attackfish (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
attackfish) wrote2010-11-25 09:34 am
attackfish) wrote2010-11-25 09:34 am
Entry tags:
Ice Flows Though: Chapter Two - Earth
Summary: After the ocean spirit mistakenly drags him down to the bottom of the sea and Yue uses her new abilities as the moon spirit to bring him back to life, Zuko struggles to learn waterbending. Meanwhile, the fire spirits begin to visit, a Dai Li agent to remind him of whom he once was.
Disclaimer: I own nothing in the Avatar Universe, though Byrke seem to take cruel delight in their active fanbase.
Author's Note:Written for the![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
avatarbigbang. Warnings for Dai Li brainwashing that borders on torture, moderately graphic fight scenes, and a little bit of profane language. I'd like to thank my betas ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
floranna and beboots again for turning this into something readable. Also floranna is responsible for the prompt upon which this story is based.
Chapter Two: Earth
"My father sent a very interesting letter today," Yue's voice told him. Zuko couldn't see her, but she cast a dark shadow on the wooden wall. He folded his arms and ignored her, but she continued anyway. "To your father, telling him what happened to you, and that if the Fire Nation tried to kill the moon again, you'd die."
Zuko turned to where he hoped she was. "You're not dead. Go away."
"You said you would learn waterbending," she reminded him gently.
"Not if you're just going to tell me about how evil my father is!" He hissed. "I don't even know where you are. Just go away."
Yue put a hand on his arm, and it solidified into a black, glimmering form, like a silk glove. "I'm done talking, if you will let me teach you."
Swallowing, Zuko nodded. "I can't even see you."
Her hand slipped off his arm. "Watch my shadow. It's the new moon. That's all I am." She sat down and crossed her legs like a living woman. The salty puddle under her shimmered and froze into the shape of a human being, with shining groves like Yugoda's mannequin. "Sit down," she told him. "I'm going to teach you healing first, until you're off the ship."
Zuko felt the ever-present ocean water pushing in around him and nodded again.
He sat down on the other side of the ice mannequin from her, and she took his hand again. She brought it down to the chest of the mannequin. "Your body has almost as much water in it as this," she began. "And that water is supposed to run in certain ways." She guided his hand over the silvery grooves in the mannequin, and he extended his finger down to touch them. The ice melted under the heat of his body and the grooves deepened.
"Yeah, I know," he said, mouth dry.
She pressed his hand to his chest. "Do you feel it? Running around your body."
He nodded. He kept waiting for it to quiet down, or for him to get used to it, for it to just become the way things were, but it wouldn't. He kept feeling it, pounding and pounding in his veins. Worse when the moon was out, and worse the bigger it was in the sky, but always there, and always telling him things were never going to be the way they used to be.
Yue swallowed audibly in the stillness. "You probably feel it more than most waterbenders, because most have never been without that feeling."
Zuko glanced at Yue's shadow, and then back at the empty space where he knew she had to be. "What's it like not having a body?" he blurted.
She shivered. He could feel it run down to her hand. "I have a body," she said softly. "I have two, actually. The white koi fish in the oasis at the North Pole, and a great big hunk of round rock in the sky, and it feels very strange."
"That's what the moon is?" Zuko asked. "Rock?"
She squeezed his hand. "Yes, that's all it is."
"What-" He stopped, stammering, and cleared his throat. "What would happen if someone, an earthbender, tried to bend it?"
"It's too big and too far away." She smiled, and he swore he could feel it. "Only the spirits of the earth itself can bend me."
"Oh." A horrible thought crossed his mind. "Can w-" the word "we" couldn't quite pass his lips. "Can waterbenders bend people?" He could feel all that water rushing around inside everyone. It wouldn't be that hard just to-
Yue squeezed his hand again, and Zuko shuddered.
~*~
"It would just be so much easier to show you if there were someone here for you to practice on." Yue heaved a sigh.
Zuko recoiled.
Yue's eyes widened. "That wasn't what I meant!" She exclaimed. "It's just back home, there was always someone with a scrape or a broken bone, or midnight sun madness or winter sickness, who would let the girls work on them. Yugoda would be healing with them when they were dealing with any sort of madness so that the person came out alright, and the first time you're going to heal anyone, you're probably going to be all alone."
"I thought they didn't let you learn healing," he said snidely, trying not to think about what she had just said.
"I used to sneak down to watch." She blushed colorlessly.
"Oh," he mumbled.
She rested her elbow on the mannequin and her head on her hand, glimmering in the gloom, growing brighter as the moon grew fuller again. "You're getting good, but you can't see it without someone to practice on."
"Thanks." The word hung in the air between them then dropped like a stone.
"I'm serious." She closed her eyes and rubbed the bridge of her nose with the hand she wasn't resting on. "You would probably feel better about things if you talked to someone other than your uncle and me."
Zuko laughed. It came out bleak and heavy like his thanks to her had been. He pictured the sailors, walking around above him, and the way they they hovered between laughing at him and wishing he was dead. "Yeah, that would go over real well."
"They're your people now too."
"No they're not!" Zuko's fists came down on the ice mannequin and it cracked into pieces before melting away under his hands.
"Calm down!" Yue ordered, but she didn't jump aside as a human woman would, one who had to worry about things like wet and cold, who the water wouldn't run right through. "Calm down."
"They're not my people." He said again, quietly, fiercely, daring her to disagree.
Yue closed her eyes and rubbed the bridge of her nose again. "You know, you aren't the only one right now having to learn the opposite element to which you were born."
Zuko's head snapped up, good eye wide with surprise.
"The Avatar-"
Zuko pushed himself away from the floor and pivoted on his boot covered heel. They weren't Fire Nation boots, but soft, furry Water Tribe ones. Even that was too much. His storming off became a stagger as the ship lurched underneath him.
"Careful!" the moon spirit called, unfolding her legs and rising into the air. "You could capsize the ship doing that!"
Zuko ignored her, swinging his feet up onto the first rung of the ladder up onto the deck. It was difficult to storm off up a ladder. Her hair brushed his shoulder before she put a restraining hand on it. He turned his head to her, his own hand halfway to the next rung. "I don't want to hear about the Avatar."
"It hurts, doesn't it?" she murmured. "Knowing you can never go home."
He shrugged her hand away sharply. "It's not the same!" His teeth were gritted together in a grimace of pain. "It's not the same. He still has his airbending. He doesn't- I feel cold, all the time. I stand in the sun and I can't feel it..."
"I'm sorry," she soothed. "I didn't mean to do that to you. I know it must be-"
"You don't know anything!" He grasped the next rung and hauled himself up to it, but she didn't have to obey things like gravity. She wasn't confined to floors and ladders.
She floated along side him. "I know what it's like to suddenly not be human anymore!" she reminded him harshly, grabbing onto his arm with both hands. "I know what it's like to be alone, and to think nobody understands! I'm the only spirit who wasn't born a spirit, and you're the only person born bending one element and now bends another instead. I just thought we could talk, but you won't talk to me about it at all!"
His face heated with the sort of shame that only made him angrier. "You're the one who did this to me!"
"I didn't mean-"
"Yes you did! You said-" He stared up at the open trap door and the knot of Water Tribe sailors ringing it, obscuring the pinkish sunset sky from view. They gazed down at Yue in wonder, eyes flicking every few moments to him, as if he were about to hurt their precious moon spirit, as if they couldn't keep their eyes off her to watch him. Zuko could see his uncle's Fire Nation boots at the edge. Closing his eyes with a grimace, Zuko closed the trapdoor. He climbed back down the ladder and jumped past the bottom couple of rungs to the ship's hull. He balanced on its keel, arms out to his sides. "You said."
"I know!" She glided over to where the ice mannequin had been, but she didn't make a new one. "But I didn't know you. I didn't know that you would only see the bad in it, not the good..." She put her face in her hands. Zuko kept trying to yell back at her, but the words kept getting stuck, so they just sat together in silence until Yue spoke again. "Things are a lot better for me in someways. They're a lot worse in others, but some things are better."
"Yeah, well you became the moon spirit. It's different."
"You're alive," she said bluntly. "You still have your uncle. And your father, I was just trying to make you see the truth a little too early, and it'll be easier trying to hide in the Earth Kingdom if you're a waterbender." She put a finger to his lips when he tried to interrupt, to start shouting again. "And you're probably going to be really glad someday that you can heal. Most people who can are."
Zuko wished he could yell, wished he could tell her exactly what he thought of that, wished the words wouldn't keep getting trapped in his own mouth, but they did, and he thought he was going to choke on them.
"I get to bend now, all the time, and I don't have to marry Hahn," she said softly. "But I don't get to see my family, and I still have an arranged marriage. It's give and take."
"Push and Pull," he spat.
The corners of her mouth quirked up. "Exactly."
Zuko thrust his hand to push her away, and realized that if he still had his firebending, he'd have just sent a fireball at her instead of an empty hand. The movements were starting to lose their meaning.
"Were you any happier when you were on your ship?" she asked. "When you had your firebending, but you still couldn't go home?"
"Yes," he hissed.
She raised an eyebrow, and Zuko flushed, all the way down his neck. "You were miserable then, you're miserable now."
"And you?" He bit the words off with a growl.
"Me?" Yue exclaimed, taken aback.
Zuko nodded once, jerkily.
She looked away. "I wasn't miserable."
Zuko snorted viciously. There was no way she was going to spend every day down there in a dank, lonely ship's hold with him every day if she was happy.
"I was doing what I was supposed to do."
"So was I." For the first time in his life, hunting the Avatar, he had been doing what he was supposed to.
She shrugged. It was a strange sort of motion to see from her, very informal, very human, but he had almost as hard a time seeing her shrug even when she had been human as he had seeing his sister make a mistake. "I never thought Hahn would be a good chief. If I had thought he would be, it would have been easier, but marrying him was better than eloping and starting a civil war. But I wasn't supposed to be unhappy, so I wasn't."
"It doesn't work that way." He closed his eyes and leaned back against one of the ship's ribs.
"It wasn't easy sitting next to my father, watching him search for an heir, knowing I was never going to be good enough, no matter how perfect, how kind or clever I was. If I had just gotten to choose who would rule, even if I didn't get to..." Yue smiled sadly. "Hahn's still his heir, you know. If he would listen to me, my father. He's supposed to. I'm the moon spirit."
"I'm sorry," he said. He wondered if she felt just as useless saying it to him as he did, saying it to her.
"When the Avatar came, and Sokka..." She was shaking his head as he opened his eyes. "I just wanted to run away with him. I'm free now. I think I'm supposed to be happy."
"Did you love him?" Zuko looked down.
She shrugged again. "I don't know. I never got to find out."
