Ice Flows Though: Chapter Three - Fire
Nov. 26th, 2010 10:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
attackfishSummary: 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 Three: Fire
His uncle and cousin were waiting for him at the edge of town when he wove through the brush, back to them. He did his best not to bristle as Lu Ten tousled his hair. The grassland fell away at the border, and transformed into broad, tree lined boulevards that wound around and into each other, like wider, prettier versions of the alleyways next to the docks.
Lu Ten let his hand rest on the surface of the ornamented wooden gate that led into his garden. “I don’t know who she’s going to be when you’re done,” he confessed, meeting his cousin’s eyes. The Mudan he knew was going to die.
He pushed the gate open and stepped though, and then waited as his father and Zuko stepped across the threshold before closing it politely behind them, smiling strangely at the lights in the house windows.
“Let’s get this over with,” Zuko muttered, staring at his boots as Lu Ten opened the house door and ushered them inside.
As they stepped into the light, the woman whose real name was Rinzee dropped the porcelain cups she had been holding to the floor. They shattered on the wood into a thousand tiny splinters. “You brought them back here? The guards let them go?”
Ruili wobbled her way across the floor to her father and smiled utterly unconcerned up at him. Picking her up, he gazed at his wife, steadily. “It’s alright, Mudan, please.”
“It’s a very, uh.” Iroh gazed around the room, and his eyes rested on his son, holding his granddaughter, trying to draw the sight in and hold it. “Nice place you have here.”
“You would know,” the woman who was Rinzee snapped. “Having just tried to rob it. You probably scouted out our house already. Ao!”
“It’s fine, I swear, just-” He turned to his cousin. “Zuko, can you just- We talked about this, please!”
Zuko shifted his weight back the way Yue had taught him and the water lifted out of the jar on the hearth and flowed to him. He spun it around itself, between his hands, to keep it moving as he walked forward.
“What are you doing?” she yelped, falling back against the wall and raising her hands. She probably didn’t even know what raising her hands that way was for.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he rasped, trying to sooth her.
Her eyes were huge in her head, pupils so wide the gold irises were almost invisible between their black, and the whites of her eyes. The fire flew from her hand, and Zuko caught it automatically on his arm to break it, but he wasn’t a firebender anymore. That didn’t work. He howled as the flesh bubbled, and the water between his hands splashed to the floor.
Ruili screamed, hiding her face in her father’s chest as her mother sucked in a breath and started to scream too.
Collapsing to the floor, Zuko curled his arm against his chest, high pitched moans leaving his throat with every breath.
“Do you have a well?” Iroh had to shout above the noise.
“And a koi pond, out back,” he gasped, pressing his daughter tight against him with one arm and looping the other around his cousin’s chest. As Iroh followed suit, he tucked Zuko’s burned arm up, trying to get Zuko’s limp fingers to latch onto his own shoulder, to keep the arm from flopping around.
“I didn’t...” The woman who didn’t know she was a firebender slumped against the wall. “I can’t...”
Lu Ten turned his head to look at her. “Just come with us, Mudan, please, this is important, please!”
They carried Zuko between them, out to the garden behind the house and did their best to set him down gently on the stone pathway and the rushes next to the koi pond. Eyes closed, face twisted, Zuko let his arm fall into the green, slimy water, and let the water glow and hum in that strange way it did, until his arm stopped hurting, but his body didn’t feel like his own. He pulled his arm out of the water, shivering and shaking, trying to pull himself together.
The woman who wasn’t Mudan hadn’t followed and Lu Ten stepped back into the house to get her. Zuko’s arm was coated in a film of sludge up to his elbow, and he scraped it off with his other hand with distaste. There was nothing under the muck, not even a scar, just new, pink, unburned skin.
His uncle brought him a bucket of water from the well, and he poured it over his arm, scrubbing until the green slime ran off his arm, down between the stones.
Lu Ten led his wife out into the garden, to sit on the stone path next to the koi pond, the unnatural, trusting, pliant way the mindbent Dai Li wives had with their husbands making her let him. “Are you sure it’s okay?” she asked, trembling.
Zuko took the bucket of water down to the well and filled it up. His arms shook with fatigue. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he told her croakily, putting the bucket down beside her and raising the water into his hands.
