Shortfic: The Ones who Walk Away

[attackfish]

Disclaimer: If I owned Avatar: the Last Airbender, I would have the money to donate to charity myself.

Summary: Zuko finds and captures the Avatar. Now he has to decide what to do with him. Can he really turn a child over to his father? How can he not?

Author's Note: Written for Runrundoyourstuff on Tumblr as a reward for donating eighteen dollars to HIAS, a charity that aids immigrants and refugees coming to the US and is fighting Trump's crimes against humanity. She wanted a fic form of a post I made about what would have happened if Aang had been a toddler when he was frozen.


The Ones who Walk Away

Zuko came back onboard the ship holding the hand of a toddling child, the crew trailing behind, leading a shaggy arrow-headed calf, and none of them looked like this made any sense to them either.

"Nephew," he said cautiously. "Who is this?"

Zuko looked down at the boy whose hand he was gripping like a vice, who was pulling hard as he could to get away like he was bewildered to find him there. "He's the Avatar."

Iroh stared at the boy. He was wearing the orange and yellow clothes and shaved head of an Air Nomad, but he had wooden teething beads around his neck, and Iroh wasn't sure the boy had even stopped nursing. "He looks cold, Prince Zuko. Let's being him somewhere warm."

Somewhere warm, and somewhere private.

Almost as soon as the door into the interior of the ship had shut, the boy yanked his hand out of Zuko's and went running, if his rapid waddling could be called that, his sobs reverberating through the metal hallway. They caught up to him easily enough, but when Iroh reached for him, the boy waved his arms frantically, and a gust of wind blew up to knock him backward and onto his backside, extinguishing Iroh's palmfull of fire and plunging them into darkness. The boy toppled over too. Scooping him up, Zuko settled him against his chest.

"No!" the boy shouted, wriggling to get away, but Zuko held on tight.

"He's frightened, Nephew," Iroh said, reigniting his fire and doing his best to soothe them both. "He doesn't know you." In truth, he didn't know who was more afraid, the crying boy, or the wild-eyed one holding him.

"I know that!" Zuko snapped.

"He should be frightened," Iroh pressed on. When they came to Zuko's cabin, he opened the door to let them in. It was strange. In all this time chasing the Avatar, they had never set aside a room for him, or made preparations for what they would do if they ever managed to capture him. It was almost as if Zuko, for all his outward conviction, deep down didn't believe any more than the rest of them that the Avatar still existed. He closed the door behind them. "You're his enemy."

Zuko slumped down against the door and let the boy go. He leapt out of Zuko's arms like a bolt popping out of an exploding boiler. Iroh held his handful of flame up as the boy darted around on sort, unsteady legs, searching for any way out. But the only way out was through the door behind Zuko.

Walking over to Zuko's low table, Iroh lit one of the candles. The boy crept over to watch. He picked up one of the candles, holding it in one chubby fist, whacking the wick against his palm. Iroh watched him with a faint smile. Then the wick caught fire. Startled, the boy dropped the candle, and Iroh scrambled to pick it up and set it safely on the table. "So Nephew, you found the Avatar."

Zuko nodded, eyes wide and staring. "When we went into the village, a girl was holding him. She tried to fight me, but this old lady told her to stop. She took him away from her and gave him to me. The girl's a bender. I saw her trying to make a water whip. She said she found him in an iceberg."

"Then he is alone in the world." Iroh sat down and reached for him, but the boy scuttled away. He peered up at Iroh with suspicious eyes.

Zuko looked away. "I guess."

"That's a terrible thing for him to be, Nephew," Iroh told him reproachfully. "And..." He hesitated. This was the dangerous part, and he couldn't help but know it. "It means he's your responsibility now, and you will have to decide whether you will turn him over to your father."

Zuko shot up straight. He can't have moved more than a few inches. He was still sitting in front of the door, but all his exhausted slump was gone, replaced with coiled defensiveness and fear. "What are you talking about, of course I'm going to turn him over to my father!"

"Hmmm."

His eyes were as wide as they would go. One was a circle, and the other, trapped in a ring of scars, strained against its bonds. "That's the whole point of all of this! This whole journey, everything! I'm supposed to find the Avatar and bring him to my father!"

As his voice rose higher and higher, louder and more shrill, Iroh watched his face. He watched his eyes. He had been wrong before. Zuko's exhaustion, his inescapable desperate weariness, hadn't been driven away or replaced. It was right there, mingling with and twisting his fear. It darkened the shadows of his eyes and drew him thin as his fear drew from that deep well of drive within him. But that well was running dry. Soon enough, Zuko would dip into it only to find nothing left. "You were meant to capture the Avatar, and bring him to your father as a prisoner."

