says, finally. “They’re probably peasants, and then Father will kill them.”

Azula doesn’t ask him again after that, but he braids her hair a few more times. She doesn’t let their mother do it for her, and she screams at any maid who tries.

His mother vanishes. The hand on his clock hasn’t moved at all. Zuko stands back-straight, with one hand clenched over his wrist so he can feel his pulse throb against his fingers, and he wonders about those two more scars on her own clock instead of grieving.

Ozai must have been the first mark, he knows that, although he doesn’t know how the other two died or why the mark was the royal crown when his father was still second in line. Maybe fate just knew Ozai was destined to be Fire Lord even then. 

He learns a bit more about soulmarks in the meantime. His mother must have told somebody, or somebody must have figured out there were still scrolls in the library about them, because when he goes back to do more research, all the scrolls with soulmark stuff in them were gone. That’s okay, though, because even though Zuko’s mother told him they weren’t supposed to, people still talk about them. 

Paths can diverge. People can die. The hand will tick down like a timer until it reaches a notch, and until it does and it “chimes” (although Zuko doesn’t know what they mean by that), anything can happen. The marks can fade. The people connected to them can get killed, or walk away from you before you can leave them first. Fate is less stubborn than people often think. 

Zuko catches a kitchen servant crying into her arms behind the kitchens one day, shoving her wrist at the head cook’s face. Her boyfriend went off to the war and died, and she knows because she felt it and her mark is already fading away into a scar. She can’t hear ticking anymore. 

Now that his mother is gone, Zuko’s suspicions are growing about what happened to her two other soulmates. He wonders what Ozai’s own soulmark looks like.

The ticking feels like reassurance now. He relies on it during that war meeting he thinks he shouldn’t have ever been at in the first place, curling his fingers over his wrist through his fear the whole time. Fate is encouraging him as he speaks out and challenges that general to an Agni Kai.

Then, fate laugh at him in ticks when it’s Ozai he faces instead.

He finds himself on a ship, sailing out to who knows where with half his face still burning and sticky. Zuko sits with his back to the metal wall of his cabin, beside his bed because he can’t stomach the swaying while laying down and the metal is cool against his back. 

Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe now he can go seek out his soulmates, like in those great epics that never explicitly talked about the soulmarks but always seemed to be just skirting around the concept. 

Zuko decides not to, ultimately. He has a mission to complete. He can’t even think about the night of the Agni Kai without cold shame sweeping over his back, and fire flickering behind his eyes. 

It takes him months to get used to using his fire again, and he has no idea why it takes so long. His uncle says he just needs time, he needs to be patient and wait for fate to reveal itself, but Zuko can’t be patient when he’s trying to stamp down hot anger too. 

He wants his turtleducks, and the library he can run to when Azula chases him, and his steady, stable bedroom, and his fire back. He wants things to go back to the way they were before all of this— this. He doesn’t know what to feel. He doesn’t know how to think.

(Maybe this is good, actually. Maybe this was meant to happen, and he can be happy for all that happened. His uncle tries to be positive for him and suggests just moving on, but there's a raw ache in him, burning no, no, I'm angry, I'm hurt, surely this isn't right, I can't be destined to be alone, I can fix it, I can fix it, I have to be able to fix it and nothing his uncle says can settle that.)

Zuko’s mother said that he didn’t need soulmates, because he had his own destiny already laid out. Now, more than ever, Zuko wishes he had a soulmate with him. He wishes he could be that sure of his fate. There’s nothing certain or reliable about his situation right now and he trembles every night he goes to bed. 

Zuko sails a lot. He barks orders and hopes that volume will make up for clear inexperience. He drinks his uncle’s tea and complains every night, then every other night, then his uncle announces tea will be a weekly thing and only lets Zuko get away with biweekly when Zuko lets him get away with spending too much of their money on new teapots (easy to sweep off tables in fits of rage) or novelty Pai Sho sets in exchange. He finds leads, and then loses his leads, then finds more leads. 

He thinks at this point he’s more of an expert on Airbender culture than the Avatar himself would be. Anyway, the Avatar was only twelve when the Airbenders were wiped out, he’s probably forgotten all about it.

Sometimes he gets letters from Ozai or Azula. Azula brags that she killed all his turtleducks. He mourns over that for three, miserable hours until Mai’s hurried letter arrives clarifying that Azula is trying to kill all his turtleducks but either she keeps missing a vital few or someone keeps repopulating the pond, and she had to send this letter immediately because she saw Azula cackling over her own paper just a moment ago and knew Zuko would worry. Then Ty Lee’s separate hurried letter arrives on the tail of Mai’s only a few minutes later, proudly letting him know not to worry at all because she has not only been keeping his ducks safe in his absence but also, coincidentally, has been pulling the world’s most hilarious prank on Azula, and yes they’re all safe, don’t worry, don’t worry.

Ozai sends him the 41st divisions’ fatality reports.

His uncle has decided to try and convince him to quit pouring over his maps and scrolls and go to the South Pole already, in case the Avatar has appeared there.

“That’s a dumb idea,” Zuko says, flicking the edge of his half-unraveled scroll so that it rolls back and forth across his table. “We already got all the waterbenders ages ago, there’s no way he could have been reborn there.”

“Unless it was recently,” his uncle points out, irritatingly cheerful. “Bending is a strange and mystical gift! Nobody can truly tell when or to whom it may be given.”

Zuko glares at him balefully, scratching a hand over his bald head. “You just want to see if there’s anyone who’ll get you sea prunes.”

His uncle slumps. “I’ve heard they have relaxing properties that are good for your skin. Besides. You have been drifting aimlessly.”

Zuko drops the pen he’d been using to annotate and gestures defensively at his pile of research. “I haven’t been—!”

“Your crew has been drifting aimlessly.”

Zuko pauses. That’s… true, actually. He hasn’t given any kind of meaningful destination in weeks, and the crew know that. They’ve been sulking around deck, starting fights with each other. The South Pole would be somewhere to go, at least. 

“Fine. Start course for the South immediately.”

His uncle wanders away looking pleased with himself. Zuko goes back to his scrolls.

So.

He does end up finding the Avatar in the South Pole, but not as a reincarnated baby (or the old man he’d been looking for). The Avatar is a sprite of a kid with a head balder than Zuko’s (not a mark of shame for this kid, a mark of skill and spiritualism) and enough cheer to run Zuko’s whole battleship with it alone. He soundly humiliates Zuko in front of all his men, dunks a few of them in the ocean seemingly for fun, and then flits away on a flying bison. 

…Zuko firmly decides that the Avatar is the world’s biggest brat and storms off with a new spring in his step to route a course in the direction the Avatar vanished to. His uncle tells any crew member he can trap for long enough that this is the most energized he’s seen Zuko in years.

Zuko can still hear his soulmark ticking in his brain. Zuko thinks, occasionally, that it could drive him insane someday. He can’t go searching for them. It’s useless.

The clock hand has gotten closer to the first of the marks. He wonders, idly, if he’ll ever make it to them, or if his decisions will change the course of fate so much that it’ll divert him away from all six of his soulmates entirely. 

Maybe that’s why the ticking infuriates him.

He puts his mother’s ribbon back around his wrist and avoids this thought.

Commander Zhao doesn’t wear any kind of covering over his wrist, which is unfortunate, because Zuko can’t stop staring at it.

On the inside of Commander Zhao’s wrist is a shiny, conspicuous, pinkish circle of evenly scarred flesh. It’s horrifically uniform, like he took the underside of a tea kettle to it, or some kind of brand. Maybe even his own firebending. 

“Is there a problem, your highness? ” Commander Zhao spits, and then they’re fighting, and Zuko completely forgets about how someone burned off Zhao’s soulmarks.

Kyoshi island. Humiliating. He wonders, briefly, if any of his soulmates live in the little village he’s burning. 

(One of the boys running off on the bison’s back seems familiar, somehow, like Zuko has seen his face before in dreams, or half-forgotten memories of a childhood friend, but the only time Zuko can place seeing the boy before is at the South Pole.)

Maybe this is what his mother meant when she told him not to worry about soulmates, though. He has his own destiny, separate from them. He’s a prince.

The ticking speeds up, briefly, and the clock burns painfully like it had when it first came in. Zuko gets a strange headache for the rest of the day, everything seeming floaty and feverish-hot. Sometimes when he practices his katas for hours on end without eating or drinking enough, he feels this same floatiness, but all he’s been doing all day is wandering this town, where people swear the Avatar flew by. He’d have to go further inland than he’d like to pursue the Avatar at this point, and he’d been considering it when the burning began.

Zuko debates it, but he eventually allows his uncle to convince him such a long journey would be unwise at this time of night, and returns to the ship. His head aches anyway.

He’s unwrapping the ribbon from his wrist to change clothes when he sees it. One of the notches is flickering, almost floating, raising up from the rest of the mark like one of the optical illusions suggesting three-dimensional figures Zuko has seen in rare paintings. The ticking gets faster, almost begins to ring in Zuko’s ears, deafening.

He hides in his ship until the noise has died enough for him to handle, and then he ventures out again. Zuko tries his absolute best to put it all out of his mind. He has a mission, he reminds himself. If he ever wants to go home, he has to fulfill it. He grits his hands into fists and resolves not to look at the mark again. 

Then his uncle gets captured, and Zuko forgets anyway. Besides, he reasons later, the soulmark couldn’t mean much if his uncle isn’t on it. The only other option if his uncle isn’t is that he won’t last long enough to count as a soulmate, either because Zuko drives him away, or he dies. Or maybe he didn’t care enough in the first place to have the strong connection a soulmate needs. 

Zuko can’t deal with any of those possibilities right now (even though he can’t get the third out of his mind—his mother wasn’t a soulmate, and she’s gone now, and he doesn’t know why and his uncle might do the same, tick, tick, tick— )

The burning goes away. The ringing follows it. Zuko doesn’t look at his soulmark, but he catches out of the corner of his eye that the oddly floating notch has gone back to normal. 

Zuko sneaks into a Fire Temple after the Avatar and almost feels sacrilegious as he fights the Fire Sages. One of them shouts, “the clock is ticking! The first chime is almost upon us!” at him, which Zuko can’t even hope to decipher. Commander Zhao, though, pales almost cloud-white and his hands jerk up in a stilted jolt that he manages to abort before any particular gesture is made. 

Commander Zhao had been about to grab his wrist, though. Zuko’s sure of it. He can’t get that burned-circle image out of his head.

In the end, the Avatar escapes once more, and none of it winds up mattering.

Pirates. Crude. Two of them are soulmates and have already found each other—they share an easy familiarity with, laughing like they’d known each other all their lives and not, as the captain tells him, only a year. Zuko can’t seem to pull his eyes away from them.

Conflict is a good distraction, though. He kidnaps the waterbender from the Avatar’s gang and even manages to hold her hostage for almost a day. She curses him out with nearly as much spit and fire as one of the pirates and he yells back at her. It’s refreshing to be yelled at. His uncle never yells, and his crew scitters and scampers away from him. 

Zuko realizes he’s missed having somebody treat him like a threat and not a prince or a nephew. They scream at each other, but he feels like it could have been worse. It almost feels like banter. He hears the tick-tock of clock gears, the trickle of what he assumes must be the water at his back, and then Katara escapes anyway.

He puts it out of his mind and focuses on the Avatar again. 

If asked, Zuko wouldn’t be able to say honestly why he rescues the Avatar from Pohuai stronghold. He rationalizes it’s because of his banishment, and that’s mostly true. Pretty much all true, actually.

But his uncle has always been able to figure out when something isn’t fully true (he hopes his uncle is one of his soulmates, he really does). So Zuko yells at him when he asks and sneaks out so he doesn’t have to think harder on it. 

It’s just—

He feels this pull . This urgent ticking, a vague floatiness from his wrist again and the feeling of importance around every step he takes. There’s this weight around his decision, when he slides his Dao blades onto his back and pulls on the Blue Spirit theater mask. Like it will have consequences, like he can feel the ripples of change spreading out from him as he walks. 

This, Zuko decides, must be because he is vaguely committing treason, and he’s sure that anyone who’s committed treason must feel this kind-of-guilty-but-also-that’s-not-it about the whole process.  

The Avatar is just as much of a brat as Zuko remembered him. The Avatar keeps insisting that they have to go back to get his frozen frogs for his friends. The Avatar is obviously, painfully young. 

He’s bony and scrawny and absolutely refuses to stop talking, now moving onto why the old lady on top of the hill told him to get frozen frogs and not regular frogs since presumably it’s not the cold that makes the frogs help but the frogs themselves, unless it is the cold, in which case what happens in summertime? Do people get sick like this in summertime? Mr. Blue Spirit? Are you listening?

The Avatar’s name, as Zuko finds out entirely against his will, is Aang. 

He gets knocked out, embarrassingly. Aang saves him, even though he took Zuko’s mask off in the process and found out Zuko’s identity. They sit together in the forest, Zuko trying to catch his breath, and Aang babbling his little heart out.

The ripples feel thicker. Everything feels heavy, important . Like he’s on the verge of something monumental. He chalks it up to the potential concussion.

Aang is talking about an old Fire Nation friend. Zuko listens, absently, while trying to keep his fingers from shaking. He hopes Commander Zhao hasn’t figured out who the Blue Spirit is, yet. 

“Do you think,” the Avatar asks, “we could have been friends?”

Maybe, Zuko wants to say. He looks at this teeny-tiny little boy with arrows painted on his skin, sliding underneath a silver-white sundial clock that Aang keeps innocently bared and thinks, I don’t know. 

He has two options, in this moment, staring at Aang with eyes as wide as his scar will allow, the faint hum of wind in his ears behind the deafening ticking of his clock. He can say yes, he could say, I hope so —or he could say impossible, I can’t. He feels each of those answers struggle in the back of his throat.