The woman who didn’t even know her own real name put her hand over her her husband’s hand, resting on her shoulder, until the water lit up like candle flame, and she started to fight. Lu Ten held her down as she thrashed, and Zuko kept the water to her head. Zuko’s stomach filled with boiling acid. The water felt sticky and didn’t want to move, but he could feel the ripples in it, that said that his fingers were shaking, twitching with small, faint movements, the kind that said he was still alive.
The water fell to the ground, soaking her, and Zuko staggered back, heaving and gagging. “I can’t,” he coughed.
Drool ran down her face, and her expression was empty. When Lu Ten touched her face, she didn’t react. “You have to,” he pleaded. “You can’t leave her like this.”
Zuko clutched his stomach and his head. “I can’t!” He couldn’t touch that again. He could barely stand.
“Please!” He grabbed onto Zuko’s arm and dragged his cousin back, stumbling to her, taking advantage of his cousin’s exhaustion to do it without any real fight. “Just bring her back, just...”
Zuko couldn’t pick himself off the ground to walk away again as Lu Ten filled the bucket with water again and brought it to him. The water ran through Zuko’s fingers as he tried to lift it out again. He finally gave up and trickled the water down onto her temple. When the water began to glow, it stopped falling. Zuko breathed hard though his nose, fighting off the horror and nausea, until she started to blink. The breath caught in her throat. “What’s-” she gasped. “What’s-”
“Mudan?” Lu Ten asked anxiously.
She launched herself to her feet, wiping the drool off her face and running backwards, back to the house. “No!”
Lu Ten heaved air into his lungs. “Rinzee?”
She stopped in the doorway, the firelight and the candles inside glinting off the lacquer and wire inlays of her Earth Kingdom headdress, and off the silk of her Earth Kingdom clothes. “Who are you?” she demanded. “All of you. Ao? How did you know, how did you know?”
Lu Ten went to her, and tried to hold her, but she shoved him away. “Rinzee.”
“No!” she shouted, shaking her head compulsively. “Don’t... touch me! I’m never going back there.”
“I’m never going to let anyone make you,” he assured her, reaching up to put his hands on her arms, but when she flinched back, he let them fall awkwardly to his sides. “You’re safe here. No one’s going to mindbend you. I’m not going to tell anybody who you are.”
She sank back against the doorway. “I don’t even know why I’m married to you.”
“The Dai Li mindbent everybody they captured.” Lu Ten heaved a shuddering sigh. “The men who were strong firebenders, good fighters, they made Dai Li. They-” he swallowed. “We married the firebending women so that the children would be benders, and the sons would grow up and become Dai Li.”
She smacked him across the face. “You did this to me?” she shouted. “You- And then you married me?” Fire blossomed in her hands.
“No!” He raised his hands to block any blow she might try to land. “They mindbent you before they mindbent me, and I was so scared, that I just went along with it when they introduced us.” He shuddered again.
“I don’t know your name,” she whispered.
He closed her eyes, like he was just waiting for her to set him on fire. “Lu Ten.”
Her brow furrowed. “Like the prince? Are you kidding me?”
He glanced back at his father, and at Zuko, lying against the ground, unmoving. “Yeah, like the prince. I was borrowing a private’s uniform, because when I wore mine, the wall defenders would aim for me, so they didn’t know who I was.”
She slapped him again, sobbing. “Don’t lie to me!”
“I’m not lying! Why would I lie?”
“And who are they?” She jabbed her finger at Zuko and Iroh. “The Earth King? A lost Air Nomad? No, really I want to know.”
“My father and cousin.”
She laughed hysterically.
“Come on, just come inside.” He glanced over the wall at their neighbors, and the possibility of open windows. I’ll tell you everything.”
“I’m not leaving my daughter with those men!” she retorted. “Whoever they are!”
Lu Ten looked back at his father, who had Ruili on his lap, where she was playing with his sideburns. “Please, Rinzee, I know what it’s like. They did it to me too.”
“No!” she yelled, sprinting back into the garden, to her daughter. “You don’t. You had your firebending, didn’t you? And I bet you knew all about having been someone else, being part of the Dai Li, didn’t you. Well I didn’t.” She snatched Ruili out of Iroh’s lap, still turned to her husband. “I couldn’t figure out what hurt so bad all the time, or why I didn’t have a past like everybody else, or a family. I wasn’t stupid, I knew something was missing, I knew it, and I couldn’t say anything!”