"There's..." He swallowed. "A girl, back home, in the Fire Nation. I don't know if I love her either, but I'd like to see her again."
The trap door creaked open on its stiff, cracked leather hinges, and Yue sighed before dissipating back into the moonlight. The first sailor's boots pattered tentatively against the ladder rungs, prompting Zuko to lever himself to his feet with an internal groan. The leftover moonlight winked off a shell incense burner in the man's hand. "Oh great lady," the man called into the darkness, laying the burner on the ground and lighting a pair of incense sticks before setting them inside it. "Please accept this offer- oh. It's just you."
"Took you this long to come down?" Zuko's lip curled. "Were you scared?"
The Water Tribe sailor pinched the burning ends of the incense, extinguishing the flame. For a moment, Zuko didn't even notice that he couldn't feel the tiny fires go out, sending smoke curling into the air. The Water Tribesman didn't come any closer to Zuko, until the rest of the crew came rumbling down the ladder and pushed him out of the way. "It's not going to do any good, boys, she's gone."
Zuko rolled his eyes. "You're the captain?"
"Taken you this long to figure that out, did it?" the Water Tribesman sneered.
Zuko clenched his teeth and didn't bother to tell him about how he couldn't see that far in the shadowy hold, or about how he didn't want to know anything about any of them. He did a quick count of the sailors clustered around the ladder. "Isn't anyone paying attention to where the ship's going?"
"We came down here to convince the moon spirit not to kill us all for your stupidity. If managed to convince her, she wouldn't let us sink." The captain crossed his arms. "And if we didn't, there'd be no way to keep us from sinking, now would there?"
Zuko just growled as he swept past and up the ladder onto the deck.
The reddish glare of the sun sinking below the water drove Zuko's eyes closed and made white hot spots erupt behind his eyelids. Slowly, he opened them, squinting as the ship's tiny crew filed up the ladder. Through the film of water, he peered down the length of the ship to the stern, around the ship's cabin, where Uncle sat comfortably wrapped in his cloak, hand resting on the tiller, holding it steady. Zuko's face tried to smile, but he wouldn't let it. Of course there was nothing to worry about. He made his way down to his uncle, swaying with the familiar motion of the deck under his feet, and stopped beside him, slouching against the cabin's back wall. "Hey."
"How are your lessons going?" Uncle asked blandly.
Zuko shrugged.
"What did you learn today?"
Zuko glanced around the side of the cabin at the crew. "More healing. Until we're off the ship." Uncle just smiled and waved at him to continue. "She made a model of the heart, and taught me how to heal different parts of it," he mumbled.
"Ooh!" Uncle burbled. Zuko searched his face for some trace of sarcasm, but he couldn't find any. "Sounds very exciting."
"I guess," he said sullenly. He stared out over the ocean behind them. "Do you have any idea how to steer this thing?"
"It's not that different from the yachts back home." Uncle patted the tiller affectionately.
Zuko glanced around at the strange outrigger sailing ship they found themselves in. It was nothing like anything back home. The captain marched toward them, around the side of the cabin, a dark look on his face, interrupting Zuko's reverie.
"Ah, Captain Unalaq!" The skin around Uncle's eyes crinkled. "Have you given any thought to my suggestion about setting up a music night?"
Zuko's good eye grew huge with stunned horror. "You didn't."
Given the captain's puzzled look, Uncle hadn't, but the old man grinned anyway.
"Get your hand off the tiller of my ship!" the captain spat, but Uncle just inclined his head politely and stood up and walked away, and Zuko followed on his heels, like a good nephew.
Glancing back, Zuko took a deep breath and let it out. Every bit of moisture, every bit of sweat and sea spray on the captain's clothes froze all at once.
"You little bastard!" the captain shouted. As he stumbled towards Zuko, the ice crackled and broke. "I don't know why the moon spirit saved your life, or what she has planned for you, but I hope she drowns you when she's finished with you."
Zuko sidestepped him easily. "Don't worry. I won't be on your ship if she does."
The Water Tribesman's hands balled into fists. "You have the worst attitude, boy," he barked. "Your uncle at least knows how to play nice and stay out of our way, but you, you steal my ink and spend all day hiding down in the cargo hold, and only the spirits know what you do all night long while the rest of us are sleeping, but it ends now. You're not a prince anymore, Zuko. You're going to pull your own weight."
Zuko's own hands moved to rest on the top of his sleeves, arms crossed, fingers stained green and dark grayish purple from the washed out ink, like rotting flesh. "I spend my time down there learning to waterbend with the moon spirit, so if you want to tell her how she's supposed to spend her time, fine with me."
The muscles in the captain's jaw jumped, and he lunged for Zuko, but Uncle brought his arm up between them as Zuko's legs shifted on their own into a firebending stance. He shivered, but didn't move. The stance was familiar, safe.
"We are all tired and have a lot on our minds" Uncle pushed the captain back gently. "If we all just sit down, with a nice cup of tea and something to eat, I'm sure we'll all feel a lot bet-"
"Sit down and shut up!" The captain grabbed General Iroh's wrist and pushed back, shoving him up into the air and letting him fall again.
"Don't touch my uncle!" Zuko yelled, baring his teeth and grabbing the captain's shoulder, thrusting his forearm into the man's neck, dropping him to the deck.
"Nephew." Zuko looked down to see his uncle's hand on his arm, and looked up to see himself surrounded by all six of the rest of the crew.
Their captain coughed and wheezed as he staggered to his feet. "It's okay, boys. Nothing to be concerned about. And you," he gasped, eyes boring into Zuko's. "If I could, I would drop you over the side of my ship right now."
Iroh sighed. Flames licked at his tongue and teeth and smoke billowed out of his mouth. "I don't think that would be a good idea, do you?"
~*~
The air inside the hold was heavy and still, and hot with the warmth of so many bodies. Zuko shoved the furs off and sat up on his hammock, letting it sway gently with the roll of the ship and his shifting body. With a sigh, he gave up and padded around the other hammocks to the ladder and climbed out of the hold. The moon was high behind the ship in the western sky, a fuzzy half-circle of silvery light piercing the clouds. Zuko's eyes flicked to it. He used to be able to look at the sun like that, but now it burned and brought tears to his eyes. Only firebenders could look out the sun without pain. They said if someone looked at it too long, they'd go blind, but no firebender ever went blind from looking at the sun.
The ocean fell away behind them slowly, and to the south, the Earth Kingdom coast loomed, a craggy black band separating the sky and sea. At the first port, he and Uncle were jumping ship.
He leaned over the side of the ship and stared down at the water between the side of the ship and the outrigger hull at the moon's reflection. The waves' motion made it bob and tremble on the water. As he watched, the water stilled and smoothed until he could see his own face reflected on it. His pale, Fire Nation skin, thin, slanted Fire Nation eyes, and the sharp angles of his face, which stood out in the moonlight as points of shadows and light, his scar, were all still there, safe, same, the way they had always been. The wind ruffled his hair, starting to grow down into his eyes. When he turned his head, his phoenix tail didn't swing behind and weigh his head down. In the water, he could see his hair, looking like her hair had, and his eyes the same clear, cold blue, like glacier ice. The water churned, and churned, and the reflection fractured.
~*~
Lu Ten raced across the sand, laughing as his little cousin chased after him, fingers sticky with cherry-rose glaze, reaching out to him. Lu Ten slowed his steps and loped along, slower, slower, until he let Zuko catch him, sticky, red fingers latching onto his tunic, smearing sugary fingerprints all over it as they fell together, down to the sand. The sun shined fierce and bright like a newly minted coin in the hot, blue, cloudless sky, and Zuko found his feet with a smirk. "You're it!" he howled, running backwards, feet splashing in the surf.
The world went cold and dark all at once, the fire inside Lu Ten extinguished, the sun gone, the beach gone, his cousin gone, all at once. "This is what you lost, you know," the Painted Lady whispered into the darkness. "All these memories. Your father, your mother, your cousins, your friends, this is what's missing."
"Go away," he told her. "I'm not yours anymore."
The Painted Lady snorted and shook her head. "It's what Mudan's missing too."
"You don't know anything about it," he said though gritted teeth, searching for somewhere to stand in her Spirit World stream.
"Her name's Rinzee, and she's a soldier. She has two little brothers, and she loved mathematics in school, because she thought the numbers could tell her everything. She grew up on an island, near the ocean, and can't sleep when she's not near it, and she can't remember why she couldn't sleep until you moved into your new house outside the city. She has parents, and friends, and brothers, who all think she's dead, and who comfort themselves with the memory of the way all she wanted to do her whole life was be a soldier and fight for her country." The Painted Lady sat down in her stream, in the middle of the lava flowing under it, and stared up at him, challenging him
.
"You are never going to make me fight against the Earth Kingdom," he snarled, eyes narrowed into thin, furious slits, gleaming in the Spirit World gloom.
The water poured around his feet, and the molten rock oozed like syrup, filling his bones with its warmth. Steam rolled off the water. It weaved around his body and into his hair, shifting and solidifying into robes, and boots, and a headdress, and in the steaming, boiling water, he could see his face, see the topknot, see the gold fire form in his hair, see the Firelord's robes swinging around him. "If we wanted someone to keep fighting this war, Ozai could keep the throne. We'd let it pass to Azula," she said, her voice hissing like the steam.
"Get it off me!" he screamed, pulling at the collar of the robes, his nails catching in the silk as he tried to rip them off.
"Ooh, skinny dipping, in my river. Sounds like fun." She winked sardonically underneath her hat, her expression dark. "Can I watch?"
"What is wrong with you!" he demanded, leaping out of the water, trying to find some small piece of solid ground.
"Oh, I'm sorry," she snapped. "The last hundred years when it was the peasants who built me shrines, and left me gifts and honored me must have made me forget how to talk like I have a stick up my ass!" She rolled her eyes. "Get used to it. Being Firelord means you're going to have to clean up the mess your family left behind, and that means talking to the people of your country."
"It's not my country! I'm never going to be Firelord! My name's Ao, and agent of the Dai Li, not whoever I used..." He broke off, slowly turning his head from side to side to side.
"Go back to bed, Lu Ten," She sighed. "Go home. Go to sleep."
~*~
"Dispatches from your father, Princess," the twins Li and Lo said together as the messenger hawk, free of its burden let one of the crew members carry it away for a rest and something to eat with the other birds.
Azula snatched the scroll out of the hands of one of the twins and broke the seal hungrily. Her eyes scanned it, absorbing the information, and she bent a ball of blue fire into the palm of her hand. The paper curled and smoked as it dissolved into ash. "Captain! Turn this ship north!"