Zuko flinched. His hands clenched. "It's not going to be like that."

The young Avatar, too wary of them to demand their attention, but too bored to hide, had taken to rummaging through Zuko's pots, bending so far into the current one that his feet had left the floor and dangled in the air. A wave of nostalgia almost overwhelmed Iroh to see it.

"My father is a wise man," Zuko went on.

The one thing Iroh had never known his brother to be was wise.

"He isn't..." There was a lost look in the back of Zuko's eyes, haunted, as he searched his uncle's face for a confirmation Iroh couldn't give him. "He'll understand this is an opportunity. We can raise the Avatar to see the rightness of the Fire Nation conquest, to understand what it gives to the world."

"Maybe." And Iroh could see it. Ozai was not wise, but he was cunning, and he might indeed latch onto an infant Avatar, barely walking, with both hands, and raise him to believe in Sozin's glorious vision, and revere him unquestioningly. He might indeed treat him like his own son. "Maybe."

The Avatar emerged from the last pot with a theater mask clasped in his pudgy fist. He glanced between them both, trepidation in the back of his eyes. But his little jaw went tight, and he made his stumbling, graceless way over to Zuko, and shoved the mask up at him. "What that?"

Zuko took the mask. "It's a mask," he said blankly, putting it on.

The Avatar tapped the wooden cheeks, considering.

Shaking, Zuko took the mask off and handed it back to the little Avatar. The boy held it up to his own face, peering through the holes with a giggle. It was huge on him, his bald head invisible behind the blue and white paint.

Iroh watched his nephew with the little boy, not fearless, no, but already brave, and bold. But then when Zuko reached for the mask again, the little Avatar flinched. He ducked under Zuko's hand and darted away, dropping the mask. Safely out of their reach, his eyes darted from the two of them to the mask, and back again.

"Your father might take the child in and raise him as you believe," Iroh said. If nothing else, it was the sort of ironic cruelty their father would have delighted in, to raise an Air Nomad child to believe the deaths of his people had been justified. And even after his death, Ozai had never stopped trying to earn their father's approval. "He might see this as an opportunity. But he might only see him as a threat. You know better than anyone that he doesn't tolerate anyone who might challenge him, Nephew."

Zuko swallowed and looked away. There was so much Iroh wanted to say, so much Zuko wasn't ready to hear. He wanted to ask if Zuko would be able to stomach watching his father treat this child the way his father had treated him, knowing he had given him to his father. He wanted to ask why he thought this boy would be treated better. But he didn't ask. He just let the questions hang between them and hoped Zuko heard them anyway.

"It's different," Zuko tried to tell him. "He's the Avatar. He'll be like Azula."

Will that be so much better? Iroh almost asked. "And how will Azula take that, Nephew? She has never had to share your father's affection before."

Zuko didn't contest this. He looked over to the Avatar, hiding behind the legs of Zuko's low table.

"You have a choice Nephew," Iroh whispered. "You can take the Avatar to your father, and have his approval. You can go home. But if you do, you will always know what you were willing to let happen to this little boy to get these things."

Zuko didn't say a word. He didn't have to. His face had gone ashen, as if he had suffered a gut wound.

"Honor comes from doing the right thing, Prince Zuko." His voice was soft. "You must decide for yourself what that means. But Nephew, if you are getting what you want, and someone else is suffering for it, that doesn't look like honor to me."

o0O0o

Zuko set the sleeping Avatar down on his uncle's bed and tucked him in, before sitting down. Iroh poured him a cup of tea. For long minutes, Zuko just stared deep into his cup, silent and still.

"He's not the Avatar," Zuko said at last. "He's not even a real Air Nomad. He's just dressed up that way because of some weird Water Tribe ritual.

"Is that what you plan to tell the crew?"

Zuko nodded, hands going white and bloodless around his teacup.

"And the sky bison calf?"

"Must be from a wild herd," Zuko rasped. "The South Pole isn't far from the Southern Air Islands."

Iroh closed his eyes and sighed. "That story won't hold together long, Nephew."

"I know," he said, his voice empty.

He glanced over at the little boy, asleep in his bed, oblivious to the plans being made on his behalf. "We will have to leave the ship. I have friends who can help us once we make port, but we will have to keep him out of sight until then. Can you lie to your crew long enough?"

Zuko nodded again, but his head didn't stop bobbing when the nod should have been over, and his breaths came in hard pants.

"Breathe Nephew!" He leapt to his feet to put his arms around his shoulders. "Breathe!"

Zuko's breaths turned into sobs.