“I’m sorry.” Lu Ten mumbled.
“And I didn’t even get to have my firebending! Don’t tell me you know what it’s like!”
She looked down. Zuko had his hand around her ankle, and he used it to haul himself up painstakingly, so that he was sitting on the path instead of lying across it. “I know what that’s like,” he muttered. “I lost my firebending, because the moon spirit screwed up.”
“Are you really his cousin?” she asked, voice high and afraid.
He nodded. “Zuko.”
“And is he really...”
He nodded again.
“H-how did you find us?”
“We didn’t,” he muttered. “We were stealing clothes.”
She laughed.
~*~
Rinzee slept curled up around their daughter on the futon as Lu Ten wrapped the spare blanket around himself. The wooden floor was hard, and he envied his father and cousin with the better, thicker blankets, and borrowed clothes. The soft, steady sounds of everyone breathing around him in their sleep filled the house, but he couldn’t sleep.
Fog rolled in off the the ocean, and billowed through the open windows. The Painted Lady rolled in with it and floated down to stand in front of him. “It’s good to see you when you’re awake.” She smiled, her mouth the only thing visible under her hat. “In your own world.”
“I thought you weren’t going to come again,” he told her, almost reproving.
She smirked. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because I remember who I am now.” He stood up, and crossed his arms across his chest. “You got what you wanted.”
“I don’t have what I want until the world is in balance again, and you sit on the dragon throne.” She tipped her had back and shook her head. “Shame. You’ll be a good Firelord. Zuko would have been a great one.”
“Zuko said the moon spirit messed up when she made him a waterbender,” he said. The Painted Lady inclined her head, and a bright, clean rush of rage burned through him. “And if she hadn’t? Would you have just left M- Rinzee and me like that, like you’ve left thousands of people, for hundreds of years?”
She snorted, and put a finger to her lips and pointed around at his family. “You don’t want to wake them.”
“Answer my question,” he growled, deep in his throat.
She exhaled heavily, and vanished.
“Coward,” he sneered softly.
~*~
The next day, Zuko slept late, until the moon rose in the afternoon. He kicked away the blanket and pulled the clothes he had borrowed from his cousin straight on his body. After the Water Tribe furs, the Earth Kingdom clothes were almost familiar, almost like Fire Nation clothes. They rasped against his skin as if they were full of sand. He stepped out from the screened off alcove. “Why didn’t anybody wake me up?”
Iroh poured a cup of tea from the pot and pressed it into Zuko’s hand. “I figured you needed the rest.”
“Thank you,” he replied, resentful, and uncertain of what exactly he was resenting.
“Lu Ten is still at work,” his uncle tried.
“Yeah,” Zuko snapped, trying to keep the anger out of his voice. “Lu Ten.”
“What is wrong, nephew?” Iroh, put a hand on Zuko’s shoulder and looked up at the face hiding under the conical straw hat. “I thought you loved your cousin.”
Zuko shrugged his uncle’s hand off, a nest of eel-snakes gnawing away at his insides. “Yeah.”
“Aren’t you happy?” He examined his nephew’s shadowed expression, for once, utterly at a loss. “He is alive. We thought he was dead. You should be rejoicing.”
“Yeah,” Zuko choked out. “Sure.”
When he fled into the garden, his uncle didn’t follow. And that was the problem, wasn’t it?
~*~
“So you’re the Dragon of the West.” Rinzee came up to stand next to her father-in-law. Her silence for most of the day made her words hang in the air and demand his notice, even though he had heard the same sequence of words so many times they ran together into one.
He nodded, taking her hands. “Believe me when I say I’m very glad to meet you.”
“Here I am surrounded by royalty. Even Ruili-” She shook her head. “My parents are fisherfolk. My brothers probably are too, by now, if they haven’t enlisted.”
“It doesn’t matter to me who your parents are. Besides.” He winked at her. “You have given me a lovely granddaughter.” They watched Ruili make her way outside and curl up in Zuko’s lap. She took the hat off his head, revealing his expression of complete bafflement, and shoved it down onto her own. She pushed it onto her face and wore it like a mask, and her father’s cousin quickly snatched it out of her hands.