~*~
The clouds hung low over the bay as the Water Tribe sailors lashed the ship to the docks and unloaded the piles of fur and leathers, carved bone and shell, weapons for collectors, dye made from the blood, bodies, and shells of deep sea creatures, beads and paints, and bottles of water from the healing hot springs onto the docks. Zuko and his uncle slipped off the ship and down the docks into the fog. They avoided the lantern lights, strung over the winding streets like barred gates, and stuck to the shadows between buildings.
As the sun burned away the fog, women began to string out clothing to dry, and the shadows grew smaller. The early spring sun beat down on them, and the parka, made for winters at the poles, grew too hot and too heavy. In the sunlight, the red of his uncle's cloak showed up, and Zuko started to reach for a soaking wet tunic, but Uncle pulled his hand down. "We're in the middle of the Earth Kingdom, Uncle." Zuko reminded him coldly. "We have to hide."
"If you have to steal," he told his nephew. "Never steal from the people who can't afford it."
Under their feet, the streets widened, and the houses gained gardens, walls and gates. Uncle boosted Zuko onto the top of the walls of one of the houses, and Zuko leaned over to pull his uncle up behind him. "You need to lose weight," he muttered, dragging Uncle up the wall.
"Shh."
Zuko glanced through the house's windows and eyed the clothesline behind the house. Zuko felt like a spider-fly on a wall, completely exposed. There was no darkness, no masks, nothing but Zuko, his uncle, and broad daylight, and he closed his eyes with a grimace as he shimmied along the wall to the clothesline.
"See anything that will fit me?" Uncle whispered. Zuko shook his head and grabbed the clothesline. Uncle lay flat on his stomach on the wall as Zuko climbed hand over hand along the rope.
The last thing he heard before the wok hit him in the back of the head was a woman's scream of rage.
~*~
Zuko awoke in a metal lined cell, hands and feet chained behind him, and smelling strangely like fried cabbage-carrots. His head pounded, and he had been stripped of his parka and left with only his ink spotted pants against the damp. Uncle's hand rested on his forehead, and when he opened his eyes, Uncle pulled his eyelids up to examine his pupils. "Think you can sit up?" he asked.
Zuko nodded slowly to keep himself from throwing up as his head spun, and propped himself up against the wall. The floor and walls were slick with moisture and the evening fog was rolling in off the ocean. With his untrained arms, Zuko bent it to himself and held it to his head until the bump on his temple subsided and the pounding ebbed away. "My head," he mumbled.
"That young lady has a very good arm," his uncle agreed ruefully, indicating his own arm in a makeshift sling. "Very fast."
Clumsily, Zuko streamed his gathered water down to the locks on his wrists and ankles. The water filled the locks, and as he wriggled it around inside, the faint click of them popping open reverberated around the metal cell.
Uncle smiled, and held out his arms. "Ow!" he gasped, as his broken elbow extended. The water in Zuko's hands splashed all over the floor. Biting back a curse, Zuko carefully drew the water up off the floor and brought it to his uncle's elbow. As it glowed, they glanced anxiously at the door grille, but no one came. "Good job, nephew."
"Shh!" Zuko hissed. "I've never done this on a person before, I need to concentrate!" It was different than with the mannequin. First with his own head, then with his uncle's arm, there was something pulling with him, something trying to drag the water away from where it had to go.
A key turned in the door. Zuko flung himself away from his uncle as a man in strange dark robes and a tasseled helmet closed the door behind himself. "All morning long, I've been receiving reports about a man in Fire Nation clothes all morning, and here I find you at my own house," the man said conversationally. "You scared my wife very badly today. Of course, my daughter thought it was hilarious."
Uncle's face spread in a wide, genial grin. "My nephew and I are sorry for any-"
"The town as been talking about you." The man's answering smile was much smaller and much more frightening. "Most people think the two of you must be some sort of spirits, because no Fire Nation general would be stupid enough to venture into a town this close to Ba Sing Se in his uniform without an army to back him up. Now." He let his voice drop and he grabbed hold of Uncle's shoulders and pulled him close until their faces almost touch. "You are going to tell me what you you're doing in my town, in my garden."
Uncle looked like the air had been pulled out of his lungs. He gasped and licked his lips to moisten them. His mouth gaped open and he hung in the man's grip like a child's stuffed toy. His chained hands came up to brush the man's face.
"You'll have to excuse my uncle," Zuko began hurriedly. "He's gone senile-"
"Lu Ten?"
Zuko had thought he had been lying about Uncle going senile. "Lu Ten's dead, Uncle."
The man in the dark green robe shoved Uncle back. "My name's Ao. I am a Dai Li agent, and you w-"
Iroh threw his chained arms over the man's head and looped them around him, tears running down his face. "I thought you were dead," he murmured.
"Uncle, he's not-" The force of the impact had thrown the man who called himself Ao's helmet off. Zuko's mouth closed. "You're-" he said when it opened again. "You can't be."
"I don't know what your game is, but you will let go of me, and you will tell me what you are doing here." As the man threw Iroh back, the sunlight struck his eyes, and they shown back, gold. Fire Nation gold
"Why don't you remember?" Iroh pleaded. "Don't you know who I am?"
No spark of recognition in Lu Ten's eyes answered his father, none at all.
~*~
The silence between Zuko and his uncle stretched on and on, and on and on until it snapped and recoiled with the slamming open of the cell door. Lu Ten stepped into the room, his helmet low over his face, hiding his eyes, hiding everything except his mouth and bearded chin. As soon as the door clicked shut behind him, he gloved his hands in flames. "I've been wracking my brain trying to figure out where I've heard the name 'Lu Ten' before," he said without preamble. "And I've finally remembered. That's the name of one of the Fire Nation prince who died in the siege of Ba Sing Se. The son of the Dragon of the West."
The breath caught audibly in Iroh's throat, and his mouth hung open. Zuko did his best to keep his own breath even and his whole body still so the shackles didn't move.
"See, I'm trying to decide if you're a senile old man who somehow managed to convince yourself you're the Dragon of the West, a senile old man from the Fire Nation who had the bad taste to name your son after the prince, or if I am somehow hosting the Dragon of the West himself." The man who was Lu Ten had the strangest look on his face, like he kept putting everything together and coming up with something he didn't like, something he knew about and they didn't.
Zuko watched him, and waited, and barely listened, gathering water droplets together into a puddle, and Iroh gasped and choked like his throat wouldn't open, or like he couldn't breathe air.
"I like the last option," he said, stepping closer. "Would give me a chance to bring in a living leg-"
Zuko sprang, the shackles falling off his wrists and ankles, and he bore Lu Ten down to the floor, knocking his helmet off his head. Lu Ten's fire wreathed fists extinguished when they hit the floor, but he brought them up blazing again. Straddling his cousin's chest, Zuko batted them away and pinned his arms down to the floor, the heat leaving shining burns on his fingers where he touched the man's wrists. Air hissing through his teeth, Zuko brought his forearms down on the man's arms and tucked his elbows in, pulling his tiny pool of gathered water to his hands and to Lu Ten's head.
"Zuko!" Iroh seemed to come unstuck, crawling towards them on his still chained arms and legs. "What are you doing? Are you crazy?"
But Zuko didn't hear him. His fingers stung and burned, but he was too busy to deal with them either. He hadn't gotten to the brain with Yue yet. He had no idea what he was needed to find, or what he was expecting to see. Maybe, somehow, he had been expecting the mind to be different from the rest of a person, that he would see Lu Ten's memories, or the memories of a man who looked like him, but all he felt were tiny, tiny rivers, just like he hand when he had healed his uncle's arm and the bump on his head. But there were so many more of them, so many that he didn't know, and didn't know how they were supposed to flow, or if they were normal or not, and he just had to hold the water there long enough, and hope it was doing what it was supposed to do, what the body already would want it to do if it were really broken, and hope the man who looked so much like his cousin didn't somehow throw him off and kill him while he did.
The man howled, and bucked, but Zuko tucked in his heels and hung on.
Until he quieted, and lay still, and let the fire in his hands die. He lay there, eyes wide and blank, lips moving, but nothing coming out, and Zuko clambered off and staggered back, panting heavily.
The man picked himself up and sat hunched over himself, eyes on the floor, the sound of his breathing harsh in the little metal cell.
"Lu Ten?" Iroh breathed, trying desperately to hide the hope, and bewilderment, and terror swirling around inside him, but it was obvious. It was so obvious, and Zuko felt sick to his stomach with it, like he was being stabbed seeing it, and-
Lu Ten's face crumpled, and he nodded, tears running down his face. Zuko could feel them. He could feel them falling down his cousin's face.
And all Zuko could hear was his uncle saying, "Ever since I lost my son, I think of you as my own."
I think of you as my own.
I think of you as my own.
Ever since I lost my son.
~*~
The cell door opened, and the three men walked out together like they were being summoned to their executions, like the world ended beyond the door. Robe straightened and helmet back in place, Lu Ten led the way up the stairs and out into the sunlit stone lobby. The pudgy, blank faced woman behind the table, didn't look up as they walked past. "How would you like the report to read, Agent Ao?" She asked in that monotonous way the clerks had.
"Ah. Um." Lu Ten swallowed. "Actually, why don't you come with me, and I'll dictate."
"I'm not permitted to leave the facility, Agent Ao."
"That's alright," Lu Ten improvised. "Just come... here. There's someone I want you to meet." He cast Zuko a significant look that his cousin struggled to interpret.
The woman stood up behind the writing table and stepped around it, her movements crisp and efficient, but cold. Gingerly, Lu Ten offered her his hand, and she took it, her own limp within his grasp. In one movement, he threw her at Zuko, and she didn't struggle; she just collapsed against him, and he let her hang in his arms, utterly at a loss. "What-"
"Heal her," Lu Ten insisted, eyes bright. "Like you did me. Fix her, make it-"
Zuko didn't hear the rest. Water wasn't everywhere in the sunny little office the way it had been in the cell, rusting away the metal, leaving streaks of lime and salt behind, like tiny needles of earth. Beads of it welled up between his fingers as he ran them along the wall, and gave up, bending the tepid tea from the cup on the writing table to him instead. It got into her hair and ran off like the ink had off his own. It pooled between his hands and around her head, rolling, cold, and alien, and not fire. She stayed still like his cousin hadn't, and didn't start screaming until the end.
"What is wrong with her?" Zuko demanded, stumbling away from her. "What's wrong with you? What's going on? What's-" There was a sickness in their minds, a profound wrongness that left him weak, and wobbly, and barely able to stand. He clung to the wall for support and longed for his firebending to burn something. There was a cancer in this place. There was something growing, eating, destroying and distorting, and he wanted to go home.
The woman screamed again, face moving and moving and moving, and refusing to settle on an expression, but at least not blank anymore. "Oh spirits!" she shrieked. "Spirits, spirits, spirits, spirits, spiritsspiritsspir-" She caught sight of Lu Ten and cowered back. "Dai Li!"