The Avatar looks so hopeful, but Zuko chooses to run away instead.

Zuko retreats back to his crew, stews for a bit, and then hires a bounty hunter named June to track down the Avatar using the necklace he’d picked up from Katara. 

June helps exactly not at all.

Which is fine, which is absolutely fine, whatever.  

He has to do everything around here.

So. 

Zuko now knows what it’s like to have his ship blown up, with him on it. Pirates filled the cargo hold with blasting jelly, he’s told later, when the ringing of the blast is still stuck in his ears (or maybe that’s the clock). Either way, he knows it was Zhao.

He’s in the North Pole now, chasing after the Avatar who’s supposed to be inside the capital’s walls. Zhao is also leading an invasion and Zuko hears he’s trying to kill the moon, in some way. 

Zuko slips under the city walls, using his firebending to keep himself warm. It’s a good distraction. He times how long he’s been under with the steady, reassuring tick-tick-tick of the clock in his ears and, at some point, feels his wrist get all floaty again. 

He makes it into the North Pole. 

Avatar: attained. 

Zuko: sneaking back out of the North Pole, with the Avatar on his back. 

He remembers Lu Ten holding him like this, or—he remembers jumping on Lu Ten’s back and hanging off his neck like a koala-owl, until Lu Ten got with the program and went running through the palace, veering in and out of the pillars. 

The thought makes him hoist the Avatar higher on his back and “accidentally” let his firebreathing slip, just enough to make the cold shock him into thinking clearly again. 

Avatar: weirdly unconscious.

Zuko won’t think about that part too hard.

The Avatar won’t wake up. Now that Zuko’s found shelter in the blizzard, it’s becoming slightly more worrying. Before, he could chalk it up to weird Avatar shenanigans, but now, after walking a few miles in the snow, he couldn’t confidently say Aang hadn’t been knocked out by the cold. 

Aang’s lying all curled on his side, slumbering peacefully by the small fire Zuko had managed to start. Zuko tied his hands and feet up so even if he does wake up, he won’t escape (go running out into the snow and die like an idiot). 

It gives him the opportunity to consider his options. It’s peaceful here, Aang sleeping, the fire crackling, sending warmth floating gently across his bones. He can’t leave in this weather. He can’t wake Aang up. His only real option is staying.

So he does. He crosses his arms across his chest and dozes, lulled by the steady, floaty, tick-tick-tick-tick of the clock. 

Aang doesn’t cover his own clock. The shadow on it covers two of the notches already. He has at least three more to go—Zuko can’t tell how many exactly from this angle.

Do you think we could have been friends?

It didn’t matter. Zuko would deliver Aang to his father, regain his honor, and go home. He’d go home. Back to the servants, Li and Yaijen and Cook Shalu and Aluni-whose-boyfriend-died and Dusa, Aoza, Daiza, Damu, Aizori, Yiru, Eiroki who let him hide in her library and Minga who snuck him bread for the turtleducks. 

Azula and her friends. Mai and Ty Lee. He wonders how they’re doing, whether or not Azula puts up with them still, or whether she’s sent Ty Lee back to the circus and Mai back to her inheritance. 

He wonders if Mai is still an heiress or if her parents have finally had that second kid, and if they’d decided that this second kid was somehow better than Mai at infancy and tossed Mai away. He wonders if Azula has killed them, on accident. Zuko’s hands curl into fists under his armpits. He wonders if Azula has burned down their mother’s study, or sent the servants away, or burned all the turtleducks. He imagines the pond on fire, the palace tapestries burning. 

Li. Yaizen and Shalu, who married each other two weeks before his banishment and told him the news privately so he could congratulate them as loudly as he wanted. Aluni and her boyfriend, Chusom, who died at seventeen. Dusa. Aoza, Daiza-Damu-Aizori. Yiru. Eiroki, head librarian. Minga, assistant cook. 

Li. Yaizen and Shalu. Aluni, Chusom. Dusa. Aoza, Daiza-Damu-Aizori. Yiru. Eiroki. Minga. He tries to remember everyone. Dee the stablehand and Oseko the maid, Chuzok left the palace to look after his son, Songso and her daughter Zilu. He remembers until the list of names drowns out the ticking and the crackling and the roaring blizzard. He remembers his room and the library and sitting in the kitchen, gossiping. The turtleduck pond and his mother’s study. 

He wonders if his uncle is looking for him.

At some point he starts talking. The words fall quiet compared to the noise. “There’s always something,” he laments, frustrated, gesturing irritably to the storm outside. Nobody has come looking for him. Nobody has found him. 

He’s not even one of his uncle’s soulmates. There’s no guarantee his uncle even cares. He compares Aang to Azula aloud, because everything always comes so easy for them. 

(He doesn’t need her luck, though. He doesn’t need this ticking.)

Aang wakes up. His friends come to save him, and the waterbender buries him in snow.

Stupid… he shouldn’t have challenged her in a blizzard. 

Aang saves him again. Zuko doesn’t understand this, but he wakes up in the bison’s saddle and escapes, stumbling through the North Pole cities. There’s some big, blue monster raging in the distance, the moon is gone, and everything is confusing. His head pounds. He can barely move his legs. 

Zuko had been going to go for his ship, but then no, Zhao blew it up and his men with it. He killed loyal Fire Nation soldiers. He killed Zuko’s crew. 

That jerk.

Zuko encounters Zhao on his way out and decides that whatever luck he does have must be bad luck. He must be cursed. That’s probably it.

He doesn’t hear much of what Zhao says. He confirms he killed Zuko’s men and also the moon. He says he knows Zuko was the Blue Spirit. He says he knows everything. He’s a swaying, raving madman with a burn scar on his wrist.

“I had no choice,” Zuko protests. “I—”

“You should have accepted your fate as a failure and a disgrace!” Zhao howls, fire sputtering from his hands, from his face. He throws bursts of it at Zuko and forces him to dodge. “You should have laid down and died!” 

Zuko throws up his hands in front of his face and staggers into an icy wall. “I—”

“You should have died!” Zhao is shouting. “You should have died!”  

Zhao punches a fist out and fire roars. 

There’s a blink of hesitation. This is a Fire Nation general, Zuko thinks, staggering away from Zhao, his head blinding him with ticking and the resonance of fire power. Should I fight him? Would that be treason?

Zhao attacked first though. He’s attacking now, arms swinging wildly with only remnants of the precision he’d shown in their earlier battles. He stares Zuko in the eye and raves flames.

Zuko counters with his own, and now they’re fighting.

They battle it out. Zhao’s clumsy and uncoordinated, swinging his arms deliriously, putting all his force into each swing. But he’s powerful, and Zuko’s on the defensive, blocking wide casts of fire that melt the walls around them and send icy torrents cascading down. They’re on a bridge, and Zuko’s foot slips once, but he catches himself on a wall and pulls himself back up before he falls, skidding and sliding on the wet ice. 

Zuko’s head still pounds. Somewhere along the line, his ribbon had been loosened and tugged down his wrist, and even a quick glance confirms that one of the notches has drifted away from the clock again. He can’t see very well. He can’t walk very well. But he blocks every punch and throws some of his own and stays alive .

Zhao seems infuriated by that. He’s still yelling. He’s shrieking something, but Zuko can’t hear it over the blast of fire and his own heartbeat. “Stop it!” he shouts back, fire dripping from his hands. “Just go away! Leave me alone!”

Zhao bellows in response. He sends out another tirade of furious waves of fire and scorching heat, then another, then a third, until Zuko realizes he’s not even fighting anymore. Fire bursts from his skin like flowers, bursting beacons of light through the icy shadows around them, and Zhao howls and cries out, arms pinwheeling around him as he punches at nothing. 

Zuko can’t look away. He can’t make himself move. Zhao’s aimless attacks have started to lag now. He notices and screams at his hands in useless frustration, like a child throwing a tantrum that’s begun to give up. His hands scrape at his own sideburns. He drags his nails over his face until the scratches have begun to bleed, stomping his feet. 

Zhao holds his hands over his ears, and Zuko knows , suddenly, horribly, exactly what this is about.

“It won’t stop!” Zhao shouts. “It won’t stop, it never stops! Zuko,” and fire pours from his hands, “Zuko I can’t escape it. I’m going mad. I’m dying. Zuko, Zuko, I can’t kill it, the ticking, the ticking, the—”

Zuko backs away as Zhao reels away, fire and sparks dripping from his fingers like the blood welling up on his face. He’s tugging at his hair now, and Zuko gasps for breath. 

“Why?” Zhao cries out, to the moonless sky and the raging monster in the background, “Why won’t it all die!”  

“What?” Zuko manages to sputter, head ringing.

Zhao whirls on him. Zuko doesn’t like the look in his eyes. “The ticking ,” Zhao wails. He holds up his wrist and its burn scar like its a knife and shoves it in Zuko’s face, pushing him back against a wall and pinning him there with an elbow. “The ticking, it won’t go away! No matter what I do, no matter what I kill, it won’t die! It never dies! I killed the moon and I can’t kill the noi-se… ” 

“Let me go—” Zuko scrabbles at Zhao’s hands, but Zhao grabs the front of Zuko’s shirt in his fist and shoves Zuko back against the wall, forcing Zuko to look at him in his wild desperate eyes. He’s crying. The tears are freezing with the blood on his face. 

“I can’t escape it,” he pleads, “it’s in my brain, Zuko, my prince, I’m going insane, I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying and I killed them and I can’t make it stop—!” 

Zhao lurches away again, groaning horribly. “I killed them,” he realizes, as though for the first time. His eyes are wide and almost child-like. “I killed them, and I—I killed them, I killed my—” He cuts himself off, sinking down to the icy floor of the bridge. “Oh,” he says, simply. “Oh. I lost.”

White-blue light washes over them. Zuko, maybe in shock by now, can’t comprehend what’s happening anymore.

Zhao gasps. “It can’t be,” he whispers. He’s smiling.

Zuko looks up, taking his eyes off Zhao for a split second to see the moon hanging in the sky once more, shining brilliantly like it had never left. He hears cheers in the distance, the sound of the Water Tribe celebrating. He hears an awful cracking noise, ice splitting into rubble, and snaps his gaze back to Zhao. 

Zhao, trapped in the hand of the Ocean spirit, screaming again, hands clawing at the watery grip around him and going straight through. Zuko jerks himself up and forward, flailing to the edge of the bridge. He thrusts out his arm.

Tick, tick, tick, tick—

“Zhao!” he shouts. “Grab my hand! Zhao! ”

But Zhao doesn’t. He looks at Zuko with those dull-desperate eyes, and lets the water swallow him. When Zuko thinks of this moment later, he’ll remember that Zhao was smiling. 

His uncle sits with him all through the night as they travel away from the North Pole. Zuko can’t get Zhao out of his head.

The ticking, the ticking, Zuko, my prince, I’m dying, I’m dying, I killed them and I’m dying—

They make it to the Earth Kingdom, where his uncle books them into a lovely little spa resort and insists that he relax. Zuko washes away the sea salt and ocean brine and chill from his bones and scrubs until his skin is red and he can close his eyes without seeing Zhao’s resigned, weeping face.

Zuko finds a calendar somewhere and learns it’s been three years since he was banished. His skin feels too tight for his body, his phoenix plume pulling at his scalp. He finds his uncle getting a massage and scares away the attendant in an urge to do something , anything, before he explodes and ruins the whole place.

Azula arrives. She looks older. Tension has pulled her face into a sneer, and, coupled with her tight updo pulling her hair stretched back from her scalp, makes her look like a much older woman.

That was probably the point.

She’s still shorter than him, even though she holds herself with all the grace of a Fire Nation princess, commander of an army, who has never seen a fight she didn’t know she could win, much less a fight she couldn’t win at all. Her armor is polished and sharp at the edges, her smile even sharper. She has the eyes she used to pull when she wanted to trick him up to the roof as a little girl. 

Azula’s still wearing the same leather cuff, polished like it’s new, and she’s twirling it around her wrist as she talks. 

Zuko almost wants to hug her. 

“He regrets banishing you,” she tells him. “He wants you to come home. Family, of course, is the only one a Fire Lord can trust.”

Zuko thinks, Li, Yaizen and Shalu, Aluni, Chusom, Dusa, Aoza, Daiza-Damu-Aizori, Yiru, Eiroki, Minga, my mother’s study, the turtleduck pond. He thinks of letters by Mai and Ty Lee, and none from any of the servants. He thinks of the library and the palace tapestries, and being sure of himself, and safe. 

Azula gives him the day to think about it, and leaves immediately after.

Zuko’s practically bubbling the rest of the day, and he can tell it’s worrying his uncle, but he doesn’t actually care. He works off the energy practicing his katas, effectively and fully distracted from Zhao.

Ozai wants him—Ozai wants him back . Even as a political move, it means Zuko gets to go home, regain his honor, forget about the Avatar and the clock and the tick-tick-tick of somebody else’s destiny. 

His uncle warns that it seems suspicious. “I’ve never known the Fire Lord to be regretful of anything,” he says solemnly, bowing his grayed head. “Nothing is as it seems in our family, Prince Zuko.”

He never says Zuko’s name without the title attached. Zuko can’t help asking himself if his uncle would say his name at all if he weren’t a prince, or a nephew. And even then, if his uncle weren’t a prince himself. If they weren’t connected by politics or family, would his uncle still care? Does his uncle care now , past obligation?

If his uncle were one of his soulmates, he would. But Zuko doesn’t know that he is. He doesn’t have anything to fall back on, where he is right now. 