“Ten years...” Rinzee fought back tears. “I’m married. I have a daughter, and I didn’t get a say in any of it.”
Iroh was silent for a long moment. “No one would think any less of you if you were to run.”
“Is that what you want me to do?” she asked sharply.
“No, but you are right. You deserve a choice in the way your life will go. And should he find out about the three of you, my brother would happily see to it that Lu Ten is once again safely dead, along with my granddaughter. It would be a great comfort to know you had taken her far away, where he couldn’t find her.”
“He’s supposed to be my lord. I fought in the Fire Nation army!” She took one of her hands out of his and rubbed it against her face. “This isn’t the way things are supposed to go.”
“No,” Iroh agreed. “It isn’t.”
Rinzee didn’t talk for a long time. Together, they watched Ruili steal Zuko’s hat again, and press it to his face. “I need to talk to your nephew about leaving the back door latched. Ruili could fall down the well, or drown in the koi pond, or something.”
“I’ll talk to him tonight, if you want me to,” Iroh assured her with a soft smile.
Outside, Zuko tried to pry it away from her, but her tiny hands were stronger than they looked, and when she finally lost her grip, he fell back against the ground in surprise. Shrieking with laughter, she climbed onto his chest and grabbed the hat back.
“We should rescue him,” Rinzee said.
“Yes, we should.” Neither of them made any such attempt. Ruili sauntered over to the edge of the pond, set the hat upside down in the water, and watched it float away. With a sharp, frustrated cry, Zuko plucked his hat out of the pond, and gazed in despair at the coating of filth on top. Iroh and Rinzee glanced at each other, and then looked down.
~*~
“Are you drunk?” Azula demanded as Ty Lee swayed back up the gangway, wearing the tightest Earth Kingdom robe any of them had ever seen. It was part of Ty Lee’s own special genius that she was always able to find that kind of thing.
“The guardsman’s son kept pouring me drinks,” she slurred slightly. “I thought this was what you wanted.”
“Guardsman’s son?” Mai asked.
“Well, his dad was ancient.” Ty Lee sat down more heavily than she meant to on a coil of rope.
Mai raised an incredulous eyebrow. “They just have the one?”
“Did you find anything out?” Azula cut in impatiently, looming over Ty Lee.
Ty Lee gazed up at her, unconcerned. “He said the Water Tribe ships don’t usually come here, because it’s so small. Mostly they go to Tianshui, a couple of days southeast of here.”
Azula waved her away.
“If you wake up tomorrow hung over, I am not cleaning up your vomit,” Mai called as Ty Lee slipped away.
~*~
Three evenings later, Iroh left the circle of his son and his son’s family and stepped outside to sit on the back step and watch his nephew. The water passed between Zuko’s hands, the scales of the koi fish inside gleaming in the lantern light like the sparks that danced around Ruili’s fingers when she was bored. He shifted his weight and pulled the water along with it, letting the fish slip gently back into the pond. The ball of water raised back off the water and froze. The ball melted and split in two, only to refreeze. He divided the balls again and again, until each ball was the size of a thumbprint, and then the balls elongated into minuscule, green, needle-like shards. They flew for Iroh’s head, but fell to the ground just before they could hit. “What are you doing out here?” Zuko asked sulkily.
Iroh took a sip from his teacup. “Watching you.”
The ice shards flew back to the air and landed in the pond, melting. “Yeah, well don’t.”
“I don’t understand.” Iroh gazed up wearily. “You barely talk to any of us for days, to me, and now you don’t even let me spend time with you?”
“It’s nothing, Uncle. Go back inside.”
Iroh didn’t leave. “Come in with me.”
Zuko flinched. “No.” He couldn’t. He couldn’t go in there and watch his uncle with his cousin and have his face rubbed in the fact that he had nothing again. “I mean... I think I’ll stay out here for a while.”
Iroh resettled himself back on the step. “Then I will watch.”
Zuko raised water out of the pond again, but it sloshed back down before he could get it between his hands. He let his hand fall to his sides in defeat, fists balling, his concentration shot to pieces with his uncle’s presence. He stood there, feeling like an idiot, in the darkness, not looking at his uncle. The wind whistled through the silence, making it bigger and louder. “Are you just going to stay here?” Zuko bust out at last, cutting it wide open.
“Yes.” Iroh smiled, and patted the step beside him.