She slunk backwards along the wall until she reached the door and jerked it open, half falling, half running out into the sunlight, and Lu Ten let her go, his expression just going more and more troubled.
Iroh gave Zuko his shoulder to rest on, and Zuko hung on it, eyes closed. "I think your cousin is right. You need to tell us what's going on."
Lu Ten rounded on them both. "I think you need to tell me what's going on," he retorted shakily. "Because I might still be trying to piece a few things together, but I remember my cousin, and he wasn't a waterbender, so unless you actually have gone senile, I want to know where Zuko is, why this man is with you, and why you're calling him by my cousin's name!"
"You don't know?" Zuko's body went slack with relief. The whole world didn't know yet. At least people weren't laughing at Zuko behind his back about that yet. The world didn't need anything else to laugh at him over.
Unconsciously, Iroh pushed his nephew partway behind himself, protectively. "We had a small run in with the spirits."
"The moon spirit saved my life," Zuko said flatly, still trying to shake off the feel of the minds. "This was her price."
Lu Ten's breathing was still too hard. His eyes were still too wide and too bright, and Zuko was terrified he was going to start crying. He lurched forward, like he was falling, and yanked his father into his arms. Iroh wrapped his arms around his son and let him hang on, and Zuko let himself fall back against the wall, simmering, like a pot of water over a fire.
Zuko couldn't watch, couldn't, didn't, which was why he didn't realize what was about to happen until Lu Ten's arms were pulling him close. He froze.
~*~
"Being stuck on this boat is almost as boring as being stuck in Omashu." Azula glanced at her, eyebrow raised, and Mai rolled her eyes. "New Ozai."
"Well, do you want me to turn the barge around and take you back?" Azula kept a reign on her temper. This was Mai. She was held to a different standard, as all truly great people were, and so she, like Ty Lee, had more license.
Mai shrugged, not taking her eyes off cleaning her knives. "I said almost as boring."
Azula examined the woodgrain underneath her fingernails. The clever engineers from the colonies had managed to outfit a captured Earth Kingdom military barge with a Fire Nation steam engine. No one would ever notice above water, when the engine was off and the smokestacks were hidden away, that this wasn't just one more Earth Kingdom barge. Azula would never understand why Mai didn't love things like this barge that were beautiful, and brilliant, and perfect.
But perfection bored Mai, which Azula didn't like to think about. "Go play with Ty Lee then. Keep her out of trouble."
Mai rolled her eyes again and rose from the bench, methodically packed away the knives spread out on the bench next to her.
"We'll be reaching the northern coast soon." Azula remarked thoughtfully. "You'll get your excitement soon enough."
~*~
The three of them wound their way through the grasses and thickets of trees between the secret Dai Li station and the town. Iroh gossiped and chattered to fill the silence between the cousins, but neither of them could think of anything to say. The late afternoon sun beat down on them, and for the first time in his life, Zuko felt the beginnings of a sunburn building on his back, and underneath his white hair. It wasn't fair. It wasn't fair. It burned, but it didn't warm.
Lu Ten's long braid swung behind him, flicking like an ostrich-horse's tail, but he had changed out of his Dai Li uniform and into a spare set of civilian clothes he kept at the station, and Iroh had unlaced his armor and tucked it on the shelf next to Lu Ten's uniform, the reddish gray tunic underneath almost unsuspicious. His thoughts strayed to that pretty little house on the inland edge of the town, and the mention of a daughter inside. Iroh tried to picture the little girl he had barely glimpsed. A granddaughter. "Aren't you going to tell us what has been happening to you for the past six years?"
Lu Ten flinched and didn't speak, until the lack of words became too oppressive to stand, and then he still didn't speak, because he couldn't.
"Is there something wrong?" his father asked.
Lu Ten stepped back, away from his father. "I kept thinking about what I was going to say to you when you asked, but everything I could say would tell you something about the Dai Li, and Ba Sing Se, and they would be things that you could use, and there are good people there, people who aren't Dai Li. I have friends, and Mudan has friends, and..." He swallowed. "I'm not going to help you burn it down."
Iroh let his hand fall heavily over his heart. He stumbled back and caught himself, moving jerkily towards his son. He caught his arm, and pulled the younger, shorter man to his chest, making Lu Ten's spine bend, hunching over into the embrace. "I lost my taste for conquest a long time ago," he breathed into his son's ear. "I am too old and tired for it now."
Lu Ten slumped against his father's shoulder, unable to articulate what it meant that some part of him was loyal to somewhere other than where he was born, and where he had fought at his father's side to glorify. He had protected Ba Sing Se in the Dai Li's own warped, destructive way for six years. He had to love it to do that. They made him love it so he could do that, but that didn't make the love go away. "You're not the only general in the Fire Nation."
"I will never tell anyone," he murmured, too low for his nephew to hear, "And Zuko doesn't have anyone to tell." The last came out more sorrowful than reassuring, but Zuko couldn't hear that either.
Zuko's eyes traveled over the rocks and valleys, anywhere that wasn't his cousin and his uncle, because every time they landed on the two of them, a flash of something so hungry and cold went though him that he hunched around himself just to keep warm.
With a sigh, Lu Ten broke his father's hold and led the way down the sloping terrain back to town. For a few moments, he just walked, taking in the sun, but then his mouth opened and the strange story of what it meant to have been an agent of the Dai Li for six years came out. At first he tried to speak chronologically, but when he tried to tell how he ended up captured, he glanced at Zuko and couldn't speak. So he tried to talk about mindbending someone, what it meant while it was happening, and what it felt like to have that kind of power. He talked about what it was like looking at them, and knowing he was going to see them again, after it was all over, and he talked about the first person he had mindbent, a Fire Nation soldier, and how he had looked at her wondering if it had really been like that for him, and if he had kicked and cursed and spat the way she had until the stone gag went over her mouth and her face had gone slack, and how it had been when he saw her again, married to his new partner.
He tried to talk about Mudan, and meeting her, and not even knowing if they had met before, before everything, and now he knew they hadn't. She had looked so lost, when he had first seen her, when the other agents had introduced them, and he had felt so relieved, because he had felt that way too.
Sometimes she still looked like that, and sometimes he still felt like that, but he couldn't say that.
He thought about telling the two of them about the Painted Lady, especially telling Zuko, who wore the mark of another spirit, but he couldn't make the words come past his lips.
When the words dried up, the sky was just beginning to turn red, and the quiet felt so good he didn't want to think about why his father and Zuko weren't saying anything.
But the quiet stopped being soothing, and he couldn't stop himself; he opened his mouth again, turning around to meet his father's eyes. "I was really scared when you said my name."
"Really?" Iroh asked. "Why?"
Lu Ten thought about it, his brow wrinkling before speaking. "When you don't know who you were, and you don't remember what you've done, it's easier to pretend you weren't anyone before you were Dai Li. And I kept thinking, Lu Ten died in the siege of Ba Sing Se." He turned to Zuko, and his mouth twisted. "But then I saw you and thought, oh thank the spirits, if he thinks any boy with a scar like that is Zuko, even if they aren't even Fire Nation, he probably can't remember what his son looked like, either."
Zuko put his hand to his face and cupped his scar. "You knew about this?"
"Everybody knows about it," Lu Ten told him, almost cheerful to talk about something other than himself after all of it. "When it happened, people were talking for months about how the Earth Kingdom might actually win the war, if the Firelord's son was stu-" He caught sight of Zuko's glower. "I mean..."
"No really," Zuko advised venomously. "Finish."
"Stupid enough to burn himself." Lu Ten's mouth had gone dry.
Zuko's teeth ground together and he walked stiffly away, down towards town.
Lu Ten moved to go after him, but Iroh grabbed his arm. "But he'll-" Lu Ten started.
"He can find his way without us for a little bit." Iroh shook his head fondly. "You would be amazed at what he can do."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
Iroh bowed his head, the familiar flash of pain at how he would have given anything to have his son back while Ozai had thrown his away still came, even with Lu Ten standing next to him. "He did not give himself that burn, and it was not an accident."
~*~
Zuko's feet sank into the half rotted leaves from the fall just past. He walked sideways along the hillside, until he found a rocky little stream and sat down on a boulder. The moon hung in the sky, and even though he couldn't see it underneath the trees bordering the river, he knew it was there.
He shifted his weight and pulled a thin ribbon of water out of the stream and held it between his hands. It glowed blue for a second, sending moving bands of light over the tree trunks and leaves overhead, and coolness spread through his throbbing fingertips. Swallowing and blinking tears out of his good eye, he streamed the water from hand to hand and over the head in an arch. Everything felt raw, and he couldn't figure out how much of that was the sunburn, and how much of that was inside him.
"Good evening, Zuko."
Zuko spun around just as the water passed over his head again. It poured down over his head and bare shoulders, soaking his pants. "Wh-what are you d-doing here?" His teeth chattered. Fog was rolling in off the sea, and the wind, when it blew, was cold.
She didn't talk. She just chuckled.
"You knew Lu Ten was here," Zuko accused, shaking himself off, shivering harder. "That's why you wanted me to go to Ba Sing Se."
She nodded. "I thought it would make your uncle happy."
"I th-thought th-that's why you s-sent me b-back," he mumbled.
She sat down next to him on the rock. "You don't have to worry. Nothing is going to change. Your uncle loves you."
He threw himself off the boulder, away from her, and fell backwards into the stream. The snowmelt stream water parted around him, and and got into his bones. The cold ached. "He loved me because he didn't have Lu Ten."
"Agni and the Painted Lady asked me to send you to him. There needs to be a new Firelord, and that cannot be you anymore." Yue stood up and offered him her hand.
He sent her a black look from beneath his hair and didn't take her hand.
"What could I have done to make you happy?" she asked rhetorically. "Would you have me consign your cousin to living as he had, hating who he once had been because that man had been the enemy, not even able to remember his own name?"
A shudder swept over him, whether from cold or revulsion, he didn't know. "N-no."
"And would you like me to have left your uncle mourning a son who was still alive?"
"No, okay?"
"Are you happy to see him alive?" she asked quietly. "You loved him once."
He nodded. Tears started rolling out of his good eye. Yue gazed down at him and thought about the perfectly good heir Ozai had tossed aside, and her own tribe in desperate need of a good heir.
And how tempting it would be to snatch him up, dust him off and carry him back to her father like a cat with a frog-mouse to show to her human.
"Now," she murmured, holding her hand closer to him. "Are you still angry with me? I promised you I would teach you waterbending as soon as you were on dry land."
Zuko put his hand in hers and let her pull him to his feet.