Zuko grips his wrist and scowls. He has nothing. He has nothing, so he yells and shouts and throws a tantrum, because at least he has that. It’s a test, maybe, to see what his uncle will do. Or maybe he’s just mad, because he knows that, at least partly, his uncle is right.

So, Azula says he can go home, and that his father wants him. And Zuko makes his first mistake, which is believing her. 

They end up fighting Azula. Zuko fends off her blue fire while listening to how Ozai blames his uncle for the failure of the North Pole invasion, how Ozai would rather have him rot in prison than ever have him home. Zuko doesn’t believe that, but she throws him down the stairs and is about to point lightning at him when his uncle redirects the blast and they escape. 

Azula would have killed him. She hadn’t even thought twice about it, he thinks deliriously, as they escape to the shoreline, then the forest. Had she known he’d die? Had she fully realized what she’d been about to do? Or had it been like squishing a fly—mindless, gally, without really registering it?

Would he have done the same? Zuko tries to think through if their roles had been reversed, if he had been the cherished son and she the defective daughter, and can’t come to an answer.  Would I have? He asks himself. Could I have? He tries to be logical, but all the results come back as hurt.

Zuko has never done logic well, and he does betrayal even worse. 

They find a creek in the forest. His uncle hands him a knife.

Zuko’s head feels lighter now and he absolutely hates it. The breeze is cold on the back of his neck without his phoenix plume to cover it. He looks awful. He looks embarrassing.

“Prince Zuko,” his uncle says, holding back a grin under that beard, “I’m sorry.”

Zuko pushes ahead and refuses to look at him.

He meets a girl named Song, who can stare war in the eyes and throw hope in its face. She responds to his shouting and scoffing with an unimpressed look and an invitation to dinner. 

Song’s father was captured by Fire Nation, and Zuko tells himself it’s what he deserved. She tells him that his scar isn’t ugly and that she knows how it feels and doesn’t falter when he pushes her away. She’s the softest thing he’s ever known. She’s the kind of strong that comes after hardship, who knows what she can do and is even willing to do it if she has to. 

There was a stable boy in the palace who rode the palace ostrich horses with Zuko once. Li had never been the toughest boy. Li had one leg that was weaker than the other, from some complication at birth. Li had the kindest green eyes Zuko had ever seen, and all of the ostrich horses loved him. 

Then Li fell from a ladder in the gardens and died. 

(There had been an unexpected breeze. The ladder swayed. Li got startled, and his bad foot slipped.)

(It was a coincidence that Azula had been playing in the same garden at the time.)

He sits on Song’s front porch with a dead boy’s name and stares at her like she’s some kind of ethereal spirit. He feels like a child. Song has eyes like soil, like living things, like tree branches in the desert, like Li’s. Tick-tock, Zuko hears, tick-tock. He wraps his fingers around his wrist so tightly that his pulse thuds against his skin.

It’s so quiet out here. He keeps waiting for something to attack him.

Song says, “the Fire Nation has hurt you, hasn’t it? They hurt me too,” and tries to rest a hand on his shoulder. 

When Zuko flings her hand away and stalks off, she doesn’t follow him. When he steals her family’s ostrich horse, she doesn’t stop him, either. 

Later, he looks at the clock and finds the hand closer to the first hand than it’s ever been. He presses his hands to his face.

Even if Song were his soulmate, she’d hate him. He’s Fire Nation. He’s a soldier. His people killed her father and crippled her. His people. He did this. 

“Have hope, Li!” she’d told him. “The Avatar has returned!”

Song had no soulmates. Every single one of her notches was a scar, and she still smiled at him. 

They have no money, and that’s dumb. His uncle moves just a bit slower every day after that swordsman makes him dance. Zuko robs the swordsman later, but the money doesn’t stretch very far. He steals again, and his uncle begins to ask where the money came from, Zuko, what happened to those travelers, Zuko, you’re better than this, we can get by. So Zuko leaves. He feels the importance of the decision weighing on him, but he leaves.

He takes the ostrich horse that he stole from Song with him. 

Earth Kingdom soldiers steal the feed he’d bought for the ostrich horse, and Zuko thinks this is some form of karma. The boy who’d provoked the soldiers in the first place offers to let Zuko feed the horse at his family’s farm, and when Zuko accepts, introduces himself as Lee, which also feels like karma.

He fixes the family barn roof (poorly) in exchange for food. Lee takes his swords and plays with them, which Zuko, inexplicably, feels more amused than angry about. He teaches Lee how to uses them correctly instead. 

Lee’s brother’s name is Sensu. He’s serving in the Earth Kingdom army (everyone is serving in the Earth Kingdom army, these days). His battalion has been captured, and he’ll be killed.

None of this is actually Zuko’s business, so he grumpily leaves, and then grumpily turns right back around because Lee pulled a knife on some Earth Kingdom soldiers who are forcibly recruiting him into their army. 

This is still none of Zuko’s business. He could just leave. He could have just left. Honestly .

So he fights the soldiers. He uses his swords, first, then firebending. He stops the soldiers, and saves Lee. 

And then Lee’s mother warns him not to come closer. Lee cries, “no! I hate you!” when Zuko tries to give him his dagger back. The soldier says that Zuko is an outcast, burned and banished by his father and everyone keeps shuffling back away from him.

Zuko leaves the village for real this time. 

He’s never felt like an enemy before.

At some point, he isn’t exactly sure when, he sees the tail-end of a Fire Nation drill chugging away past him, and his heat-adled, tired mind decides, yes, that is the direction I want to go too. The drill could be going anywhere, really. He knows there are mining expeditions in the Earth Kingdom, seeking out iron and riches to supply the Fire Nation army, and so he assumes that the drill is simply heading back to a mining camp. 

Maybe he could find help there. Or steal from the campsite. Surely a few iron ingots or gemstones wouldn’t be missed, right? 

Maybe these would be bad soldiers. Maybe he could justify attacking his own people then.

Zuko ends up not being able to justify it at all. He hears voices, recognizes them, realizes a few things all at once, and the sense comes rushing in much, much later. 

Azula and her friends are manning the drill. He notices this first. It is not a mining expedition, and it has stopped at an abandoned town, long since emptied out and left behind. He finds a Fire Nation helmet on his way in, and the remnants of a taxation outpost by the street. 

Next. The Avatar just flew into that building, and Azula has followed. She asks if he really wants to fight her, and the Avatar doesn’t reply. 

Aang is a child. Azula is a child.

Looking back, Zuko doesn’t really know what he’s thinking here. He’ll rationalize it the same way he did with Zhao—selfishness. If Azula captured the Avatar, he’d really never be able to go home, and so he has to stop her. 

The other half of him will whisper that Aang never replied to what Azula said. It was as if he didn’t know. Or he didn’t know if he should tell her even if he did.

That silence held too many memories for Zuko to just leave him there.

His uncle gets struck by lightning, but manages to direct it away. In the aftermath, Zuko makes him tea and complains. His uncle analyzes his sister like she’s a general in a great war, planning out this strategy and that to bring her down.

Zuko knows his sister better than Iroh. He could speak up now, and tell his uncle, no, she’s fourteen, she’s two years older than the Avatar, she’s wearing armor twice her size to make her look bigger, she’s projecting her voice like our mother taught her, she used to sit on my floor and let me braid her hair, look at her—

But in this moment, Zuko hears his uncle speak like Azula is a great military force, something to be afraid of, and realizes that although Aang’s silence had echoes of himself, Azula’s question had sounded exactly like Ozai. 

Tick-tock, tick-tock…

Zuko says nothing and burns the tea. 

His uncle doesn’t comment on his time away. Zuko feels all shaken up inside, like someone took a sword to him and then left him to bleed out somewhere. 

He tries to learn lightning redirection. He stands in a storm and screams at the sky, daring it to strike him, daring it to kill him, if he can just get this one thing right . Water trickles down his wrists and the clock goes tick-tick-tick-tick-tick and deafens him even more than the thunder. 

He thinks about Song and he thinks about Lee and he thinks about the tiny Avatar and Zhao. He cries, sobbing into the rain and thinks about his mother. He doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t know his destiny anymore and it’s terrifying. It’s overwhelming, standing on this mountain and looking out at the world and feeling so, so small. 

Where is he supposed to go? What is he supposed to do, now? He has no grand future to follow before him, no pre-set destiny, aside from his soulmates, and—

None of his soulmates are in the Fire Nation because he can never, ever go home. Maybe he’ll die before he ever meets them. Maybe they’ll die. Maybe the Fire Nation will shoot them and set them on fire, dress them up as soldiers and set them on the front lines against their own side, unarmed. Maybe the Fire Nation will kill their fathers and cripple them for life. Maybe the Fire Nation will kick the ladder out from under them while they fix the palace roof.

He just wants to go home. He wants to be better than this. He wants to be better than Azula, better than his fears, better than his doubts, better than the storm and the rain and the fire and the entire Earth Kingdom and this dumb war. He hates this feeling, this awful, drowning feeling that rages around him like lava and he hates himself for feeling it and not being able stop. He wants to be home. He wants everything to go back to the way it was. He wants someone to hold him and love him and know there's nothing he can do to ruin that love like he's ruined everything else. He wants to know the world will stay the same around him and he wants to know he can trust himself again, and his uncle will stay with him forever. He's still waiting for that chime.

He wants to forget everything he knows and be young and happy and twelve years old again, hiding in the palace library. 

Thunder booms and lightning strikes and Zuko screams into it.

Zuko does not learn lightning redirection. 

They’re heading towards towards Ba Sing Se now, and his uncle finds this incredibly funny. He may also be part of a secret, perhaps-treasonous society of old people. 

Moving on.

The hand is still inching, slowly, towards the first notch. Zuko’s doubts and spite won’t stop fate from moving. Zuko expects that once he passes this mark, the others will come in quick succession. He feels tempted to seek them out, but the Earth Kingdom is huge, and they could be anywhere—any tribe, really, even though he bets none of them are in the Fire Nation anymore. 

They make it to Ba Sing Se, or at least on the ferry there. His uncle charms the border officer, which Zuko wants to immediately forget about. The tick-tick-tick s feel more urgent now, more expectant. He meets Jet on the boat, who has spiky hair and rakish smile that grows wider after he flicks his eyes up and down Zuko’s frame a few times and hears him talking about how naive everyone here must be to think they can escape the Fire Nation by simply moving. 

It’s like Zuko has passed Jet’s evaluation with all the right qualities. Like Jet saw him and thought, without question, yes, he’s good enough, he fits. Zuko hasn’t felt like someone saw that about him in a long time. He isn’t sure he’s ever felt that way.

His uncle sighs beside him and asks if he could lighten up, have some hope. But Jet bounces an eyebrow and asks if Zuko wants to go rob some of the passengers, and, really, how could Zuko say no to that? 

Jet’s charming, and adventurous. He crosses his arms and glares out at the ocean as it passes by and comments that none of these people have their eyes open. They act like they’re fleeing the war by going to Ba Sing Se, but they can’t ever do that. The war is omnipresent. The war is everywhere.

Zuko agrees. He agrees with everything Jet says, about the injustice of it all, the unfairness. Jet’s two friends fold Zuko right in, and for a moment, Zuko is happy. They spend the whole trip together, spitting angry sparks about the state of the world. 

“See, you?” Jet says, gesturing between them with one lazy hand, “you get me. You understand what I mean. Everybody—they think the war will just end, but it won’t. It sticks with people, it changes people, you can’t outrun something like that. You get that. You’ve lived in it. You know what happens out there. You don’t pretend everything is-is fine now.”

Zuko meets Jet’s eyes and feels something heavy around him, something important, like he felt with Song . Jet’s magnetic, he thinks. Jet’s like fire, entrancing, jagged and angry but enthralling where Song was all acceptance and steel. 

They look at each other, Jet searching for something in Zuko’s expression, and Zuko lets himself be examined and wonders if Jet’s one of his soulmates. He wouldn’t mind that, he thinks. He puts a hand over his wrist and holds it there, waiting, breath caught, looking into those brown eyes like bonfire coals. 

But Jet isn’t. They part ways, and Zuko heads further into Ba Sing Se. 

Zuko makes tea. They have an apartment in the lower ring, next to Gao Chihan and his wife who bakes them bread over her stove for their first day and Yuomen and Umalu and their six kids who have managed schedule themselves so one of them is always shrieking in the early hours of the morning. They’re organized like that, and they’re all under the age of six. 

Zuko honestly longs for that kind of hold over his life. 

Their apartment complex has a cat who hangs near the building entrance, begging for scraps by winding her way around the residents’ ankles when they leave for the morning and tripping them up. She’s affectionately nicknamed Our Favorite Nuisance, Lil’ Miss Idiot, Whiny Clumsy Dear, and That Tiny Freeloader by the neighbors. 

She is also certifiably something other than just cat, but nobody has been able to figure out what that other thing is. Pigeon-cat is the most likely candidate, but others say owl-cat and others barn owl-cat and one neighbor memorably claimed squid-cat and got booed out of the apartment hallway. 

Whatever the cat’s name or origin, Zuko decides she’s officially the only good thing in Ba Sing Se and insists on calling her only by “cat.” Sometimes even “the cat” when he’s feeling less monosyllabic.

His uncle finds this endlessly amusing. “But nephew, how will anyone know which cat you mean?” he asks, giggling to himself in the apartment’s open doorway while Zuko unpacks their meager groceries. “There are many stray cats in Ba Sing Se! You could mean any one of them.”

“But there’s only one cat here!” Zuko protests, flinging packages of wheat-rice flour and dried meats (assorted, unlabelled, and mysterious) about the table. “People can figure it out!”