“And me?” Zuko hissed, the desperation in his voice so thick it almost choked away his words.
“Where do you want to go?” Iroh asked.
“Anywhere.” Zuko shrugged jerkily. “Somewhere, I don’t know, just... It doesn’t matter.” He paced back and fourth, eyes darting around, as if they could see through the darkness to whatever was driving him.
But he couldn’t see it, because it wasn’t out there. For three years, Zuko had not rested. For three years, he had chased something, and somewhere along the way, without Iroh noticing, it had stopped being about the chase and started being about the running. And even once the quarry was out of his reach, he couldn’t stop, and now that he was no longer the hunter, he was the hunted.
“Then stay here,” Iroh urged, “Train. Rest.”
Zuko flinched, and stared around, trapped. “I’m not going to waterbend for you just because you’re too curious about all the other elements to stay inside with your son.” He opened his mouth like he was about to say more, but nothing more came out of his mouth except the soft sibilance of his breath around his clenched teeth.
Iroh blinked. “Zuko,” he murmured, reaching out to his nephew.
“No!” Zuko thrust out his hands to push him back, but his uncle sat back down, startled, before Zuko could touch him. “I can’t, I can’t-”
A dozen little things clicked together in Iroh’s head. Gathering his determination, Iroh climbed back to his feet again and pulled his nephew close against his chest. Zuko squirmed half-heartedly, but Iroh didn’t let him go. “Are you jealous, nephew?” Iroh asked softly.
“No!” Zuko denied, terrified, trying to pull away. “You- No!”
Iroh refused to let go, keeping his nephew pinned against his chest. “Afraid?” One handed, he ran his fingers through Zuko’s hair soothingly, as if his nephew was a little boy again. “Worried I wouldn’t love you now that I have my son back?”
Before he realized it, Zuko was nodding, tears running down out of his good eye, soaking the front of his uncle’s robe. A sick sort of humiliation left his cheeks hot and flushed at needing his uncle this way. He should’t be crying. It was just going to make everything worse when his uncle could see- He shouldn’t need anyone. He was supposed to be...
He wasn’t supposed to be this weak.
Iroh sank back down onto the step, guiding Zuko down with him. “It doesn’t work like that,” he said gently. “Finding Lu Ten again just means I have two sons.”
“Not your son,” Zuko muttered, voice muffled against his uncle’s chest.
“I am never going to stop loving you, or thinking of you as my son.” Iroh patted his nephew’s head. “Didn’t I tell you, you don’t get rid of me that easily?”
As Zuko lay slumped against his uncle’s side, he tried to stop crying. He should stop crying. But he wasn’t sure he believed his uncle anyway.
~*~
A hand brushed across Lu Ten’s shoulder, and he jerked awake. “You!” he snapped lowly at the Painted Lady, kneeling just above the floor next to him.
“I thought you’d want to know your cousin’s in town.”
“I know. He’s sleeping right over there!” He pointed his finger at the wood and paper screen between himself and his father and cousin. “You know this; he gave me back my memories!”
The Painted Lady shook her head and smirked. “Not him. Azula.”
“Here?” Lu Ten sucked in a breath. “What? Why?”
Cocking her head, she stood up and tipped up her hat. “Your father’s been declared a traitor, and your uncle wants Zuko dragged home in chains. Azula’s only too happy to do it for him.”
“But how did she find us? Now?” He searched her face, and a dark thought flashed across his mind. “Did you-”
“There aren’t any spirits whispering in her ear, if that’s what you’re insinuating,” she grumbled.
“You want me to leave this place, you want me to become Firelord, you brought her to me, didn’t you?” He glanced around at his sleeping family, voice rumbling low in his throat.
“I already told you I didn’t.” Her eyes narrowed reprovingly at him. “Now, go wake up your family.”
She vanished, and the darkness of her passing made spots dance across his open eyes. His heartbeat pounded in his ears, and he swallowed, struggling to stop his hands from shaking, but they wouldn’t. Everything was happening so fast.
He gave up and shook Rinzee awake.
~*~
Azula kicked down the door, but no panicked chaos erupted within. The house was empty.
“Are you sure this is the right house?” Mai asked, peering around her.
Ty Lee tilted her head as she slipped inside and turned back to her friends, and the disguised soldiers behind them. “This is where they s-”
Azula’s eyes took in the mess and the ransacked chests and wardrobes. Her lips curved up. “Positive.”