Under her tutelage, the stream water danced and swirled under his control. It lapped at the banks like the ocean and ran uphill, and all he had to do was keep moving. He hated the way it felt. He hated the way it came so naturally, so quickly to him, the way Firebending never had.
Chapter Three: Fire
Disclaimer: I own nothing in the Avatar Universe, though Byrke seem to take cruel delight in their active fanbase.
Author's Note:Written for the
avatarbigbang. Warnings for Dai Li brainwashing that borders on torture, moderately graphic fight scenes, and a little bit of profane language. I'd like to thank my betas floranna and beboots again for turning this into something readable. Also floranna is responsible for the prompt upon which this story is based.Chapter Two: Earth
"My father sent a very interesting letter today," Yue's voice told him. Zuko couldn't see her, but she cast a dark shadow on the wooden wall. He folded his arms and ignored her, but she continued anyway. "To your father, telling him what happened to you, and that if the Fire Nation tried to kill the moon again, you'd die."
Zuko turned to where he hoped she was. "You're not dead. Go away."
"You said you would learn waterbending," she reminded him gently.
"Not if you're just going to tell me about how evil my father is!" He hissed. "I don't even know where you are. Just go away."
Yue put a hand on his arm, and it solidified into a black, glimmering form, like a silk glove. "I'm done talking, if you will let me teach you."
Swallowing, Zuko nodded. "I can't even see you."
Her hand slipped off his arm. "Watch my shadow. It's the new moon. That's all I am." She sat down and crossed her legs like a living woman. The salty puddle under her shimmered and froze into the shape of a human being, with shining groves like Yugoda's mannequin. "Sit down," she told him. "I'm going to teach you healing first, until you're off the ship."
Zuko felt the ever-present ocean water pushing in around him and nodded again.
He sat down on the other side of the ice mannequin from her, and she took his hand again. She brought it down to the chest of the mannequin. "Your body has almost as much water in it as this," she began. "And that water is supposed to run in certain ways." She guided his hand over the silvery grooves in the mannequin, and he extended his finger down to touch them. The ice melted under the heat of his body and the grooves deepened.
"Yeah, I know," he said, mouth dry.
She pressed his hand to his chest. "Do you feel it? Running around your body."
He nodded. He kept waiting for it to quiet down, or for him to get used to it, for it to just become the way things were, but it wouldn't. He kept feeling it, pounding and pounding in his veins. Worse when the moon was out, and worse the bigger it was in the sky, but always there, and always telling him things were never going to be the way they used to be.
Yue swallowed audibly in the stillness. "You probably feel it more than most waterbenders, because most have never been without that feeling."
Zuko glanced at Yue's shadow, and then back at the empty space where he knew she had to be. "What's it like not having a body?" he blurted.
She shivered. He could feel it run down to her hand. "I have a body," she said softly. "I have two, actually. The white koi fish in the oasis at the North Pole, and a great big hunk of round rock in the sky, and it feels very strange."
"That's what the moon is?" Zuko asked. "Rock?"
She squeezed his hand. "Yes, that's all it is."
"What-" He stopped, stammering, and cleared his throat. "What would happen if someone, an earthbender, tried to bend it?"
"It's too big and too far away." She smiled, and he swore he could feel it. "Only the spirits of the earth itself can bend me."
"Oh." A horrible thought crossed his mind. "Can w-" the word "we" couldn't quite pass his lips. "Can waterbenders bend people?" He could feel all that water rushing around inside everyone. It wouldn't be that hard just to-
Yue squeezed his hand again, and Zuko shuddered.
~*~
"It would just be so much easier to show you if there were someone here for you to practice on." Yue heaved a sigh.
Zuko recoiled.
Yue's eyes widened. "That wasn't what I meant!" She exclaimed. "It's just back home, there was always someone with a scrape or a broken bone, or midnight sun madness or winter sickness, who would let the girls work on them. Yugoda would be healing with them when they were dealing with any sort of madness so that the person came out alright, and the first time you're going to heal anyone, you're probably going to be all alone."
"I thought they didn't let you learn healing," he said snidely, trying not to think about what she had just said.
"I used to sneak down to watch." She blushed colorlessly.
"Oh," he mumbled.
She rested her elbow on the mannequin and her head on her hand, glimmering in the gloom, growing brighter as the moon grew fuller again. "You're getting good, but you can't see it without someone to practice on."
"Thanks." The word hung in the air between them then dropped like a stone.
"I'm serious." She closed her eyes and rubbed the bridge of her nose with the hand she wasn't resting on. "You would probably feel better about things if you talked to someone other than your uncle and me."
Zuko laughed. It came out bleak and heavy like his thanks to her had been. He pictured the sailors, walking around above him, and the way they they hovered between laughing at him and wishing he was dead. "Yeah, that would go over real well."
"They're your people now too."
"No they're not!" Zuko's fists came down on the ice mannequin and it cracked into pieces before melting away under his hands.
"Calm down!" Yue ordered, but she didn't jump aside as a human woman would, one who had to worry about things like wet and cold, who the water wouldn't run right through. "Calm down."
"They're not my people." He said again, quietly, fiercely, daring her to disagree.
Yue closed her eyes and rubbed the bridge of her nose again. "You know, you aren't the only one right now having to learn the opposite element to which you were born."
Zuko's head snapped up, good eye wide with surprise.
"The Avatar-"
Zuko pushed himself away from the floor and pivoted on his boot covered heel. They weren't Fire Nation boots, but soft, furry Water Tribe ones. Even that was too much. His storming off became a stagger as the ship lurched underneath him.
"Careful!" the moon spirit called, unfolding her legs and rising into the air. "You could capsize the ship doing that!"
Zuko ignored her, swinging his feet up onto the first rung of the ladder up onto the deck. It was difficult to storm off up a ladder. Her hair brushed his shoulder before she put a restraining hand on it. He turned his head to her, his own hand halfway to the next rung. "I don't want to hear about the Avatar."
"It hurts, doesn't it?" she murmured. "Knowing you can never go home."
He shrugged her hand away sharply. "It's not the same!" His teeth were gritted together in a grimace of pain. "It's not the same. He still has his airbending. He doesn't- I feel cold, all the time. I stand in the sun and I can't feel it..."
"I'm sorry," she soothed. "I didn't mean to do that to you. I know it must be-"
"You don't know anything!" He grasped the next rung and hauled himself up to it, but she didn't have to obey things like gravity. She wasn't confined to floors and ladders.
She floated along side him. "I know what it's like to suddenly not be human anymore!" she reminded him harshly, grabbing onto his arm with both hands. "I know what it's like to be alone, and to think nobody understands! I'm the only spirit who wasn't born a spirit, and you're the only person born bending one element and now bends another instead. I just thought we could talk, but you won't talk to me about it at all!"
His face heated with the sort of shame that only made him angrier. "You're the one who did this to me!"
"I didn't mean-"
"Yes you did! You said-" He stared up at the open trap door and the knot of Water Tribe sailors ringing it, obscuring the pinkish sunset sky from view. They gazed down at Yue in wonder, eyes flicking every few moments to him, as if he were about to hurt their precious moon spirit, as if they couldn't keep their eyes off her to watch him. Zuko could see his uncle's Fire Nation boots at the edge. Closing his eyes with a grimace, Zuko closed the trapdoor. He climbed back down the ladder and jumped past the bottom couple of rungs to the ship's hull. He balanced on its keel, arms out to his sides. "You said."
"I know!" She glided over to where the ice mannequin had been, but she didn't make a new one. "But I didn't know you. I didn't know that you would only see the bad in it, not the good..." She put her face in her hands. Zuko kept trying to yell back at her, but the words kept getting stuck, so they just sat together in silence until Yue spoke again. "Things are a lot better for me in someways. They're a lot worse in others, but some things are better."
"Yeah, well you became the moon spirit. It's different."
"You're alive," she said bluntly. "You still have your uncle. And your father, I was just trying to make you see the truth a little too early, and it'll be easier trying to hide in the Earth Kingdom if you're a waterbender." She put a finger to his lips when he tried to interrupt, to start shouting again. "And you're probably going to be really glad someday that you can heal. Most people who can are."
Zuko wished he could yell, wished he could tell her exactly what he thought of that, wished the words wouldn't keep getting trapped in his own mouth, but they did, and he thought he was going to choke on them.
"I get to bend now, all the time, and I don't have to marry Hahn," she said softly. "But I don't get to see my family, and I still have an arranged marriage. It's give and take."
"Push and Pull," he spat.
The corners of her mouth quirked up. "Exactly."
Zuko thrust his hand to push her away, and realized that if he still had his firebending, he'd have just sent a fireball at her instead of an empty hand. The movements were starting to lose their meaning.
"Were you any happier when you were on your ship?" she asked. "When you had your firebending, but you still couldn't go home?"
"Yes," he hissed.
She raised an eyebrow, and Zuko flushed, all the way down his neck. "You were miserable then, you're miserable now."
"And you?" He bit the words off with a growl.
"Me?" Yue exclaimed, taken aback.
Zuko nodded once, jerkily.
She looked away. "I wasn't miserable."
Zuko snorted viciously. There was no way she was going to spend every day down there in a dank, lonely ship's hold with him every day if she was happy.
"I was doing what I was supposed to do."
"So was I." For the first time in his life, hunting the Avatar, he had been doing what he was supposed to.
She shrugged. It was a strange sort of motion to see from her, very informal, very human, but he had almost as hard a time seeing her shrug even when she had been human as he had seeing his sister make a mistake. "I never thought Hahn would be a good chief. If I had thought he would be, it would have been easier, but marrying him was better than eloping and starting a civil war. But I wasn't supposed to be unhappy, so I wasn't."
"It doesn't work that way." He closed his eyes and leaned back against one of the ship's ribs.
"It wasn't easy sitting next to my father, watching him search for an heir, knowing I was never going to be good enough, no matter how perfect, how kind or clever I was. If I had just gotten to choose who would rule, even if I didn't get to..." Yue smiled sadly. "Hahn's still his heir, you know. If he would listen to me, my father. He's supposed to. I'm the moon spirit."
"I'm sorry," he said. He wondered if she felt just as useless saying it to him as he did, saying it to her.
"When the Avatar came, and Sokka..." She was shaking his head as he opened his eyes. "I just wanted to run away with him. I'm free now. I think I'm supposed to be happy."
"Did you love him?" Zuko looked down.
She shrugged again. "I don't know. I never got to find out."
"There's..." He swallowed. "A girl, back home, in the Fire Nation. I don't know if I love her either, but I'd like to see her again."