“The cat by the corner to the shop, maybe? The cat by the grocer’s stall? Little Darling Kitty,” his uncle inquires, lifting The Cat to his face by her armpits and staring into her clueless pigeon-cat eyes, “What do you think? Do you think he means the grocer’s cat? You know, he could even mean the potter’s cat, and we’d never even know!”

“This city isn’t overrun with cats, uncle!” shouts Zuko. “People know what I mean!”

“He could even mean a rat-cat, or an owl-cat, or a pigeon-cat! Perhaps he’s even gone the way of that man Jiang and means to say you are a squid -cat! I hear there’s an infestation of squid-cats by Hua Fai’s bakery if she’s to be believed, he could mean one of them, hey Miss Cat? Are you part squid? Do you have tentacles? Hmm?” his uncle is swaying with the cat in his arms like a baby now. The cat thinks this is very undignified and wriggles her way to an escape. “See, nephew? She must be jealous of how many other cats you refer to instead of her.”

“She’s a cat, uncle! She doesn’t have opinions!”

He keeps referring to the cat as just the cat, but now he will occasionally add pigeon- cat, or the stray cat, when his uncle starts to look a little mischievous. 

Zuko makes more tea. He serves little cakes that his uncle makes in-between pots and tries to keep all the names right. The owner used to just buy simple steamed buns from street vendors to warm up over their half-working stove, but his uncle bought sweet potatoes and red bean and mashed them up himself for filling and people preferred those tenfold, so the owner switched over to his uncle’s method gladly. 

“I’ve never heard of this before,” one girl comments aloud, peering at the crumbly teacake he’s served her. 

She’s a regular. Her name’s Xiao Lulian and she keeps losing her hair ribbons. She comes into the shop to huddle over a cup of ginseng and gripe about the job she got as a middle-ring bookseller and all her horrid customers who don’t appreciate the intricacies of bookbinding. 

She’s also very polite, as evidenced by her innocent refusal to admit that the reason she has never heard of “Come mung, come all” tarts is because his uncle made them up earlier that morning when he realized they only had mung beans left in the pantry.

There’s red bean tarts and pineapple tarts and endless buns and rolls that each have different fillings and somehow still look exactly the same. Zuko gives a man a pork bun instead of a red bean bun and gets yelled at for twenty minutes. Zuko thinks this man has more important things to worry about, as an occupant of the lower ring.

There’s trash on the streets and people sleeping in it and sometimes people will leave their houses at night and never come back, and it’s a toss-up whether they got arrested or mugged or kidnapped or kicked out of the city forever. The Fire Nation has nothing like this, he assures himself. The Fire Nation would never treat its citizens like this.

Would he have known if it did, though? 

His uncle keeps starting to firebend and then stopping himself. For the first few weeks, first few months, really, Zuko looks around at everything like it’d bite him if he got too close. But then he realizes that Yuomen’s Fire Nation, from a colony, and her wife’s a firebender even, and nobody cares at all. If they knew he’s a prince (was), they’d care. But all they know is Li, and he looks and acts too much like them to be questioned. 

It’s oddly comforting.

Zuko makes tea, and makes more tea, and sometimes when he sneers at the customers they laugh back at him and say, “hey Li, wipe that look off your face—or is that just the scar?” and it doesn’t sound like an insult because they all have scars too, dotted across their cheeks and shoulders and wrists. 

“Hey, Li!” someone calls from the tables, “get me more of that jasmine and tell your old man to steep it more this time!”

Zuko shouts back, “Uncle says it’s a delicate tea!”

“It tastes like hot leaf juice!”

Idiot, Zuko thinks to himself, all tea tastes like hot leaf juice.

Somebody else in the teahouse boos. “You just have no taste, Mengxia!”

“I have better taste than this!” Mengxia counters, waving his fist in the other customer’s face. “We all agree my stall is the best in the market!”

“We do not all agree!” Hani barks, Mengxia’s fruit-stall competitor. 

The heckler yells, “Just let the jasmine be and get black bergamot!” 

“Stay out of this!” Mengxia yells at her, and she snorts and waves a hand like he’s being unreasonable.

“We’re out of black bergamot,” Zuko says, slamming down his tray on another table to pick up the empty cups there. The customers seated at it look incredibly invested in his drama, which he doesn’t appreciate.

“Just steep the jasmine longer, it’s not that hard,” Mengxia suggests, again.

Zuko scoffs, loudly. “It tastes better the way he does it, what, are you a tea expert now? Do you work here? I don’t see a name tag, so shut up.”

“I don’t see yours either!” Mengxia shrieks back, banging his fists on his knees. 

Zuko tops off another customer’s cup of green tea and shakes the teapot in Mengxia’s face. His current table revels in this. “Nobody here needs to know my name, Mengxia!”

Mengxia cackles and somebody else in the tea house jeers and Xiao Lulian pleads with them all to be quiet because she’s trying to get the rest of her homework done before her shift later until the owner of the house pokes his shriveled head out from the kitchen curtain and howls at them to shut it down or take it outside, which is met with mocking and a smidgeon of grudging respect. 

It’s loud and easy and Zuko doesn’t bother trying to hold his tongue. It’s the simple camaraderie he saw in his crew when they thought he wasn’t looking, or in the palace kitchens when he was younger. It’s familiarity and security and simplicity, and Zuko loves it. He’s not supposed to, but he does. 

Li. Yaizen and Shalu. Aluni, Chusom. Dusa. Aoza, Daiza-Damu-Aizori. Yiru. Eiroki. Minga. He thinks they would have loved it too.

Jet barges in one day, shaking hooked swords in Zuko’s face and hollering that he’s a firebender. When asked, his evidence is that he saw Zuko’s uncle heating up his tea.

“We work in a tea shop!” Zuko sputters, but Jet isn’t dissuaded. And in Zuko’s defense, Jet attacked first. He spits sparks with his words and swings his hooks wildly, and for a moment, Zuko sees Zhao. So he responds, and Jet is carted off, still screaming about firebenders in the city and soldiers in the walls.

( “Why?” Zhao cries out in Zuko’s memories, to that horrible, moonless sky. “Why won’t it all die! It’s in my brain, I’m dying, Zuko—” )

Later, Zuko will remember that people in the shop stood up for him. Mengxia, and Xiao Lulian, and the owner. Hani wasn’t there that day, but she drops off a package of free strawberry-mangos and tells him to be careful and watch himself, and if he and his old man ever need anything, they can go to her, anytime.

(And not Mengxia, with his shriveled cabbages and skinny cucumbers, pah! She’d help them more than he ever could, and he can tell his uncle that.)

(She winked when she said that last part, and so Zuko pointedly doesn’t.)

He never sees Jet again.

His uncle buys taro and ube at the marketplace and, one day, lotus bean paste in a tiny little container. It’s just a smidge for the two of them, but it cost more than all their furniture combined. Zuko tried to stop him by protesting, then complaining, then throwing up his hands and trying to pull his uncle away from the stall by brute force, but his uncle insisted and was surprisingly strong. 

It’s stupid, Zuko argues. They don’t need lotus bean paste. And anyway, taro tastes better.

His uncle thinks it’s good to indulge sometimes. He makes two sweet buns with the paste and hands one to Zuko, telling him to split it with somebody and waggling his eyebrows too much not to be intending for Zuko to split it with a girl, or that boy who gives them discounts on tea leaves but only when Zuko buys them. Zuko snatches it away with a scowl and keeps it in his pocket for the morning.

Zuko ends up splitting the bun with the tabby pigeon-cat. She snatches it in her bony claws, then she climbs him like a streetlight and wraps herself around his face to let him know how grateful she is. She absolutely refuses to let go of either him or the bun, so he finds himself staggering all along the street flailing (and failing) to get her off for an embarrassing amount of time. 

He ends up giving up and bringing her back to the apartment with him, since the landlord wouldn’t care anyway as long as she doesn’t destroy anything, and aside from some boundary issues she really is a polite cat. He pushes at the paper doorway and shuffles into the tiny apartment with the cat around his neck like a scarf.

The cat then has the audacity to look his shocked uncle straight the eye and nibble on her half of the lotus bun with utmost delicacy. Zuko flushes bright red and tries again to detach her, which only results in her clinging harder. His shoulders sag defeatedly.

Zuko’s uncle looks at him, then the cat, then the expensive lotus paste sweet bun, then back at Zuko, who’s turning red again. “She’s a good cat,” he mumbles.

And his uncle laughs and laughs and laughs. 

“This isn’t what I ordered,” says Qiqi, a student who comes into the tea shop to pointedly not study and get on Xiao Lulian’s nerves because she gets better grades somehow. 

“That’s jasmine.”

“But it’s not.”

Zuko rolls his eyes, picks up the cup, and tastes it. “That,” he tells Qiqi, “is jasmine. It’s jasmine.”

“No,” counters Qiqi, “it’s ginger. It tastes like ginger . Smell it.”

“It tastes like jasmine because it is jasmine,” Zuko insists. 

Qiqi sighs like she’s the only intelligent person left in all of Ba Sing Se and it’s starting to get very inconvenient for her. She takes another sip of the tea. “It’s ginger. It tastes exactly like ginger, the two teas are so different, how can you say it’s jasmine!”

“It all tastes the same to me!”

“You work in a tea shop, Li.”

“And I hate tea!” Zuko exclaims, throwing up his hands. He’s been trying to argue this point for a while now. 

“Look,” says Qiqi, with all the patience of a daycare teacher, “it’s ginger. It’s fine. Just go back and get me jasmine.”

“I will not, because it is not ginger. ” He takes another sip to prove it. “There, jasmine.”

She responds by also taking another sip, slamming the already chipped teacup down onto the equally battered table. “Ginger.”

“Jasmine.”

“Gin-ger! ”

“Jasmine!”

Zuko has to go back and get another cup anyway because they drank all of the first one in their argument. On his shameful sulk back with the correct tea he passes Mengxia, who chortles at him. “Ohhh, she played you,” he says with utter glee. “She got you good . I bet it was jasmine the whole time. I bet she was lying just to get a free refill.”

“Oh, shut up,” Zuko grumbles.

“You know, it probably only worked because you have no proper taste for these things. I bet you couldn’t even tell an oolong from an infusion.”

“I don’t even know what that means!” sputters Zuko, which makes Mengxia laugh louder and the two adjacent tables join in. “Shut up!”

They don’t.

It’s weird. 

In the Fire Nation, Zuko knew what to expect. He knew all of the rules there, what he needed to do for praise and how to avoid anger, but here, the rules don’t matter. It isn’t that he’s stopped waiting for anger, or that he doesn’t know the rules, just that he knows nothing they do can hurt him. There’s no Agni Kai awaiting him here, no life-long banishment to quiver in or hot fingers ready to press against his skin when he messes up a kata. 

What could they do to him? What could they take that hasn’t already been taken away?

And anyway. Zuko’s a disgraced prince, but he’s still a firebender, and he can’t seem to shake that sense of superiority whenever he looks at these people. Earth Kingdom people. Peasants, poor people. People with burns across their face and limbs missing and grins stretching across their faces.

Kind people. Good people.

He thinks all of this while Qiqi howls in laughter, roiling back and forth on her chair like an irritatingly delighted slug. He scowls at her, but that just makes her laugh louder.

(The tea had, in fact, been jasmine the whole time.)

His uncle does end up setting him up with an Earth Kingdom girl, eventually. She’s been coming in every day after her work shift ends and making Zuko help her pick what to order every single time. They don’t have any real menus (not enough paper for that), but he’d think after the seventh time a week repeating their specials (none), tea blends (same as every other tea house, but better), and pastries (pineapple, red bean, plain, and pork), she’d remember what she likes. 

So she’s not only indecisive, but she has the memory of a mole-rat. Zuko is incredibly unimpressed with her.

But she laughs at all of Zuko’s jokes, even though they’re awkward. She throws her own comebacks into the teahouse banter and helps the little ones with their homework if they have it, and if they don’t because they can’t pay a teacher anymore, she gives them her own assignments. She calls the apartment cat Bun-Bun and Sweetheart and giggles when Zuko snaps at her. She’s soft, like Song, and sweet, and innocent, and yet fits so smoothly into lower-ring life. 

She keeps forgetting what taro tastes like somehow, and Zuko can’t explain it for the life of him. He couldn’t explain it the first time. He couldn’t explain it the second time. He doesn’t know why she seems to believe each time that maybe now he will have miraculously gotten better at explaining things, when every time she asks he just fumbles around and disappoints both of them. 

“It tastes like vanilla,” he tries, faltering under her faith-filled grin. “Uh. And.”

“And…?” she prompts.

“And dirt,” Zuko decides.

“... dirt?” the girl asks, peering at him. Zuko realizes he just insulted his own tea and tries to backtrack. 

“I mean, not dirt, dirt, obviously,” he says, “like, earthy things. Like grass!”

“Your tea tastes like grass?”

“No!” Zuko howls. “You know what it tastes like! You’ve had it four times!”

“You counted?” the girl asks, innocently. Then she has the audacity to giggle at his flustering. “You’re not very good at this, are you?”

“I never said I was,” he grumbles.

The other customers find this all immensely entertaining. They keep calling out their own comments and cheering when he yells at them to shut up, I swear . 

Her name, Zuko finds out, is Jin.

They go on a date. A singular date, and it’s a disaster. Zuko’s hairdo is stupid. He gets food all over himself trying to juggle. The lights at Jin’s favorite spot aren’t even lit, but somehow, inexplicably, she doesn’t seem to care. She just keeps smiling.

He gets the feeling that she wouldn’t care even if they were mugged on this date, if her dress was torn, if it started raining or the neighborhood caught on fire, if he was the most awkward person in the universe (which, in all honesty, he already is)—she would smile through it all as long as he was there too. 