~*~
The predawn shadows lingered over the town and the docks as Zuko gazed over them, as if he really thought he would be able to see Azula coming towards them.
He hadn’t seen her in three years. He wondered how much she had changed.
Their feet kicked up dust on the trail, and Ruili whimpered in confusion. Rinzee passed her to Iroh and hitched her pack higher up on her shoulders without looking at any of them. “I don’t get it,” she said. “You said she’s only fourteen. She can’t be that scary.”
Zuko and his uncle shared a significant glance, remembering what she had been like at eleven.
Lu Ten turned his eyes to his boots. “She’s probably got an army with her.”
An army, and supplies, and dispatches, and intellegence reports, and all of the things Zuko didn’t have when-
Rinzee dragged in a shuddering breath and started walking a little faster.
~*~
The night took a long time to fall. The fog rolled in off the sea and caught up with them, and they stopped in a valley, next to a dry riverbed. Lu Ten kicked the dust and stones at the riverbed bottom. “Damn it, it’s supposed to be full this time of year!”
Ruili whined as she swallowed the last mouthful of water and her grandfather pulled the empty waterskin away. Zuko tasted salt on his lips in the fog and growled. It just made him thirstier. “There’s a stream south of here.”
Rinzee spread a blanket over the ground. “We’ll find it tomorrow morning,” she said waspishly.
“I will take first watch,” Iroh yawned, tucking himself between the roots of a tree.
~*~
“Wake up, Zuko.” Yue’s voice floated down through the trees, and her long hair brushed across his face. “Wake up.”
Zuko opened his eyes. They watered at the brightness that was Yue and refused to focus on the darkness around them both. “What-”
“Your sister is almost here.” She pointed at the cloud of dust coming inexorably closer along the path.
Zuko glanced over at his uncle, dozing against the tree trunk, and snarled, throwing the blanket off himself as Yue’s body broke up into little flecks of moonlight. He grabbed his uncle’s shoulder and shook him hard. “What are you doing?”
Iroh woke with a start and blinked up at his nephew. “What time is it?”
Zuko stared up at the moon, high in the sky and almost full. “Almost midnight!” he snapped.
“Well I might as well go back to sleep and let you take the next watch,” Iroh said slowly, closing his eyes again.
Zuko shook his shoulder again and pointed at the dust cloud almost upon them. “No, because now we have to wake up everyone.”
Iroh’s sleep clouded eyes cleared and sharpened. He put a hand on his son’s shoulder and squeezed.
As Zuko leaned over Rinzee and prodded her arm, he tried not to watch his uncle and his cousin. He stared out over the empty grassland beyond the trees overhanging the dry river, feeling sick to his stomach. There was nowhere to go out there, nowhere to hide.
Rinzee yelped and batted his hand away, but Zuko snatched her arm off the blanket and pulled her to her feet. “Come on,” he ordered, forcing himself not to whisper. “Azula.”
At her mother’s cry and the sudden absense of both her parents on the blanket with her, Ruili woke up and started wailing. Azula’s army was close enough that the sound of their feet rumbled all around them. Rinzee lifted her daughter off the blanket and pressed her to her chest. She glanced down at the dry riverbed and then at Zuko. “You!” she said, making a discission and holding Ruili out to him. “Take her.”
Zuko’s eyes followed hers to the empty river, and slid over to the empty waterskins, and he snatched the girl out of her mother’s arms, shaking with fury at himself. He had no water. He didn’t have anything to bend. Firebenders didn’t... didn’t have to keep track of things like that. It was so stupid that all his sister had to do was corner him somewhere dry, and he was... He pulled the knife his uncle had given him out of his boot and held Ruili one handed against his hip. Squirming, she shouted into the fog, her tiny baby voice crying out the only two words she knew. “Nonono, mama!”
Zuko held her tighter as her mother turned back to them both. She saw his knife and bared her teeth. “Don’t you dare! You, you keep her out-”
From where he was climbing up the side of the ravine, in which they had been sleeping, to the road, Iroh turned around to face his nephew. “Hide,” he insisted.
Helpless humiliation rolled over Zuko as his uncle, cousin, and cousin-in-law climbed over the lip of the ravine. There was no water, just a tiny knife, and instead of being an asset, a warrior, he was a useless non-combatant like Ruili.