The trap door creaked open on its stiff, cracked leather hinges, and Yue sighed before dissipating back into the moonlight. The first sailor's boots pattered tentatively against the ladder rungs, prompting Zuko to lever himself to his feet with an internal groan. The leftover moonlight winked off a shell incense burner in the man's hand. "Oh great lady," the man called into the darkness, laying the burner on the ground and lighting a pair of incense sticks before setting them inside it. "Please accept this offer- oh. It's just you."
"Took you this long to come down?" Zuko's lip curled. "Were you scared?"
The Water Tribe sailor pinched the burning ends of the incense, extinguishing the flame. For a moment, Zuko didn't even notice that he couldn't feel the tiny fires go out, sending smoke curling into the air. The Water Tribesman didn't come any closer to Zuko, until the rest of the crew came rumbling down the ladder and pushed him out of the way. "It's not going to do any good, boys, she's gone."
Zuko rolled his eyes. "You're the captain?"
"Taken you this long to figure that out, did it?" the Water Tribesman sneered.
Zuko clenched his teeth and didn't bother to tell him about how he couldn't see that far in the shadowy hold, or about how he didn't want to know anything about any of them. He did a quick count of the sailors clustered around the ladder. "Isn't anyone paying attention to where the ship's going?"
"We came down here to convince the moon spirit not to kill us all for your stupidity. If managed to convince her, she wouldn't let us sink." The captain crossed his arms. "And if we didn't, there'd be no way to keep us from sinking, now would there?"
Zuko just growled as he swept past and up the ladder onto the deck.
The reddish glare of the sun sinking below the water drove Zuko's eyes closed and made white hot spots erupt behind his eyelids. Slowly, he opened them, squinting as the ship's tiny crew filed up the ladder. Through the film of water, he peered down the length of the ship to the stern, around the ship's cabin, where Uncle sat comfortably wrapped in his cloak, hand resting on the tiller, holding it steady. Zuko's face tried to smile, but he wouldn't let it. Of course there was nothing to worry about. He made his way down to his uncle, swaying with the familiar motion of the deck under his feet, and stopped beside him, slouching against the cabin's back wall. "Hey."
"How are your lessons going?" Uncle asked blandly.
Zuko shrugged.
"What did you learn today?"
Zuko glanced around the side of the cabin at the crew. "More healing. Until we're off the ship." Uncle just smiled and waved at him to continue. "She made a model of the heart, and taught me how to heal different parts of it," he mumbled.
"Ooh!" Uncle burbled. Zuko searched his face for some trace of sarcasm, but he couldn't find any. "Sounds very exciting."
"I guess," he said sullenly. He stared out over the ocean behind them. "Do you have any idea how to steer this thing?"
"It's not that different from the yachts back home." Uncle patted the tiller affectionately.
Zuko glanced around at the strange outrigger sailing ship they found themselves in. It was nothing like anything back home. The captain marched toward them, around the side of the cabin, a dark look on his face, interrupting Zuko's reverie.
"Ah, Captain Unalaq!" The skin around Uncle's eyes crinkled. "Have you given any thought to my suggestion about setting up a music night?"
Zuko's good eye grew huge with stunned horror. "You didn't."
Given the captain's puzzled look, Uncle hadn't, but the old man grinned anyway.
"Get your hand off the tiller of my ship!" the captain spat, but Uncle just inclined his head politely and stood up and walked away, and Zuko followed on his heels, like a good nephew.
Glancing back, Zuko took a deep breath and let it out. Every bit of moisture, every bit of sweat and sea spray on the captain's clothes froze all at once.
"You little bastard!" the captain shouted. As he stumbled towards Zuko, the ice crackled and broke. "I don't know why the moon spirit saved your life, or what she has planned for you, but I hope she drowns you when she's finished with you."
Zuko sidestepped him easily. "Don't worry. I won't be on your ship if she does."
The Water Tribesman's hands balled into fists. "You have the worst attitude, boy," he barked. "Your uncle at least knows how to play nice and stay out of our way, but you, you steal my ink and spend all day hiding down in the cargo hold, and only the spirits know what you do all night long while the rest of us are sleeping, but it ends now. You're not a prince anymore, Zuko. You're going to pull your own weight."
Zuko's own hands moved to rest on the top of his sleeves, arms crossed, fingers stained green and dark grayish purple from the washed out ink, like rotting flesh. "I spend my time down there learning to waterbend with the moon spirit, so if you want to tell her how she's supposed to spend her time, fine with me."
The muscles in the captain's jaw jumped, and he lunged for Zuko, but Uncle brought his arm up between them as Zuko's legs shifted on their own into a firebending stance. He shivered, but didn't move. The stance was familiar, safe.
"We are all tired and have a lot on our minds" Uncle pushed the captain back gently. "If we all just sit down, with a nice cup of tea and something to eat, I'm sure we'll all feel a lot bet-"
"Sit down and shut up!" The captain grabbed General Iroh's wrist and pushed back, shoving him up into the air and letting him fall again.
"Don't touch my uncle!" Zuko yelled, baring his teeth and grabbing the captain's shoulder, thrusting his forearm into the man's neck, dropping him to the deck.
"Nephew." Zuko looked down to see his uncle's hand on his arm, and looked up to see himself surrounded by all six of the rest of the crew.
Their captain coughed and wheezed as he staggered to his feet. "It's okay, boys. Nothing to be concerned about. And you," he gasped, eyes boring into Zuko's. "If I could, I would drop you over the side of my ship right now."
Iroh sighed. Flames licked at his tongue and teeth and smoke billowed out of his mouth. "I don't think that would be a good idea, do you?"
~*~
The air inside the hold was heavy and still, and hot with the warmth of so many bodies. Zuko shoved the furs off and sat up on his hammock, letting it sway gently with the roll of the ship and his shifting body. With a sigh, he gave up and padded around the other hammocks to the ladder and climbed out of the hold. The moon was high behind the ship in the western sky, a fuzzy half-circle of silvery light piercing the clouds. Zuko's eyes flicked to it. He used to be able to look at the sun like that, but now it burned and brought tears to his eyes. Only firebenders could look out the sun without pain. They said if someone looked at it too long, they'd go blind, but no firebender ever went blind from looking at the sun.
The ocean fell away behind them slowly, and to the south, the Earth Kingdom coast loomed, a craggy black band separating the sky and sea. At the first port, he and Uncle were jumping ship.
He leaned over the side of the ship and stared down at the water between the side of the ship and the outrigger hull at the moon's reflection. The waves' motion made it bob and tremble on the water. As he watched, the water stilled and smoothed until he could see his own face reflected on it. His pale, Fire Nation skin, thin, slanted Fire Nation eyes, and the sharp angles of his face, which stood out in the moonlight as points of shadows and light, his scar, were all still there, safe, same, the way they had always been. The wind ruffled his hair, starting to grow down into his eyes. When he turned his head, his phoenix tail didn't swing behind and weigh his head down. In the water, he could see his hair, looking like her hair had, and his eyes the same clear, cold blue, like glacier ice. The water churned, and churned, and the reflection fractured.
~*~
Lu Ten raced across the sand, laughing as his little cousin chased after him, fingers sticky with cherry-rose glaze, reaching out to him. Lu Ten slowed his steps and loped along, slower, slower, until he let Zuko catch him, sticky, red fingers latching onto his tunic, smearing sugary fingerprints all over it as they fell together, down to the sand. The sun shined fierce and bright like a newly minted coin in the hot, blue, cloudless sky, and Zuko found his feet with a smirk. "You're it!" he howled, running backwards, feet splashing in the surf.
The world went cold and dark all at once, the fire inside Lu Ten extinguished, the sun gone, the beach gone, his cousin gone, all at once. "This is what you lost, you know," the Painted Lady whispered into the darkness. "All these memories. Your father, your mother, your cousins, your friends, this is what's missing."
"Go away," he told her. "I'm not yours anymore."
The Painted Lady snorted and shook her head. "It's what Mudan's missing too."
"You don't know anything about it," he said though gritted teeth, searching for somewhere to stand in her Spirit World stream.
"Her name's Rinzee, and she's a soldier. She has two little brothers, and she loved mathematics in school, because she thought the numbers could tell her everything. She grew up on an island, near the ocean, and can't sleep when she's not near it, and she can't remember why she couldn't sleep until you moved into your new house outside the city. She has parents, and friends, and brothers, who all think she's dead, and who comfort themselves with the memory of the way all she wanted to do her whole life was be a soldier and fight for her country." The Painted Lady sat down in her stream, in the middle of the lava flowing under it, and stared up at him, challenging him
.
"You are never going to make me fight against the Earth Kingdom," he snarled, eyes narrowed into thin, furious slits, gleaming in the Spirit World gloom.
The water poured around his feet, and the molten rock oozed like syrup, filling his bones with its warmth. Steam rolled off the water. It weaved around his body and into his hair, shifting and solidifying into robes, and boots, and a headdress, and in the steaming, boiling water, he could see his face, see the topknot, see the gold fire form in his hair, see the Firelord's robes swinging around him. "If we wanted someone to keep fighting this war, Ozai could keep the throne. We'd let it pass to Azula," she said, her voice hissing like the steam.
"Get it off me!" he screamed, pulling at the collar of the robes, his nails catching in the silk as he tried to rip them off.
"Ooh, skinny dipping, in my river. Sounds like fun." She winked sardonically underneath her hat, her expression dark. "Can I watch?"
"What is wrong with you!" he demanded, leaping out of the water, trying to find some small piece of solid ground.
"Oh, I'm sorry," she snapped. "The last hundred years when it was the peasants who built me shrines, and left me gifts and honored me must have made me forget how to talk like I have a stick up my ass!" She rolled her eyes. "Get used to it. Being Firelord means you're going to have to clean up the mess your family left behind, and that means talking to the people of your country."
"It's not my country! I'm never going to be Firelord! My name's Ao, and agent of the Dai Li, not whoever I used..." He broke off, slowly turning his head from side to side to side.
"Go back to bed, Lu Ten," She sighed. "Go home. Go to sleep."
~*~
"Dispatches from your father, Princess," the twins Li and Lo said together as the messenger hawk, free of its burden let one of the crew members carry it away for a rest and something to eat with the other birds.
Azula snatched the scroll out of the hands of one of the twins and broke the seal hungrily. Her eyes scanned it, absorbing the information, and she bent a ball of blue fire into the palm of her hand. The paper curled and smoked as it dissolved into ash. "Captain! Turn this ship north!"
~*~
The clouds hung low over the bay as the Water Tribe sailors lashed the ship to the docks and unloaded the piles of fur and leathers, carved bone and shell, weapons for collectors, dye made from the blood, bodies, and shells of deep sea creatures, beads and paints, and bottles of water from the healing hot springs onto the docks. Zuko and his uncle slipped off the ship and down the docks into the fog. They avoided the lantern lights, strung over the winding streets like barred gates, and stuck to the shadows between buildings.