She makes him feel special, in a stupid, blushing way. She makes him feel normal, too tall and too rough but in regular, okay ways. She doesn’t question him or wonder about him or make him feel scrutinized or wanting. He feels like he could be the stupidest person in all of the Earth Kingdom, and she’d still like him. 

It almost makes Zuko ashamed. Or guilty. He wants to be better, be Li, just to prove he’s worthy of that blind trust, because he knows for certain he’d break it immediately if she knew who he is. She ruffles at his hair and has to stand on her tip-toes to do it, and Zuko thinks, I could break this. All it would take is the truth. And he doesn’t even think she’d be mad about it.

Just disappointed.

Jin’s still smiling when they get to Firelight Fountain and find it unlit, but her smile turns sad. It seems like all she wanted ever was to share it with him, and there’s a funny feeling in his gut, heavy, like Song and Jet, weighted with anticipation. “Close your eyes,” he tells her, and of course she trusts him and does.

It’s a risk, but he wants to give her this much, so he lights the candles. Maybe, he thinks, when he tells her to open her eyes again, all he wanted to do was bring that smile back. Her face breaks into the widest grin and she grips at his arm, gasping.

The firelight glimmers against the water. Zuko’s never seen fire be gentle before, but he can’t even make himself look at it, too busy watching her. Her gaze is beautiful. It’s awed, and quiet. Nobody has ever looked at fire before and seen art and wonder and not weaponry, he thinks. Not like how she does. Nobody like her.

Zuko leaves her there, finally. He tells her that it’s complicated and she doesn’t seem to understand that, but she doesn’t question it. His footsteps feel heavy as he walks away, sad and wistful, but also content.

His uncle doesn’t stop beaming for the rest of the week. 

Song was not his soulmate. Jet was not his soulmate. Jin is not his soulmate. Zuko lies on the blanket laid out for him on the floor of the apartment and opens the window so a light, stifling breeze can waft through. He feels as though he’s finally made it to steady ground, but now everything else is shifting around him. He can’t seem to escape that.

It’s making him uneasy.

“You need to find clarity,” his uncle says. “You have to find something to stake your peace on. See? Something you believe in. You cannot walk through life alone and blind.”

“What did you choose?”

His uncle is quiet for a time, then declares, “Tea! And so that’s why I know for certain that this Mengxia has no idea what he is talking about,” he adds with a derisive snort. He sighs, rolling his eyes. “Steeping jasmine longer , it is a delicate tea!”

Zuko rolls onto his side and grips his wrist to his chest, sung to sleep by the steady tick-tick-tick-tick. 

The Avatar is in Ba Sing Se. Zuko doesn’t know what to do, and then he does. The air has gotten all heavy again. The teahouse stands imposingly at his back, and it’s like wading through waist-deep ocean water as he turns away from it, on the search for the Avatar’s bison. 

He’d forgotten what this felt like. The search, the chase, the desperation that comes with seeing the Avatar. He hadn’t missed it, he knows now. He’d been stable. He forgot about the Avatar, somehow, and it was nice . It’d been good.

Zuko doesn’t know what that means for him. He puts it out of his head for later and shoulders his dual Dao.  

He shakes down an agent of the Dai Li. He doesn’t even register that he just threatened to cut off the man’s head. Tick-tick-tick-tick, roaring and loud and intolerable in his head, in his ears, worming into his brain. 

Zuko finds the bison under the lake, and his pulse thuds like metal-clad footsteps. He’s going to have a heart attack like this. He can’t think straight. He hadn’t anticipated what it’d be like to stand in front of a choice so big and look it in the eyes. 

His uncle is here. His uncle is always where Zuko needs him most, and he speaks so forcefully Zuko expects the very walls of Lake Laogai Stronghold to bend under the words. 

“I know my own destiny, Uncle!” Zuko spits. He clenches the swords in his hands. 

“Is it your own destiny?” his uncle roars back, “or is it a destiny someone else has forced upon you!”

And Zuko stares the Dragon of the West head-on and thinks, stunned, I don’t know.

He sets Aang’s bison free. He lets his mother’s mask slip into the ocean. He lets his uncle lead him back to their apartment and the cat and the teahouse without response, drifting in his own mind. It’s as though there had been a build-up of pressure in his chest this whole time, and now that it’s burst he’s left untethered.

Every decision has ripples. Some more so. He made a choice, for better or worse, and now he has to accept what happens next. But Zuko has never been good at accepting things.  

He might have made his soulmarks fade forever. He might have cast away his future entirely. He might die tomorrow. He might die today.

In his dreams, he’s his father. The palace is burning—or maybe that’s just the throne he sits on. Before him is a red dragon and a blue dragon. He’s choking on flames that curve around his left  eye, and his uncle, the blue dragon, tells him to run. He dreams that he looks in the mirror and sees the Avatar’s tattoos looking back at him with an unscarred face that’s painfully, horrifically young. 

He wakes up gripping his wrists.

They get a new tea shop and call it the Jasmine Dragon, in the upper ring. They can afford a better apartment, now. They can afford lotus buns whenever they want. His uncle plays Pai Sho with sniveling politicians, and Zuko takes one look out at the expansive serving area and knows intrinsically that he can’t insult these people.  

It’s so uptight here. It’s bigger than their old teahouse, but so much more stifling. And even though it’s better here, safer here, he feels restless in his skin.  

Li. Yaizen and Shalu. Aluni, Chusom. Dusa. Aoza, Daiza-Damu-Aizori. Yiru. Eiroki. Minga. 

Song, Jet, and Jin.

Iroh.

Zuko’s never wanted his soulmates more. He’s never needed clarity so badly. He’s never wanted to be home so badly.

This time when Zuko serves tea, he keeps his mouth shut.

They’re invited to serve for the Earth King. His uncle is so happy, and so Zuko tries to be happy too. 

Zuko has the worst luck ever.

He’s in a cave with the waterbender—he’s in a cave with Katara. She’s angry with him. He expected that.

She calls him the Fire Lord’s son, and that he has hatred running in his veins, and even if the latter is true he hasn’t been the Fire Lord’s son in months. He touches his scar and thinks, years. That’s the only part he contests her on, and she seems shocked. 

They both have dead mothers. 

Katara apologizes for yelling at him, sorrier than he probably deserves. She offers to heal his scar.

Zuko looks at her. She has fire like Jet, sweetness like Song, persistence like Jin. She holds up a vial of Spirit Oasis water, and Zuko feels time slow.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

He hears the sound of ocean waves, he thinks. The clink of seashells tapping together in the surf, but cleaner, crisper. The steady trickle of a water clock, as he looks in Katara’s eyes.

This is important, the universe whispers. 

“I…” he says. 

And then the entrance of the cave rolls away, and he and Katara startle apart. His uncle bustles in, grasping at Zuko’s shoulders. The Avatar is glaring at him, and Zuko glares back. 

His uncle is held hostage, briefly. His uncle calls this a “crossroads of destiny” and tells Zuko to choose, like Zuko hasn’t been hearing his soul whisper that for the past three weeks. 

Azula knows every single thing that makes Zuko cave. She tells him he can redeem himself. She tells him she needs him, and if he goes with her, he could have his honor, his father’s love, anything and everything he could want.

I want to be home, Zuko thinks, hands curling. I want to know what I’m supposed to do right now.

His uncle only tells him to figure out what he truly wants.

Li. Yaizen and Shalu. Aluni, Chusom. Dusa. Aoza, Daiza-Damu-Aizori. Yiru. Eiroki. Minga. Song and Jet and Jin, the library, the turtleduck pond, his mother’s study. The feeling of security and surety in himself and his life. The knowledge that he has a destiny. The innocence to never question it. 

He remembers being a child, running through the steps of the palace. He remembers their vacation home on Ember Island, and seeing shows on his mother’s lap. Playing with Azula in the surf. Lu Ten lifting him in the air. 

“You’re a prince,” his mother murmurs in his ear, the tick-tick-tick as a steady metronome. “Your fate will diverge from theirs, and your marks will fade like mine. You are the leader of others. You have a path laid out for you already. You only have to walk it.”

Head down. Eyes forward. One foot at a time in his empty family halls, where nothing is ever as it seems. Song and Jet and Jin and Iroh and Li. He may never meet his soulmates, they may become scars as dead as the one on his face, whether he chooses path A or path B. He has nothing to base his decision upon or guidance to follow. The earth sways before him, his heart beats like drums in his ears, like clock-ticks. 

Zuko looks from Azula to Iroh. His little sister to his uncle. Red-dragon, blue-dragon, red-dragon, blue-dragon.

The blue dragon tells him to run, in his dreams. 

Tick-tick-tick-tick…

He chooses Azula, and the world caves in on him.

Honor. What is honor? 

Honor is integrity. Honor is loyalty. Honor is supporting his people, honor is doing as he ought. Honor is helping those who cannot help themselves, leading the weak and lifting them up until they can lift themselves. Honor is holding his sister when she screams and laughing with the servants in the hidden alcoves of the palace. Honor is being a good son, a good brother, a good prince. 

Honor is respect. Honor is pride. Honor is holding your own so nobody else has to hold it for you. 

For Zuko, right now, honor is reputation. Honor is the look in his father’s eyes when they say the Avatar is dead. Honor is perfecting a bending kata. Honor is hiding his Dao in a box and then putting that box in a drawer and locking it. Honor is standing tall and having everyone see you and smile easy because they know who you are. Honor is being constant and sure. 

Zuko goes home. He regains that honor and that reputation. He is the prince who tricked everyone, our cunning prince, our clever prince, who infiltrated Ba Sing Se as a scout for his sister, who helped take it down from the inside, who killed the Avatar—probably. 

Zuko’s living on the verge of a heart attack, and he was supposed to feel safe here.

Some of the notches on his clock get terrifyingly thin. Zuko watches the clockface at night, like if he keeps vigil, nothing will fade. Either his soulmate is dying, or his soulmate is at a precipice, like he was, thinking things over. He lies in bed, wrist in front of his face, lit by a flaming thumb, and hears the red dragon whispering to him.

It sounds like Azula. 

(Azula sounds like Ozai.)

One notch on his wrist sears back to life in the middle of the night, just as strong as it had been before. One does not, and comes back slowly. It stops halfway, remaining at a pale ash color that is uneven next to the other charred black marks. But it seems stable. 

Whoever it is, their fate with him is in question. He can’t stop checking it now. 

The days go by in a blur. He feels empty, unattached to his surroundings. He tries to talk to the servants, but he can’t find any of his old friends and none of the new ones will talk to them. The kitchens are empty. The library is devoid of anything but tax information and history books.

“Mai,” he comments one day, scroll in hand, “what happened to the history section?”

“How do you mean?” she responds, lips pursed. Her voice is even raspier than he’d remembered.

“This chapter doesn’t sound right. I could have sworn we lost that battle.”

Mai doesn’t answer him for a long time. Eventually she tells him to not talk about that stuff in the palace.

It’s nice to have her around, though. She and Ty Lee face Azula every day and welcome Zuko into their ranks with secret, but open, arms. Nothing has changed, really, in that regard. 

He gets news from Ty Lee. Aluni has married a stableboy and gotten a job in town. Yaizen and Shalu quietly quit to work for one of his mother’s noble-born handmaidens only a few weeks after his banishment. 

Eiroki was fired, they don’t know what happened to her, but Ty Lee heard she’d been writing letters to the ministers protesting the new curriculum proposed for the nobility’s schools—since then, the change has spread down the ladder to almost every school in the Fire Nation. 

Minga and Damu got married, although not to each other. Aoza and Daizi did marry each other. They’re expecting, and making plans to silently leave—they look so sad when they see him, clinging at each other’s wrists silently and not saying a word. 

Aizori stayed. She stayed as long as she could, and then she’d been fired, inexplicably. Ty Lee thinks as an example. 

Songso’s daughter Zilu died last week. Chuzo left the palace to look after his son before Zuko was banished. Nobody has heard Dee the stablehand or Oseko the maid, and nobody has heard of Dee the maid or Oseko the stablehand either. Zuko is left with the horrifying realization that he’d forgotten their names, and now he has no idea where they are. 

In other news:

Mai’s parents had a baby. This baby was briefly kidnapped by the Avatar, and then brought back. This baby is a boy. His name is Tom-Tom. He is two years old. 

This dumb two-year-old named Tom-Tom is the new heir to the estate, and so now Mai has nowhere else to go if Azula gets tired of her. 

They’re working on it.

His mother’s study is in the process of conversion to a reading room—half the items have been moved out and relegated to other rooms, so he when he goes looking he finds her armchair in a sitting room and her desk in a noblewoman’s office. Large bookshelves are being moved in, and all the books will of course be censored. 

Ty Lee has not spoken with her own family in over a year now, but they do still write. Mainly letters asking her to get out and come home. When Zuko asks why she doesn’t, all she does is scoff. If she leaves, of course, what little is remaining of Azula’s calm will crumble down entirely, and if Azula snaps, then Mai will be sent away, and Zuko will be assassinated—she says that she knows all this absolutely, and Zuko doesn’t doubt her.

He and Mai find time to talk more after that, because she thinks it’s cowardly that so far all they’ve spoken about is the state of his mother’s study. So they talk.

Zuko doesn’t know if they’re soulmates, and at this point he can’t even tell if he’s looking for one. He just really needs a friend, and he thinks she does too. Another person to stand behind if Azula comes raging. 

Mai seems to agree. And anyway, it’s good politics--Azula can’t discount them standing up for each other if they say it’s for love, or get jealous like she would if they said it was for friendship, and now if Mai is disowned or quietly written out of her inheritance, she still has a future (and a more reliable one than Azula, who is getting bored more and more easily). 