She kept crying. He shoved his knife back into his boot and covered her mouth to muffle the noise. Under the bright full moon, the blanket on which they had slept stood out on the pale, brownish grass and dust like a smudge of ink on an otherwise clean sheet of paper. Zuko yanked it off the ground, bundling it around Ruili while she sent him foul looks and sniffled into the blanket she suddenly found wrapped around herself.
Fireballs whizzed over his head, fizzling in the fog. They kept drawing Zuko’s eyes across the sky. Ruili’s hands filled with sparks to match them in small, but her hands were bunched up in the blanket. The cloth caught fire, and Ruili screamed. Zuko cried out in surprise and threw the blanket down to stomp the flames away. Smoke curled in the air, rising off the charred blanket as Zuko scooped it back up into his arms and Ruili’s fists beat against his chest. Her knuckles and the backs of her hands were covered in angry red burns and she howled with rage and pain.
A harsh, hot jet of blue fire split the air, speeding down towards them. Zuko yelled in shock and jumped aside, the flames close enough for him to feel their heat in his scarred skin as they passed. They crashed into the ground, and swept down in a line, igniting the grass, crackling and popping and lighting up the darkness around them.
Ruili screamed louder. In desperation, Zuko’s fingers found a corner of the blanket and stuffed it into her mouth. As she tried to push it out with her lips and tongue, she let out little muffled screams Zuko could barely hear above the noise of the battle and the sound of his own ragged breathing as he ran. He sprinted, the stones of the riverbed jarring through the too-supple soles of his boots, and peered through the fog and darkness at the fires ripping through the sky above.
He couldn’t see the people, only the flash of fire, and the only fire that looked different from everyone else’s was Azula’s. She was the only person he knew was still standing.
He launched himself at the closest tall tree, and he pulled himself one handed up onto the lowest branch. Slowly, he dragged himself upward, the bark digging into his palms and catching on the cloth wrapped around his baby cousin. She shot him a dark glower over her blanket gag as he wedged her between a branch above the fighting and the trunk before he swung himself up next to her. There were tears running down her face, which was flushed with defenseless misery. Zuko glared right back at her, slipping her hands out of the fabric trapping them. Immediately she started pounding his arm again, and he pinned her arms down against her sides.
He ground his teeth together. He stared through the leaves and the roiling mist, and he still couldn’t see anything.
“Pffftht!” He heard the sound of the spit-sodden corner of the blanket pop out of her mouth right before the air rushed into her lungs. “Nnnnoaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh!”
Zuko slammed his hand down over her mouth, but it was too late. Azula’s hand filled with fire, and through the shadows and fog, he saw it light up her face. She turned to the sound of Ruili’s voice and her lips curled up in a vicious, triumphant smirk. The fire blazed towards him, and his arm throbbed a warning where it had been burned, and he ducked instead of trying to block.
It hit the tree trunk where his head had been. The leaves in its wake exploded into flame, catching the leaves beside them, until the whole tree around him roared with the noise of the fire.
Zuko did the only thing he could do. He tucked Ruili up against his chest and jumped. The blanket unfurled as they fell, and the fog rushed past his face. He could feel it.
He could feel it.
He was an idiot. He knew he was an idiot. This sort of thing shouldn’t keep surprising him.
It felt like the ground and his sister were leaping up to meet him.
He whipped his arms around and sucked the fog out of the air and pressed his forearms to his chest, around Ruili, to cushion her.
His legs hit Azula hard in the back as she tried to dodge, knocking her to the ground. Ruili gulped in shock as she crash landed on the blanket covered armor over the shoulders of her other cousin, Zuko’s arms keeping her safe from the impact.
“What the-?” Azula shoved the blanket down, only to see her brother, pinning Ruili to his chest, a globe of cloud-water shifting between his hands. The water froze into icicle daggers, and Zuko grasped onto them. Azula balled her hand into a fist and fire blazed around it. She rammed it through the air at him, but he leaned to the side. “Who’s the child, Zuko?” she asked, hooking her arm to punch fire at his head.
The icicles melted and refroze into a flat pane of ice.