As the sun burned away the fog, women began to string out clothing to dry, and the shadows grew smaller. The early spring sun beat down on them, and the parka, made for winters at the poles, grew too hot and too heavy. In the sunlight, the red of his uncle's cloak showed up, and Zuko started to reach for a soaking wet tunic, but Uncle pulled his hand down. "We're in the middle of the Earth Kingdom, Uncle." Zuko reminded him coldly. "We have to hide."
"If you have to steal," he told his nephew. "Never steal from the people who can't afford it."
Under their feet, the streets widened, and the houses gained gardens, walls and gates. Uncle boosted Zuko onto the top of the walls of one of the houses, and Zuko leaned over to pull his uncle up behind him. "You need to lose weight," he muttered, dragging Uncle up the wall.
"Shh."
Zuko glanced through the house's windows and eyed the clothesline behind the house. Zuko felt like a spider-fly on a wall, completely exposed. There was no darkness, no masks, nothing but Zuko, his uncle, and broad daylight, and he closed his eyes with a grimace as he shimmied along the wall to the clothesline.
"See anything that will fit me?" Uncle whispered. Zuko shook his head and grabbed the clothesline. Uncle lay flat on his stomach on the wall as Zuko climbed hand over hand along the rope.
The last thing he heard before the wok hit him in the back of the head was a woman's scream of rage.
~*~
Zuko awoke in a metal lined cell, hands and feet chained behind him, and smelling strangely like fried cabbage-carrots. His head pounded, and he had been stripped of his parka and left with only his ink spotted pants against the damp. Uncle's hand rested on his forehead, and when he opened his eyes, Uncle pulled his eyelids up to examine his pupils. "Think you can sit up?" he asked.
Zuko nodded slowly to keep himself from throwing up as his head spun, and propped himself up against the wall. The floor and walls were slick with moisture and the evening fog was rolling in off the ocean. With his untrained arms, Zuko bent it to himself and held it to his head until the bump on his temple subsided and the pounding ebbed away. "My head," he mumbled.
"That young lady has a very good arm," his uncle agreed ruefully, indicating his own arm in a makeshift sling. "Very fast."
Clumsily, Zuko streamed his gathered water down to the locks on his wrists and ankles. The water filled the locks, and as he wriggled it around inside, the faint click of them popping open reverberated around the metal cell.
Uncle smiled, and held out his arms. "Ow!" he gasped, as his broken elbow extended. The water in Zuko's hands splashed all over the floor. Biting back a curse, Zuko carefully drew the water up off the floor and brought it to his uncle's elbow. As it glowed, they glanced anxiously at the door grille, but no one came. "Good job, nephew."
"Shh!" Zuko hissed. "I've never done this on a person before, I need to concentrate!" It was different than with the mannequin. First with his own head, then with his uncle's arm, there was something pulling with him, something trying to drag the water away from where it had to go.
A key turned in the door. Zuko flung himself away from his uncle as a man in strange dark robes and a tasseled helmet closed the door behind himself. "All morning long, I've been receiving reports about a man in Fire Nation clothes all morning, and here I find you at my own house," the man said conversationally. "You scared my wife very badly today. Of course, my daughter thought it was hilarious."
Uncle's face spread in a wide, genial grin. "My nephew and I are sorry for any-"
"The town as been talking about you." The man's answering smile was much smaller and much more frightening. "Most people think the two of you must be some sort of spirits, because no Fire Nation general would be stupid enough to venture into a town this close to Ba Sing Se in his uniform without an army to back him up. Now." He let his voice drop and he grabbed hold of Uncle's shoulders and pulled him close until their faces almost touch. "You are going to tell me what you you're doing in my town, in my garden."
Uncle looked like the air had been pulled out of his lungs. He gasped and licked his lips to moisten them. His mouth gaped open and he hung in the man's grip like a child's stuffed toy. His chained hands came up to brush the man's face.
"You'll have to excuse my uncle," Zuko began hurriedly. "He's gone senile-"
"Lu Ten?"
Zuko had thought he had been lying about Uncle going senile. "Lu Ten's dead, Uncle."
The man in the dark green robe shoved Uncle back. "My name's Ao. I am a Dai Li agent, and you w-"
Iroh threw his chained arms over the man's head and looped them around him, tears running down his face. "I thought you were dead," he murmured.
"Uncle, he's not-" The force of the impact had thrown the man who called himself Ao's helmet off. Zuko's mouth closed. "You're-" he said when it opened again. "You can't be."
"I don't know what your game is, but you will let go of me, and you will tell me what you are doing here." As the man threw Iroh back, the sunlight struck his eyes, and they shown back, gold. Fire Nation gold
"Why don't you remember?" Iroh pleaded. "Don't you know who I am?"
No spark of recognition in Lu Ten's eyes answered his father, none at all.
~*~
The silence between Zuko and his uncle stretched on and on, and on and on until it snapped and recoiled with the slamming open of the cell door. Lu Ten stepped into the room, his helmet low over his face, hiding his eyes, hiding everything except his mouth and bearded chin. As soon as the door clicked shut behind him, he gloved his hands in flames. "I've been wracking my brain trying to figure out where I've heard the name 'Lu Ten' before," he said without preamble. "And I've finally remembered. That's the name of one of the Fire Nation prince who died in the siege of Ba Sing Se. The son of the Dragon of the West."
The breath caught audibly in Iroh's throat, and his mouth hung open. Zuko did his best to keep his own breath even and his whole body still so the shackles didn't move.
"See, I'm trying to decide if you're a senile old man who somehow managed to convince yourself you're the Dragon of the West, a senile old man from the Fire Nation who had the bad taste to name your son after the prince, or if I am somehow hosting the Dragon of the West himself." The man who was Lu Ten had the strangest look on his face, like he kept putting everything together and coming up with something he didn't like, something he knew about and they didn't.
Zuko watched him, and waited, and barely listened, gathering water droplets together into a puddle, and Iroh gasped and choked like his throat wouldn't open, or like he couldn't breathe air.
"I like the last option," he said, stepping closer. "Would give me a chance to bring in a living leg-"
Zuko sprang, the shackles falling off his wrists and ankles, and he bore Lu Ten down to the floor, knocking his helmet off his head. Lu Ten's fire wreathed fists extinguished when they hit the floor, but he brought them up blazing again. Straddling his cousin's chest, Zuko batted them away and pinned his arms down to the floor, the heat leaving shining burns on his fingers where he touched the man's wrists. Air hissing through his teeth, Zuko brought his forearms down on the man's arms and tucked his elbows in, pulling his tiny pool of gathered water to his hands and to Lu Ten's head.
"Zuko!" Iroh seemed to come unstuck, crawling towards them on his still chained arms and legs. "What are you doing? Are you crazy?"
But Zuko didn't hear him. His fingers stung and burned, but he was too busy to deal with them either. He hadn't gotten to the brain with Yue yet. He had no idea what he was needed to find, or what he was expecting to see. Maybe, somehow, he had been expecting the mind to be different from the rest of a person, that he would see Lu Ten's memories, or the memories of a man who looked like him, but all he felt were tiny, tiny rivers, just like he hand when he had healed his uncle's arm and the bump on his head. But there were so many more of them, so many that he didn't know, and didn't know how they were supposed to flow, or if they were normal or not, and he just had to hold the water there long enough, and hope it was doing what it was supposed to do, what the body already would want it to do if it were really broken, and hope the man who looked so much like his cousin didn't somehow throw him off and kill him while he did.
The man howled, and bucked, but Zuko tucked in his heels and hung on.
Until he quieted, and lay still, and let the fire in his hands die. He lay there, eyes wide and blank, lips moving, but nothing coming out, and Zuko clambered off and staggered back, panting heavily.
The man picked himself up and sat hunched over himself, eyes on the floor, the sound of his breathing harsh in the little metal cell.
"Lu Ten?" Iroh breathed, trying desperately to hide the hope, and bewilderment, and terror swirling around inside him, but it was obvious. It was so obvious, and Zuko felt sick to his stomach with it, like he was being stabbed seeing it, and-
Lu Ten's face crumpled, and he nodded, tears running down his face. Zuko could feel them. He could feel them falling down his cousin's face.
And all Zuko could hear was his uncle saying, "Ever since I lost my son, I think of you as my own."
I think of you as my own.
I think of you as my own.
Ever since I lost my son.
~*~
The cell door opened, and the three men walked out together like they were being summoned to their executions, like the world ended beyond the door. Robe straightened and helmet back in place, Lu Ten led the way up the stairs and out into the sunlit stone lobby. The pudgy, blank faced woman behind the table, didn't look up as they walked past. "How would you like the report to read, Agent Ao?" She asked in that monotonous way the clerks had.
"Ah. Um." Lu Ten swallowed. "Actually, why don't you come with me, and I'll dictate."
"I'm not permitted to leave the facility, Agent Ao."
"That's alright," Lu Ten improvised. "Just come... here. There's someone I want you to meet." He cast Zuko a significant look that his cousin struggled to interpret.
The woman stood up behind the writing table and stepped around it, her movements crisp and efficient, but cold. Gingerly, Lu Ten offered her his hand, and she took it, her own limp within his grasp. In one movement, he threw her at Zuko, and she didn't struggle; she just collapsed against him, and he let her hang in his arms, utterly at a loss. "What-"
"Heal her," Lu Ten insisted, eyes bright. "Like you did me. Fix her, make it-"
Zuko didn't hear the rest. Water wasn't everywhere in the sunny little office the way it had been in the cell, rusting away the metal, leaving streaks of lime and salt behind, like tiny needles of earth. Beads of it welled up between his fingers as he ran them along the wall, and gave up, bending the tepid tea from the cup on the writing table to him instead. It got into her hair and ran off like the ink had off his own. It pooled between his hands and around her head, rolling, cold, and alien, and not fire. She stayed still like his cousin hadn't, and didn't start screaming until the end.
"What is wrong with her?" Zuko demanded, stumbling away from her. "What's wrong with you? What's going on? What's-" There was a sickness in their minds, a profound wrongness that left him weak, and wobbly, and barely able to stand. He clung to the wall for support and longed for his firebending to burn something. There was a cancer in this place. There was something growing, eating, destroying and distorting, and he wanted to go home.
The woman screamed again, face moving and moving and moving, and refusing to settle on an expression, but at least not blank anymore. "Oh spirits!" she shrieked. "Spirits, spirits, spirits, spirits, spiritsspiritsspir-" She caught sight of Lu Ten and cowered back. "Dai Li!"
She slunk backwards along the wall until she reached the door and jerked it open, half falling, half running out into the sunlight, and Lu Ten let her go, his expression just going more and more troubled.