It’s so easy to fall back into surviving at the palace, keeping his head down but his shoulders back. The crown feels so heavy on his head, but he gets to take it off with Mai. She gets it. She understands him, and she’s stable with it. She is the only constant thing in this palace, he thinks. She’s the only thing that makes sense, even if he can’t put that knowledge into practice sometimes and actually be a good boyfriend for her. He can rely on her.

Zuko hopes, Zuko thinks , he wants her to be his soulmate. 

The hand on his clock is almost to the first notch--any day now, he thinks. A month, or a few weeks. He looks at Mai and thinks he could love her, if she asked him to. 

Zuko confronts Iroh, and Iroh says nothing. He won’t look at him. Zuko thinks, spitefully, that he was right, that the minute Zuko cut “royalty” and “family” Iroh stopped caring. 

He calls Iroh a traitor, and then regrets that.

He hires an assassin, and then regrets that too. He’s calling out a hit on a twelve-year-old dead boy.

(If he’s even dead at all, he better be dead, that kid better be dead, and if not what Zuko just sent at him will take care of it all.)

Zuko can’t get the thought out of his head that he’s been making all the wrong choices lately. 

Ty Lee declares that they have all been much too stressed lately, so they rectify this by going to Ember Island for a short, weekend vacation. They’re all tense at the beginning of the day. Azula barks orders like a general, and Mai can’t seem to get her shoulders down from her ears, and Ty Lee’s playing up the pretty act, and Zuko can’t seem to stop bringing Mai little gifts like a crow-raven, but they manage to get over all that. 

Zuko even gets to bear witness to Azula’s failed attempts at being a normal teenager, and feels, finally, like this is what he came back to the Fire Nation for. His little sister, his friends, being a kid again, letting the world be easy and simple and stupid. 

He tries to put everything aside and embrace it. And oh Spirits , once he manages that, this is all actually pretty fun.

Okay, nevermind, somebody hurts his little sister’s feelings and now he has to die. 

She even shares her first kiss with him, and then he just freaks out and runs, the coward. Zuko kind of thinks it’s funny and that they all should have expected this, but also he really hates this guy, whoever she is. 

Also, Mai won’t talk to him. He doesn’t understand that, he doesn’t understand any of this. Acting like they used to has suddenly become like trying to fit into too-small childhood clothes, pulling at the seams of their skin, and Mai is hiding, even here, and Ty Lee is playing back into the pretty, airheaded act, and Azula’s storming out. Zuko yells, like he used to, falling right back into anger. 

It’s so easy to yell. He can’t do anything else, but he can scream and throw a tantrum. I’m right, I’m right, of course I am, how can you not see that? But now he knows what he’s doing and he hates it. He misses when he could have been ignorant. He misses being a kid on Ember Island, smiling with his family.

Zuko shares a conversation with Azula, without him yelling at her or her stabbing him. They found an old picture of their father, when he still smiled. She lets him stroke his fingers through the tangles of her hair for a brief second, until she flips her hair away with a hand and snaps at him to leave her alone. It’s progress.

They sit on the beach. It’s dark outside. They made a fire from the old pictures in the house, and Zuko watches his father’s smile burn. 

There’s something about darkness that makes people more open with themselves. They’re all huddling together on the sand, the cold sea wind at their backs—under the cover of the night sky, when nobody can really make out anybody’s face and everything feels just slightly unreal. Zuko adds more flame to the fire so it roars up, and everybody takes a deep breath and starts screaming at each other. 

Mai is met with insults and just takes it and takes it and takes it instead of even slightly rocking the tenuous boat she shares with Azula and her family’s reputation. Ty Lee cries and hides and gathers allies, all her ten boyfriends to raise her up on their shoulders and declare to everyone that she’s different and special and better. He knew all of this already, but it still hurts.

Why are we like this? What happened? He remembered them as so much happier than they are now. 

Zuko feels all twisted up inside. He feels like the pieces of a Pai Sho set jumbled together in the box, and his father is only one of the pieces. Mai tells him anger doesn’t excuse the way he’s been acting, and he knows that. There’s no excuse for him, only explanations, written on the sheet they’ll read out at his trial (if he even gets one).

They aren’t normal teenagers. He can’t act like a normal teenager, he can’t ever go back to normal and the thought makes fire spark in his veins at the injustice of it all. Why? Why him? Why can’t he just act the way he’s supposed to? Why can’t he fall back into this rut of following orders, believing blindly? 

They heckle him. Azula has always been persistent, and Mai and Ty Lee follow behind her. 

They ask and ask and ask and Zuko can’t figure out which one of them to focus on. He tries to focus on the question instead. Why is he angry?

He’s angry . He’s angry—at his father, at them for asking. 

Zuko’s angry at the Fire Nation for not being perfect, or what he remembered. He’s angry at his mother for leaving him. He’s angry at Aluni and Yaizen and Shalu for leaving the palace. He’s angry at Eiroki for speaking out about the changed history. He’s angry at himself, because this is how it’s always been , people are always leaving, the history is always changing, his mother left long ago and the Fire Nation was never perfect, even when he couldn’t see it.

Zuko’s angry at himself for seeing it now. He’s angry at himself for caring so much about it, for not being able to lie down and quietly go back to being a prince. He’s angry at himself for being so blind before, being such a child before. 

He’s angry at himself, because there are two periods in his life now, before his banishment and after. Two options laid out before him, a crossroads of ideologies. 

Ahead, towards the crown, where he lowers his head and raises his shoulders and goes back to being the immature prince of the Fire Nation. Maybe he shuts everything out like Mai, or plays up his innocence like Ty Lee. Maybe he becomes cunning and insidious like Azula. He keeps his honor and keeps his family and keeps his life and future bright. Zuko knows the scripts of the palace like the marks on his wrist. 

Or, back, towards the Earth Kingdom. He takes a stand. He—realizes that the Fire Nation is murdering the rest of the world and killing itself in the process. He realizes that the life is slowly leeching through spilled blood out of the home he loves so deeply it’s killing him. He fights back—he’d have to—finds the Avatar, maybe. Finds his soulmates. Charts his own destiny, alone, unstable, and tries to make the world better for it. Zuko rejects the Fire Nation and that laid-out path his mother gave him. 

Zuko he doesn’t know what he wants and he doesn’t know what’s right, and that’s terrifying. It’s standing out in the ocean on a tiny raft, or crawling his way through an active volcano. He has nothing to stake himself on, no sense of identity he can accept, no clarity . He lost everything, then lost everything again, and now he’s standing on the precipice of a third tragedy, teetering over the edge with his destiny in is hands, tick-tick-tick ing away. 

He’s angry at himself, because he doesn’t know which road to take anymore.

“Well, that’s stupid,” his little sister says, chin held high. 

Zuko really can’t please anyone. 

In a classic Azula move, his little sister tacks her own trauma at the end of their shouting, as though it’d go unnoticed. Zuko still sees it—his little sister thinks she’s a monster. She’d never have admitted that before today. That guy got to her more than he’d thought. A monster. Please. She wishes, but Azula’s only ever been terrifying, and right now she’s a little girl who just got rejected as that little girl for the first time.

But he can do something about that. He can’t fix his face, or his father, or his life. He can’t fix Mai and Azula forever. But he can break things.

He’s really good at breaking things.

So they go and trash that jerk Chan’s house, and that feels great .

Zuko goes back to the palace and promptly has the worst day of his life. Even worse than when his father burned off half his face. He may literally die because of this. It’s the most horrible thing in his life.

“Aang is my grandfather,” Zuko shrieks into his pillow. “This is so embarrassing!”

His father shoots lightning at him. It had been coming for a while.

He wrote a letter for Mai outlining his reasoning and left it in her bedroom. She’d be mad, both at his stupidity and for leaving her and Ty Lee behind, but she’d understand, he thinks. Maybe not agree, but understand how his motives drove his actions. Zuko’s less sad about it than he’d thought. Or maybe that’s just the adrenaline.

Fate presses before him like suffocatingly thick smoke, and he can almost feel it pressing against his skin, but it gives way. Zuko hopes that’s permission. 

This is important, the universe sings with his clock’s steady metronome, and it sounds pleased in his ears. 

He sneaks down to his father’s war bunker and faces him one last time. Zuko isn’t sure why, exactly. It’s honestly a bad idea—he should just leave now before someone can catch him. But he has to explain himself, he thinks. Zuko needs Ozai to know that he isn’t running away out of fear, he’s running with a purpose. 

So he explains himself. He explains the Fire Nation’s cruelty and what it has done on the world, he explains how Ozai himself failed as a father, how their family was broken from the start and he’s done sitting down like a quiet prince, waiting for someone to kill him. Ozai wonders why he doesn’t take his revenge, then, and kill Ozai where he stood, but that’s the Avatar’s job. That isn’t his destiny. And whatever his destiny is, Zuko’s going out to find it, himself, alone. 

Clarity. Zuko’s going to find clarity.

Ozai laughs. “You’ve been listening to my brother.”

Zuko hates the derision in Ozai’s voice. “My uncle has been more of a father than you’ve ever been. I’ll free him from prison and beg for forgiveness.”

“Strange how he isn’t one of your soulmarks, if that’s how much of an impact he’s had on you.”

Zuko freezes. His hand goes to his wrist automatically, where the hand still hasn’t reached its first mark. 

“You’ve had three years together,” Ozai notes. “I wonder why you’ve never connected? Surely you would have by now.”

“Stop it,” Zuko grits. “I don’t need to hear anything from you, especially about soulmarks. I’m leaving.”

“Not even about your mother’s soulmates? Or,” adds Ozai, smug, like a saber-tooth moose lion playing with his prey. Zuko hates it. “Your mother herself? Parents and children are normally soulmates.”

“You aren’t one of mine,” says Zuko. Ozai’s stalling, waiting for the end of the eclipse, and Zuko’s already halfway out of the room. He could just leave. He should leave.

“I never cared enough for that,” Ozai sighs. “Suppose she didn’t either. Don’t you wonder where she went?”

Zuko stays. He turns. “What did you do.”

“Nothing. Everything she did was her own choice.”

“You killed her soulmates,” Zuko spits, “that’s not a choice,” and Ozai seems to find this hilarious. He won’t stop laughing. It bounces off the walls and rings out around them like cannon fire, like thunder on gongs. 

“No.” Ozai’s eyes glitter down at him, and he crosses one leg over the other, deliberate. He’s not worried about Zuko anymore, if he ever was in the first place. “She left her soulmates. She had a choice between me and them and she chose me and power and safety, forsaking them forever. And then she chose again! That night you were supposed to die, she offered an alternative. She saved your life and made me Fire Lord, and then she left.” 

“She’s dead.”

“Maybe,” says Ozai, disgustingly flippant. He leans back on his mock throne. “She was banished, just like you, for her treason. Maybe she went back to her soulmates. I think she did, because otherwise, she would have found you, when you were banished. But she didn’t, did she? Did you ever see her? Did she ever talk to you? She must have heard you were out there, in the perfect position for an errant mother to find her errant son. Why didn’t she? ”

Zuko clenches his fists. He hears ticking, he hears the echo of Ozai’s laughter in his ears. 

“I suppose soulmates were more important to her than you. Are they more important to you than me?”

“Yes.”

“You might never get to meet them, if you leave.”

Tick-tick, tick. Tick, tick…

Zuko was never going to meet them anyway. In the palace, he’d be assassinated by Azula before he ever reached eighteen or die from sheer torment. He feels the weight of his choices around his shoulders, the knowledge that they might bring him away from solid ground forever and leave him adrift, helpless, completely on his own. He’s never been on his own like that, not even in the Earth Kingdom, with the ticking to keep him company. Now, he might not even have the ticking.

“It’s my destiny,” he tells his father, “I’m going to find it.”

And his father doesn’t even bother to say anything back. 

Zuko feels the sun return at the same time Ozai does, and they’re reacting in the same moment. Ozai steps forward with one foot, reaching out with his arm, two fingers extended, in one, fluid motion. And Zuko reels back, fingers flinching into form, one arm raised to protect himself.

The lightning hits in a searing roar. It screams through every nerve with fire and rage. Zuko catches it and lets it course through him. He acknowledges it, sees it for what it is—power, and spite, and energy—changes his stance, and redirects it.

Ozai is caught by the falling rubble of his own blast, and Zuko escapes while he still can.

It takes a while to find Aang. He tries to remember what he knows about their group. Aang, Katara, the watertribe boy who refused to stop being witty while Zuko chased them. An earthbending girl who Zuko only saw once or twice, under Ba Sing Se, and in passing. She looked tough. 

Aang doesn’t know firebending yet, and that’s all Zuko has going for him. 

(Also. Sokka has to be tired of being the only one older than fourteen.)

He tries to think of what to say.

“Hello, my name is Zuko. It’s nice to meet you, uh. Officially. I mean we kind of already met, you know, when I was trying to capture the Avatar, so I could regain my honor that I lost when I was thirteen because I disrespected my father? Uh, the Fire Lord, I mean. And I had to fight him—actually, that’s funny, it’s how I got my scar? Um, so the context for that is—”

“It’s nice to see you, I’m unarmed, I’m not here to hurt you—I mean, I don’t exactly have to be armed, since I’m a firebender. Oh, I guess I do have to uh, have arms. To firebend. So I am armed.” Zuko pauses. He looks at his arms, then at his swords. He doesn’t want to be threatening. “Should I cut them off…?”

He can’t figure out a way to cut his arms off without dying of bloodloss. Also then he wouldn’t be able to teach Aang firebending without arms, which would ruin his whole thing.

He remembers that Sokka likes puns and other witty quips, though, so he keeps the “armed” joke in. 