Iroh gave Zuko his shoulder to rest on, and Zuko hung on it, eyes closed. "I think your cousin is right. You need to tell us what's going on."
Lu Ten rounded on them both. "I think you need to tell me what's going on," he retorted shakily. "Because I might still be trying to piece a few things together, but I remember my cousin, and he wasn't a waterbender, so unless you actually have gone senile, I want to know where Zuko is, why this man is with you, and why you're calling him by my cousin's name!"
"You don't know?" Zuko's body went slack with relief. The whole world didn't know yet. At least people weren't laughing at Zuko behind his back about that yet. The world didn't need anything else to laugh at him over.
Unconsciously, Iroh pushed his nephew partway behind himself, protectively. "We had a small run in with the spirits."
"The moon spirit saved my life," Zuko said flatly, still trying to shake off the feel of the minds. "This was her price."
Lu Ten's breathing was still too hard. His eyes were still too wide and too bright, and Zuko was terrified he was going to start crying. He lurched forward, like he was falling, and yanked his father into his arms. Iroh wrapped his arms around his son and let him hang on, and Zuko let himself fall back against the wall, simmering, like a pot of water over a fire.
Zuko couldn't watch, couldn't, didn't, which was why he didn't realize what was about to happen until Lu Ten's arms were pulling him close. He froze.
~*~
"Being stuck on this boat is almost as boring as being stuck in Omashu." Azula glanced at her, eyebrow raised, and Mai rolled her eyes. "New Ozai."
"Well, do you want me to turn the barge around and take you back?" Azula kept a reign on her temper. This was Mai. She was held to a different standard, as all truly great people were, and so she, like Ty Lee, had more license.
Mai shrugged, not taking her eyes off cleaning her knives. "I said almost as boring."
Azula examined the woodgrain underneath her fingernails. The clever engineers from the colonies had managed to outfit a captured Earth Kingdom military barge with a Fire Nation steam engine. No one would ever notice above water, when the engine was off and the smokestacks were hidden away, that this wasn't just one more Earth Kingdom barge. Azula would never understand why Mai didn't love things like this barge that were beautiful, and brilliant, and perfect.
But perfection bored Mai, which Azula didn't like to think about. "Go play with Ty Lee then. Keep her out of trouble."
Mai rolled her eyes again and rose from the bench, methodically packed away the knives spread out on the bench next to her.
"We'll be reaching the northern coast soon." Azula remarked thoughtfully. "You'll get your excitement soon enough."
~*~
The three of them wound their way through the grasses and thickets of trees between the secret Dai Li station and the town. Iroh gossiped and chattered to fill the silence between the cousins, but neither of them could think of anything to say. The late afternoon sun beat down on them, and for the first time in his life, Zuko felt the beginnings of a sunburn building on his back, and underneath his white hair. It wasn't fair. It wasn't fair. It burned, but it didn't warm.
Lu Ten's long braid swung behind him, flicking like an ostrich-horse's tail, but he had changed out of his Dai Li uniform and into a spare set of civilian clothes he kept at the station, and Iroh had unlaced his armor and tucked it on the shelf next to Lu Ten's uniform, the reddish gray tunic underneath almost unsuspicious. His thoughts strayed to that pretty little house on the inland edge of the town, and the mention of a daughter inside. Iroh tried to picture the little girl he had barely glimpsed. A granddaughter. "Aren't you going to tell us what has been happening to you for the past six years?"
Lu Ten flinched and didn't speak, until the lack of words became too oppressive to stand, and then he still didn't speak, because he couldn't.
"Is there something wrong?" his father asked.
Lu Ten stepped back, away from his father. "I kept thinking about what I was going to say to you when you asked, but everything I could say would tell you something about the Dai Li, and Ba Sing Se, and they would be things that you could use, and there are good people there, people who aren't Dai Li. I have friends, and Mudan has friends, and..." He swallowed. "I'm not going to help you burn it down."
Iroh let his hand fall heavily over his heart. He stumbled back and caught himself, moving jerkily towards his son. He caught his arm, and pulled the younger, shorter man to his chest, making Lu Ten's spine bend, hunching over into the embrace. "I lost my taste for conquest a long time ago," he breathed into his son's ear. "I am too old and tired for it now."
Lu Ten slumped against his father's shoulder, unable to articulate what it meant that some part of him was loyal to somewhere other than where he was born, and where he had fought at his father's side to glorify. He had protected Ba Sing Se in the Dai Li's own warped, destructive way for six years. He had to love it to do that. They made him love it so he could do that, but that didn't make the love go away. "You're not the only general in the Fire Nation."
"I will never tell anyone," he murmured, too low for his nephew to hear, "And Zuko doesn't have anyone to tell." The last came out more sorrowful than reassuring, but Zuko couldn't hear that either.
Zuko's eyes traveled over the rocks and valleys, anywhere that wasn't his cousin and his uncle, because every time they landed on the two of them, a flash of something so hungry and cold went though him that he hunched around himself just to keep warm.
With a sigh, Lu Ten broke his father's hold and led the way down the sloping terrain back to town. For a few moments, he just walked, taking in the sun, but then his mouth opened and the strange story of what it meant to have been an agent of the Dai Li for six years came out. At first he tried to speak chronologically, but when he tried to tell how he ended up captured, he glanced at Zuko and couldn't speak. So he tried to talk about mindbending someone, what it meant while it was happening, and what it felt like to have that kind of power. He talked about what it was like looking at them, and knowing he was going to see them again, after it was all over, and he talked about the first person he had mindbent, a Fire Nation soldier, and how he had looked at her wondering if it had really been like that for him, and if he had kicked and cursed and spat the way she had until the stone gag went over her mouth and her face had gone slack, and how it had been when he saw her again, married to his new partner.
He tried to talk about Mudan, and meeting her, and not even knowing if they had met before, before everything, and now he knew they hadn't. She had looked so lost, when he had first seen her, when the other agents had introduced them, and he had felt so relieved, because he had felt that way too.
Sometimes she still looked like that, and sometimes he still felt like that, but he couldn't say that.
He thought about telling the two of them about the Painted Lady, especially telling Zuko, who wore the mark of another spirit, but he couldn't make the words come past his lips.
When the words dried up, the sky was just beginning to turn red, and the quiet felt so good he didn't want to think about why his father and Zuko weren't saying anything.
But the quiet stopped being soothing, and he couldn't stop himself; he opened his mouth again, turning around to meet his father's eyes. "I was really scared when you said my name."
"Really?" Iroh asked. "Why?"
Lu Ten thought about it, his brow wrinkling before speaking. "When you don't know who you were, and you don't remember what you've done, it's easier to pretend you weren't anyone before you were Dai Li. And I kept thinking, Lu Ten died in the siege of Ba Sing Se." He turned to Zuko, and his mouth twisted. "But then I saw you and thought, oh thank the spirits, if he thinks any boy with a scar like that is Zuko, even if they aren't even Fire Nation, he probably can't remember what his son looked like, either."
Zuko put his hand to his face and cupped his scar. "You knew about this?"
"Everybody knows about it," Lu Ten told him, almost cheerful to talk about something other than himself after all of it. "When it happened, people were talking for months about how the Earth Kingdom might actually win the war, if the Firelord's son was stu-" He caught sight of Zuko's glower. "I mean..."
"No really," Zuko advised venomously. "Finish."
"Stupid enough to burn himself." Lu Ten's mouth had gone dry.
Zuko's teeth ground together and he walked stiffly away, down towards town.
Lu Ten moved to go after him, but Iroh grabbed his arm. "But he'll-" Lu Ten started.
"He can find his way without us for a little bit." Iroh shook his head fondly. "You would be amazed at what he can do."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
Iroh bowed his head, the familiar flash of pain at how he would have given anything to have his son back while Ozai had thrown his away still came, even with Lu Ten standing next to him. "He did not give himself that burn, and it was not an accident."
~*~
Zuko's feet sank into the half rotted leaves from the fall just past. He walked sideways along the hillside, until he found a rocky little stream and sat down on a boulder. The moon hung in the sky, and even though he couldn't see it underneath the trees bordering the river, he knew it was there.
He shifted his weight and pulled a thin ribbon of water out of the stream and held it between his hands. It glowed blue for a second, sending moving bands of light over the tree trunks and leaves overhead, and coolness spread through his throbbing fingertips. Swallowing and blinking tears out of his good eye, he streamed the water from hand to hand and over the head in an arch. Everything felt raw, and he couldn't figure out how much of that was the sunburn, and how much of that was inside him.
"Good evening, Zuko."
Zuko spun around just as the water passed over his head again. It poured down over his head and bare shoulders, soaking his pants. "Wh-what are you d-doing here?" His teeth chattered. Fog was rolling in off the sea, and the wind, when it blew, was cold.
She didn't talk. She just chuckled.
"You knew Lu Ten was here," Zuko accused, shaking himself off, shivering harder. "That's why you wanted me to go to Ba Sing Se."
She nodded. "I thought it would make your uncle happy."
"I th-thought th-that's why you s-sent me b-back," he mumbled.
She sat down next to him on the rock. "You don't have to worry. Nothing is going to change. Your uncle loves you."
He threw himself off the boulder, away from her, and fell backwards into the stream. The snowmelt stream water parted around him, and and got into his bones. The cold ached. "He loved me because he didn't have Lu Ten."
"Agni and the Painted Lady asked me to send you to him. There needs to be a new Firelord, and that cannot be you anymore." Yue stood up and offered him her hand.
He sent her a black look from beneath his hair and didn't take her hand.
"What could I have done to make you happy?" she asked rhetorically. "Would you have me consign your cousin to living as he had, hating who he once had been because that man had been the enemy, not even able to remember his own name?"
A shudder swept over him, whether from cold or revulsion, he didn't know. "N-no."
"And would you like me to have left your uncle mourning a son who was still alive?"
"No, okay?"
"Are you happy to see him alive?" she asked quietly. "You loved him once."
He nodded. Tears started rolling out of his good eye. Yue gazed down at him and thought about the perfectly good heir Ozai had tossed aside, and her own tribe in desperate need of a good heir.
And how tempting it would be to snatch him up, dust him off and carry him back to her father like a cat with a frog-mouse to show to her human.
"Now," she murmured, holding her hand closer to him. "Are you still angry with me? I promised you I would teach you waterbending as soon as you were on dry land."
Zuko put his hand in hers and let her pull him to his feet.
Under her tutelage, the stream water danced and swirled under his control. It lapped at the banks like the ocean and ran uphill, and all he had to do was keep moving. He hated the way it felt. He hated the way it came so naturally, so quickly to him, the way Firebending never had.
Chapter Three: Fire
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Sadly, after that, I won't be releacing any more chapters until the next big bang is over...