“I’ve prepared a resume for you—do people have those outside the Fire Nation? I didn’t need to submit anything to be hired in the Earth Kingdom but I figured that was because everything was kind of like, uh. I mean we didn’t have much, we sort of had bigger things to worry about than paperwork? But I know the Earth Kingdom is a lot like the Fire Nation in terms of bureaucratic practice—not to say the Earth Kingdom is like the Fire Nation! The Fire Nation is obviously not the best, I don’t mean to be insulting—I should probably explain. Uh. Hi, I’m Zuko—”

“Maybe I should make this more exciting. Maybe I should have a dance routine or add an interactive element to my speech.” He remembers that interactive elements were very important from his old classes on public speaking. Zuko adds more fire to his air balloon. He considers this new idea. “I can’t dance,” he realizes.

How will he have a dance routine in his speech if he can’t dance? 

Maybe he’s just sleep-deprived and stressed out of his mind, but this seems like an incredibly important problem that he needs to address right now.

“I should learn how to dance.”

“If I had to say, I’d say my biggest weakness is the trauma, which led to I think a few problems controlling my emotions and responding to social situations. I don’t really know what’s normal anymore? Getting half my face burned off by my father at thirteen and sent to hunt the Avatar, who everybody thought was dead at that point, that’s probably not normal. Is it normal? Wait.” 

Zuko rubs at his eyelids and blinks down at his hand, thinking very hard. 

“Is it normal?”

Zuko learns the primary reason why you aren’t supposed to dance in war balloons, especially when you don’t actually know how to dance in the first place. This reason is as follows:

War balloons tilt.

On a completely separate note, Zuko also realizes that he curses a lot, and that habit had not , in fact, been regulated during his brief stint back at the palace. “Huh,” he says aloud (he’s been doing that more often, on his own). “There’s a lot of little tiny ones with Aang. Aang is a little tiny one.”

That. Is not a very happy thought to have.

“Sokka must be so stressed out.”

“My biggest strength would probably be my ability to firebend. I’m pretty good at it. Which. You probably already knew. Because I chased you around a lot. So you already know my skills! That’s good. I was going to demonstrate but I thought that might bring up some bad memories—hmm… maybe we’ll need to work on that before we begin bending lessons…”

“Nephew,” he says, squinting and stroking at his chin, “Your father is to you as the river that takes an unpredicted sharp turn into rocks is to a small boat, which is to say, a major jerk. He is extremely messed up and he needs to go down.”

Having settled whether or not burning your child's face off is normal once again, Zuko passes out goes to sleep, because he's already decided this all a few times before and suddenly wanting to reconsider probably wasn’t a good sign.

“Also, I’m good at strategizing, kind of, if you need an extra brain? I’m also very stupid sometimes, though. I make bad decisions in the moment. Like this one time, I told the Fire Lord to his face that I was betraying him—” Zuko catches himself. He shouldn’t tell Aang about how idiotic he can be, that would not be very persuasive. 

Maybe he should have paid more attention in class, he could have sworn he was supposed to learn how to do stuff like this.

“I made a graph analyzing the pros and cons of letting me join, but it blew away. Which I’m sad about because I worked hard on it, so to summarize it, the largest pro is learning how to firebend, and the largest con is just that it’ll be very awkward for me to join the group because I did chase you around a whole lot. However, you don’t have to worry about me betraying you, because if I try to go home, I’ll be killed. That’s dark. Maybe I should leave that out.”

Maybe Zuko should be writing all this down. He thinks about whether or not to land for a bit and buy more paper. He didn’t bring many supplies with him, which was an oversight on his part, but he wasn’t thinking very clearly when escaping. 

“Am I going in the wrong direction?”

He grumbles a bit and changes his course again. He’s heading to the air temples first.

When he was scared in the palace, he went to a spot that felt like home. He figured Aang would do the same.

“Also, I get lonely very easily, and I don’t think that’s really good for me, so you’d be doing me a whole lot of benefit if you let me join, much more than I would by going back home, so that’s another reason why I don’t betray you. Should I focus on that? Hi, my name is Zuko, and here’s ten reasons why I won’t betray you—no, my opener should be friendlier than that, I sound pretentious.”

He arrives a little ways away from the Western Air temple and pitches a tent on the opposite side of the mountain from the temple itself. 

His soulmarks haven’t faded yet. The tick-tick-tick ing is still present in his ears, almost anticipatory. That might mean Zuko survives this. He hopes so.

The hand has been hovering over the first notch for a while now. 

“Hello,” he tells a bullfrog, “Zuko here.”

The climb up to the air temple is unnecessarily long (the air nomads could have flown the whole way), but he manages it eventually. On a rare streak of good luck, he gets there around the same time the Avatar and his friends land on their bison after having presumably flown around the mountain. 

His speech doesn’t work on them very well, and Zuko can’t for the life of him figure out why. He thought it was pretty good. Maybe it’s because Appa won’t stop trying to lick him.

That must be it.

“See—I could have stolen your bison,” Zuko points out, trying to recover from the bison licking. “But I set him free! That’s something!”

“Appa seems to really like him,” the little blind girl notes, which is a good point that everybody else should absolutely listen to. Sokka counters that he probably just covered himself in honey, which is idiotic why would he do that— Zuko takes a deep breath.

Tick-tick-tick-tick …

In hindsight, he really shouldn’t have revealed that he was the one who’d hired the assassin.

Zuko goes back to camp annoyed. He’s bad at this. He’s incredibly, horribly bad at this and he can’t figure out why or how to change it.

It wasn’t like he thought it’d be easy to gain the Avatar’s favor. But he’d thought it’d at least be easy to be good . Everybody else seemed to be able to. His uncle had managed it just fine. 

(He’ll probably never see his uncle again, at this point. He doesn’t know what to think about that.)

He’s set up a fire and is beginning to make dinner when he hears footsteps. Somebody calls his name, and he doesn’t think clearly before reacting. He goes with instinct.

Fire. Yelling, “stay back!”

Why is it that fire and yelling are always his first reactions to things? Why can’t he just stop?

“You burned my feet!” the earthbender is shrieking. She’s crawling away from him across the forest floor, and he has a moment of pure panic and regret that paralyzes him until he regains his senses and runs to help her up.

“I’m sorry, I’m—”

“Get off me! ” 

She hits him with a rock pillar and sends him flying. “I didn’t mean to!” he shouts after her, but she’s running away now. “Come back!”

Why can’t he get this right?

One benefit of hiring an assassin to kill your future teammates—you can later save those teammates, and join them. 

It wasn’t how he’d thought it would go, but at least it worked. He saves Katara’s life and theirs, too. Apparently he almost made Aang have a heart attack when he fell off the cliff. 

He moves all his things into one of the temple rooms, arranging his few belongings into something vaguely resembling hominess. Toph is crowing something about being right at Sokka, who seems incredibly grumpy. Zuko turns and runs into Katara.

She threatens him. He thinks. He spends the whole time staring at her bemusedly, because he can’t actually tell if she’s threatening him, or just. Being intimidating in his general direction? She’s like a quivering chinchilla-monkey, all puffed up. He has the vague urge to pat her on the head. 

Azula was much worse.

Toph is, strangely, one hundred percent fine with him. She is completely oblivious to any tension between him and the others in the group, or at least pretends to be, and treats him as equally as anyone else. She also declares one day that he’s officially her seeing-eye firebender, as a favor after he burned her feet.

Katara practically simmers at the reminder and tries to talk Toph out of it, but Toph doesn’t budge, and now she drags Zuko around everywhere, making him point out mundane details and then contesting him on them.

“No,” she insists, “it has too many bumps.”

“It’s orange,” repeats Zuko. He places the orange-melon back in her hand. She tries to give it back again, but he pushes it away. “The number of bumps doesn’t mean it’s not orange.”

Toph scowls at him. “It doesn’t feel orange. Look, feel the little ridges, they’re all close together. Not orange.”

“But it’s called an orange-melon.”

“Maybe the person who named it was colorblind,” she says, tossing the orange-melon up in her hand. “You don’t know.”

Zuko sputters. He can’t come up with a way to contest this. “What color do you think it is then?” he asks instead, changing tracks.

This does not work.

“Green,” she says confidently, spinning the orange-melon between her fingers now. 

“What.”

“It’s definitely green. I was thinking maybe an olive shade?”

“How do you even know what colors look like?” he demands. Across the campsite, he can see Sokka laughing at him. “Olive green could be completely different to you! You could say olive green and mean orange!”

“No,” she tells him, handing the orange-melon back for the fifth time. She presses his fingers to the skin. “Bumps. Close ridges. That, my dear hotman, is green. You can smell it.”

Zuko ends up just gaping at her, mouth open and dumb. “That—” he says, weakly “—there’s so many things wrong with that—”

Toph resolutely cuts her nail into the orange-melon skin and begins slicing a long curve all around the edge. “Aang says colors aren’t real anyway, so it doesn’t matter.” She extracts her thumb from the skin and starts on a second curve crossing directly over the first.

“What did you say?” asks Zuko, thinking he misheard.

“Colors aren’t real.” Toph digs her little fingers into the skin and pulls it back, revealing the juicy fruit flesh behind it. She doesn’t look up. “Aang said so.”

From the other side of the camp, Sokka screeches. “What did you say?!”

“ Colors aren’t real!” Toph hollers back, unconcerned. One of the kids wandering around camp tugs on her sleeve, and she hands them a section of orange-melon.

Zuko thinks very hard about turning around and walking in a straight line as far away from this camp as he can. 

“They are!” Sokka declares. He looks incredibly mad. Infuriated. “Aang is a liar!”

“Colors are relative and so are you,” says the child. Juice drips down their chin. “Be scared about it.”

“What does that mean!”

“You’ll never know.”

Toph grabs Zuko’s hand and tugs him in the other direction, which he’s grateful for, even though he’s supposed to be leading her. She pulls him along in silence for a few moments, then something wet and sticky squishes into his hand. 

He holds it up and finds one-fourth of an orange-melon exactly. When he looks back, the other fourth of the melon has disappeared into her mouth. “Thanks,” he says.

“Don’ mention it,” she garbles through the fruit. She grabs his hand again, pressing their sticky palms together before he can protest, and points at the stone wall in front of them. “That’s yellow.”

“You didn’t even touch it!”

“It’s earth. I can tell with my earthbending.”

“That’s not how it works!”

“How would you know, jerkbender?”

Zuko almost screams.

Zuko tells Aang he’s ready for his first real firebending kata soon. “You’re progressing really well,” he says after their morning training session. He’s clearing away the candles they’d used. “You can control your flame now, at least.”

Aang gets all wide-eyed. “Like, real katas? Like. Fighting katas?”“Well, yeah.” Zuko picks up the last candle and turns to set them aside. Katara’s cooking breakfast by their pile of sleeping bags. “You’ll be using it to, I mean. Fight.”

“To hurt people?”

“That’s what fighting is?” Zuko turns back around. “You’ve done worse with waterbending, right?”

Aang, though, has become shaky now. His eyes seem far away. “I don’t want to.”

“But you have to, if you want to win the war.”

“I don’t—I don’t want to—”

“Back off, Zuko,” Katara snaps, slinging her rice pot onto the fire. “If he doesn’t want to, he doesn’t have to yet.”

Sokka snores loudly and rolls over. Zuko casts a shocked look at her first, then Aang. “But we’re on a deadline, right? I thought—”

“He doesn’t have to,” insists Katara. 

Aang fled sometime during the argument, and Zuko doesn’t try to convince him again. 

Zuko learns the childrens’ names are Pipsqueak and The Duke, he hears them say words Jet, the lake, and Longshot told me that, one morning, and he promptly disappears for the rest of the day. 

Honor is following what you think is right, Zuko knows now. Honor is taking a stance, saying this is what I believe, and following through. Honor is seeing suffering and saying, no, that isn’t okay. Honor is loyalty, and integrity to yourself. Honor is being a good son to a father who cast him away, a good brother to a sister who screams, a good prince to a nation of soldiers, and knowing exactly what that may mean and accepting it.

He has to accept it.

“Where have you been?” Sokka asks when he gets back, but he seems suspicious when Zuko tells him he’d just been on a walk. “Pretty long walk, buddy.”

“Uh, yeah,” responds Zuko, rubbing at tired eyes. “Lots of. Beetles?”

“Hmm. What kind of beetles?”

“...big ones.”

“Suspicious,” Sokka declares, pointing. “Very suspicious. I’ll have my eye on you.”

“Don’t you have one already?” Zuko calls, but Sokka has already left to pester Katara about dinner, and doesn’t hear. He and Aang and Toph and Haru and Teo and Pipsqueak and that one kid are all clustered around the fire, laughing about something. Katara turns whatever she’s cooking over on the hot stones. 

Zuko goes to sit on the edge of the cliff and look out at the depths below. Tick, tick, tick, tick.

Honor is making choices not for some destiny that fate has decided to set upon him or that his mother told him he should follow, but because he thinks they’re right. Honor is recognizing that the world is unsteady and uncertain and he can’t trust himself to know what’s truly right or wrong, but trying anyway.  

He understands, he thinks, when his uncle said that humility is the only antidote to shame. Honor is humility, not pride. The humility to see what acts are out of selflessness and what’s really from pride, and to admit when something has been prideful and act again to change it. The humility to see when you’ve been proud and act to change it. The humility to keep returning after you mess up. The humility to recognize when you have not been honorable.

The war was dishonorable. He doesn’t regret leaving to end it. 

Zuko covers his clock with his hand and sits on the cliff one evening, legs dangling into the air. He isn’t welcome at the campfire with the others, but the stars are pretty enough to distract him. And this time of year brings fire butterflies when the night is warm enough. He entertains himself watching them flutter around the tips of the forest below. 

Tick, tick, tick, tick, the clock goes in his head. 

He doesn’t regret his choices, he tells himself. And that’s true. He wouldn't change them, if given the chance. That would be dishonorable.

But there’s a difference between regretting a choice and wishing for a future he’ll never have because of one. What would it have been like, if he’d chosen differently? He knows it’s unrealistic, but he imagines it. 

Maybe Jet would still be alive in that future. That’s what’s drawing him in today. He didn’t even know Jet for all that long—a few months on a ferry and in the lower ring. The sadness he feels is from the loss of a future, not from the past like Pipsqueak or The Duke. 

But maybe Jet would be his soulmate in that future, magnetic with fury and hurt and hope for something better and clear. Jin could be his soulmate too, and she’d be so innocent she’d win the war with just her smile, and Song would burn with a quiet hope and probably kill him for stealing her ostrich horse. 

Maybe destiny had planned this, or maybe it hadn’t. Maybe he’d chosen this himself, in all those small ways, and no matter what he does now, he can’t change it. Jet’s dead, and Ba Sing Se has fallen so Jin might be too, and Song’s village was on the side of a major road and so her home is probably occupied now. 

All he did, and all he could have done, was what he thought was right. Following himself. Trying his best. 

Clarity. That’s what he thinks this is. He’s stumbling into clarity, and it hurts like grieving. 

Somebody settles next to him on the cliff edge. “Why are you out here all alone?” asks Toph. “You look like a loser.” 

“I wanted to think,” Zuko responds, leaning back on his elbows. He can pick out navigational constellations above them. 

“Congrats. I’ve heard you don’t do that a whole lot.”

Zuko barks a laugh. “I’ve done some stupid things.”

“Eh, we all have.”

“Have we all burned down a village?”

Toph scoffs. “They’ll get over it.”

They sit together there, on the edge of the cliff. Zuko traces the lines of the Dragon where it joins hands with the Maiden, and then down to the Traveler with her bright telescope star. Behind them is Sokka’s loud laughter at something Haru said, and in his head the ticking taps quietly. Zhao whispers reminders of those too-bright stars in a moonless sky, transposed over this one in his head. 

And somewhere else, fate ticks on, like wheels, or the click of a pendulum tapping against the sides of its case. A metronome of pebbles falling down a never-ending set of stairs. But for once, he isn’t thinking about soulmates. He isn’t thinking about what he could have done. He lets the ticking go on, he lets it fade into the background, and he lets his soulmates be. 

It feels like the first moment of quiet he’s gotten since he left the palace three years ago. 

“They take a while, sometimes,” Toph says, eventually. “The others, I mean. Y’know, it’s hard to get used to? Leaving so much behind, for this . It doesn’t always live up to expectations the way you thought it would. They don’t always get it.”

Zuko hums in agreement. He tilts his head. “You talk like people in the Lower Ring, but your clothes were all silk last time I saw you.” 

“Yeah, those tore like, immediately,” Toph laughs. She wears red now, and it looks strange on her. “I dunno what I thought with that. It was the most practical stuff I had with me at my parent’s home. I kept everything else down at the ring.”

“You were… upper-class, then?”

“Bunch of rich jerks, yeah.” Toph kicks her feet. “They thought I was a blind little girl and didn’t let me leave the house at all. These guys busted me out,” she jerks a thumb behind her, “had to even after I beat up a bunch of guys who kidnapped me and Aang right in front of their faces. They tried to lure me back a while ago but I escaped. Invented metalbending.”

“Never heard of that before,” says Zuko, an eyebrow raised. “Because metal is still an earth element? You must be pretty good then.”

Toph snorts and punches him in the arm, which is exactly the response he should have expected from her. “ Pretty good, ” she huffs. “I’m the best earthbender ever, that’s what I am. Avatar Kyoshi wishes she were me.”

“Don’t tell Aang, Kyoshi may overhear and force him into the Avatar State or something just so she can go who dares? and punt you all the way back to your family.”

“Pfft.” Toph shakes her head, waving it away. “Nah, I’d get so revulsed at the idea of going back there that I’d stop myself in midair, reverse direction, come flying back and rocket into her and send her flailing. Watch me.”

Zuko winces. “Are they that bad?”

“They’re not really anything. Coddling.” Toph digs her fingers into the stone beneath them, and it bunches under her nails. “I don’t know. They saw worse than I do. I could have beaten all of the Earth King’s Dai Li one by one in front of them and they’d still try to lock me up—it was like nothing I did was ever enough for them!” she exclaims, more exasperated than whiny. “I could never be what they wanted me to be, and they’d never see that. And I did.”

“So you left,” Zuko concludes. He touches his face. “I get that. My sister was the prodigy—she was everything my father ever wanted, which probably explains a lot now, but. I hated it back then. I tried everything I could to get him to change his mind about me, but.”

“But.” Toph sighs and leans herself against his arm. She’s surprisingly heavy for someone her size. “It was never about us,” she says into the empty air in front of them. “So there was nothing we could have done. It wasn’t our fault.”

There’s something stuck in Zuko’s throat now. He opens his mouth, tries to say something, and can’t. He clears his throat. “Yeah,” says Zuko, roughly. “And we can’t change it.”

Every person can only ever control themselves. When the pieces fall, the places they take are up to them, and each person can only choose how they react. And it is up to that person to try, and try, and try their hardest to react in a way that helps people rather than harms them, that puts good into the world rather than removes it. 

That is Zuko’s clarity. That is the honor he will stake himself on. But the relief of it is bitter-sharp against his skin, and leaves him feeling cut-open and vulnerable. 

Toph shrugs against his shoulder, her head lolling to the side. “I guess, we can’t change it, no. I don’t regret my choice, though.”

“No?”

“No way. I’m happy here. I have to live with what happened.” She bumps his shoulder. “Doesn’t mean it can’t suck sometimes though.”

“I thought we had to be grateful for where we are,” Zuko says, a bit bitterly. Toph laughs, loud and harsh, reeling away from him.

“What?” she sputters, punching him in the arm again. “No!” She waves her hands. “Look, okay, okay. This is where we are. And this is what we have to deal with. But that doesn’t mean it can’t suck. It can be awful and horrible and hard and really irritating sometimes and it’s where we are and so we have to deal with it, but we can also call it like it is—it’s bad! And we’re allowed to hate it!”

Zuko blinks at her. 

“Come on!” Toph cajoles, grabbing at his arm. “Throw a tantrum! Get your anger out! It’s no use keeping all of that inside. Look at it head-on.”

“Shouldn’t we get over it?”

“ No!” insists Toph. “Shout and yell and break stuff, and then get over it! Look life in the eye and call it out on its jerkishness! Life is awful sometimes and we should be allowed to complain about it! Suffering in silence is useless and stupid!” 

Zuko thinks of his uncle, and tea, and endless calls for him to calm down. “Uh.”

Toph groans, loudly. She stands up, and pulls him up too, leaving him stumbling on his feet. “Come on, say it with me! Our parents suck!”

Zuko just stares at her.

She shoves him. “Zuko!” she demands. “Our parents suck! Don’t be quiet about it! Speak up! Get it out! ”

“Our—my—”

“Your dad sucks! Say it, Sparky!”

Zuko freezes in the face of a tiny green girl’s might. Toph glares, silently staring him down. “My—” he coughs. “My dad sucks.”

It feels almost blasphemous. It feels like he should at least be more eloquent about it. Or take it with grace. Hide it, maybe. Pretend like he’s stronger because of it, or that he’s fine now so it doesn’t matter.

But the words felt good. 

“YEAH!” Toph hollers. She grabs his arm and jumps up and down, the earth pounding under their feet, boom-boom-boom. “He’s the worst!”

“Our parents suck!”

“And I hate it!” she glares, fiercely. 

Zuko thinks she’d take on the world for him in that moment, and it makes him yell, “I hate it! I hate this happened to me!”

It’s freeing in a way he hadn’t expected, jerks loose something in him that had only ever settled into complacency while drinking tea with his uncle. It was wrong, he thinks in his head, wildly. He had known this before, of course, but it’s one thing to think it in his head and tell it to his father and another to scream it aloud for nobody’s sake but his own. 

I’m right to be mad. I’m hurt, and I’m mad, and this feels right—  

“We didn’t deserve it!” adds Toph. She tugs at his hand. “C’mon Zuko! Shout!”

Zuko clenches his fists and shouts into the abyss below them, “it wasn’t our fault!”

Toph chucks a rock off the cliff and it shatters below, and then she hands him one too and he throws it as far as he can. It careens off the cliffside and breaks into six different pieces, and then she hands him another, and another, and swears loudly and now he’s laughing and laughing and he can’t manage to stop. 

“YEAH!” Toph cheers. She kicks two boulders off the cliff in quick succession, and their crashes echo off the cliff walls around them. “Take THAT!”

“None of this should have happened!” Zuko declares. He could never describe this feeling, this righteous, angry lightness, the odd mix of spite-fuelled happiness and the giddy release of finality , like he’s exactly where he’s meant to be not because destiny led him here, but because he decided this is where he wants to be, this is what he needs to do. “What happened to us was wrong.”

“Oma’s eyebrow, it was.”

Zuko turns to Toph and tells her, breathless, “we can make it better.”

“Oh,” she laughs, eyes crinkling up. “We’re gonna.” She earthbends a boulder from beneath their feet and the impact it makes with the ground almost sends them both toppling over, tripping each other. Zuko tries to catch Toph and Toph tries to push them back up and they end up sprawled over in a tangle of banged elbows and scraped knees, the ground still shaking beneath them.

Toph shrieks with the biggest grin Zuko has ever seen on a person, and he laughs, and Katara yells, “Tui and La, calm down over there!” and Toph responds with something so creatively colorful that it turns Katara red but just makes Zuko laugh harder.

They collapse back down onto the stone again giggling, and Zuko has never really giggled before. Toph pulls Zuko closer to her again because, apparently, he’s warm. He feels warm. Content. Relieved, almost, like he hadn’t really believed any of this before he’d yelled it and he’d never even noticed. Relieved like he’s so utterly ecstatic to know there’s someone here who gets it too.

Zuko sighs, the kind of heavy, relaxed sigh that seems to bring his whole body down. He finds the Dragon and the Maiden and the Traveler and her telescope, and the Bear and the Anchor and the Volcano too. The clock spins on in his head, the black gears turning under his skin. 

There’s something about darkness that brings out secrets in people. Zuko isn’t sure what it is, but he comments, after a short while, “I’m… glad you didn’t know me, before. You know?”

“Yeah?” Toph blows a strand of hair out of her face. She nudges him when he doesn’t continue. “What? Keep going.”

It’s different than that night at the beach, in the way Zuko feels more at peace with himself, the way Toph pushes but doesn’t pressure, the way the air feels open and clean and not thick with smoke. “I was angry,” Zuko tells her, “And confused. My father had just set half of my face on fire and exiled me and I… couldn’t—” He presses his hands to his eyes like that’d block her out. “I panicked and uh, kept panicking. Didn’t know what to do.”

“You shouldn’t’ve had to,” says Toph, quietly. “Remember? It happened, and I wish it hadn’t but it did, and now we…”

“What do we do?”

“Spirits if I knew,” she laughs. “I don’t know. We work on it. Hey, if I’d been there, I could’ve beaten you up and knocked some sense into you. And maybe gotten knocked down a peg too, that would’ve been good for me, I’ll admit it.”

Zuko tries to imagine that, him stomping around angry and hurt and meeting Toph standing like a brick wall. She wouldn’t have put up with any of that. “Maybe. I don’t think you would have wanted to be around me back then.”

“Eh,” Toph scoffs. “I think we would’ve kicked butt.” She pauses. “I'd really just needed a friend, you know? Someone who understood.”

And that rings very true. Constancy. Reassurance. The knowledge that no matter what, there would be a person to see him—Zuko could have used that. Zuko would have died for that—he remembers dying for that, every day on that steamboat. “I did too,” he admits into the air.

Toph curls up next to him, as close to him as she can be. Somebody tells a joke by the fire behind them, and that sends up a roar of laughter that is muffled by the time it reaches Zuko on the cliffside. 

“Zuko?” says Toph.

“Hm?”

“You know…” Toph pauses, thinking. She decides on, “I kind of do wish we’d met before.”

He scoffs.

“No, really,” she insists. “You would have been good for me. You could have helped me.”

“I would have only hurt you more.”

“You wouldn’t have. I wish I’d known you then. Maybe we could have made things better.”

Zuko stares at her. “Really?”

“Yeah.”

At first, he feels nothing. The words process. 

And it’s like they settle.

Not because she’d banished whatever monster had moved his mind out of place, but because she’d said she didn’t care that he had it. Not because his anger had led to his peace, but because his anger was worthwhile in and of itself. 

Not because he had become more worthy, but because he always had been, maybe. Because she believes she had been. 

Tick. Tick. Tick.  

Oh.

It’s the click of a door latch sliding into place. The tap of puzzle pieces connecting, or the metal ring of a key in a lock. It’s solid. Steady. Warm in his chest, like heated stones and someone hugging him, feet rooted firmly to the ground. 

“Zuko?”

Zuko scrambles to check his wrist. He pulls his sleeve up and holds it up to catch the firelight behind him, pulling the skin this way and that to make the image clearer. And peeking just behind the clock hand is a tiny etched eye, burned into the tattooed wood. The pupil is the symbol of the Earth Kingdom. 

He looks at Toph. Her fingers are wrapped around the base of her hand, sliding over the skin there, and she’s smiling. 

“I knew it,” she says happily. “Sokka owes me five yuan.”

And that is somehow the most hilarious thing Zuko has ever heard in his entire life.