“Zuko?” A voice came out of the fog and floated through the fog. A woman with knives in both hands, turned away from the battle for just a second as she spoke, and the ice shattered. Azula wrenched her knee up from under him and flipped him over, slamming him down into the dust.
There was a hole in the fog, above and around them, from where Zuko had pulled the water out of the air, and the full moon shown through. He had the full moon, water all around him, surprise, every advantage as he could ask for and he still ended up on his back in the dirt.
“Mamamamamama!” Ruili twisted away from them. Azula’s gaze followed her, amused before she turned back to her brother, but Zuko used the time to wriggle his arm free. He elbowed her hard beneath her ribs and knocked her away from him, gagging and gasping. Staggering to his feet, he stumbled backwards, and tried to catch his feet.
“Ruili!” Rinzee yelled, dashing to her and scooping her up. She shoved her little, burned hands at her mother and bawled into her shoulder. Rinzee shot Zuko a filthy look as she pressed her daughter to her chest and sent a fist full of flame into the face of an oncoming soldier.
As he tried and failed to find his feet, Zuko whirled his arms again, drawing in more fog. In the sudden clarity, Zuko could see the woman with the knives who had spoken before. “Mai?” he whispered, without realizing he had spoken.
He caught himself from falling and stood steady. He flung the water through the air like knives at the soldiers closing in on his cousin-in-law. He breathed in, a little of the panic and self-loathing subsiding as he watched his sister gulp down mouthfuls of air and force her breathing back under control. Then a shadow fell over the ground behind him, and a few sharp jabs brought the water splashing down at his feet and left his body numb and falling into the arms of Azula’s soldiers, and it came rushing back. “Ty Lee?”
She cocked her head as she stepped around him, pulling her lips into her mouth with her teeth, voice very quiet. “Sorry.”
Zuko roared in frustration, and threw his head, the only part of his body he could still move, back into the face of the soldier behind him. She yelled in shock and he could feel her nose crunch, and the blood start running down. His hat fell off his head to hang around his neck, his hair colorless, like an old man’s, like the fog creeping back in around them, under the moonlight. The blood from the soldier’s nose gushed into Zuko’s hair and down onto his face.
Everybody stopped moving. Fires died all around them, leaching the color out of the world.
Mai kept staring at him. He could feel it.
Azula walked to him with measured, ominous slowness and drew in a single, steady breath. “Hello, Zu-zu.”
She raised her hand full of bright blue flame and held it close to Zuko’s scarred cheek. The air pressed in on his ribs. He couldn’t draw in a breath. It hurt so much to breathe.
“I’m going to take you home, Zu-zu,” she told him. “Isn’t that what you wanted?” He still didn’t answer. He couldn’t. The silence hung in the air, and the stares of everyone around them weighed him down. Azula’s lips pulled back, showing her teeth gritted and frustration. Her flame came even closer to his face. “I wonder if Father’s just going to kill you, or if he’s going to lock you away with the other waterbenders. There are still some of them down there, you know.”
Zuko shuddered convulsively and the air rushed into him like a lungful of daggers. His own blood pounded in his ears. He tried to push it all away. His fingers tingled and his arms hung heavily in the soldiers’s grasp. The blood didn’t rush around in them. He couldn’t feel it. The sweat beaded on his forehead as he pictured the blood pouring into his limbs. He could almost feel the blood moving, almost imagine he was slowly bending it down into his fingertips. He exhaled, and the daggers he had breathed in floated out on the air.
Ice crystals. They glittered in the moonlight like bits of broken glass before falling to the dust, and the fog fluttered and dispersed in the wake of his breath, leaving the air around them clear again. The fire in Azula’s hand flared, sharp with her anger. Ice rimmed her hair and gathered on her clothes, where he had breathed. She thrust her hand closer to his face and bent low to mutter in his ear, stroking his scar with the back of her hand. The fire was so close, the heat so intense, his skin reddened under it. “I wonder if he will finish what he started with this,” she murmured, tapping his scar with her knuckles. “and blind you with fire, cook your eyes in your head like he should have done back then. I wonder if they will still be blue after that.” Zuko flinched away, and Azula’s lips curved. “Not that there’s any point. It’s not like you could escape to humiliate the family again. You couldn’t even capture one little boy.”
Zuko’s head snapped up, around her hand, out of the way of the fire, and his eyes narrowed with cold, indignant rage. “I’d love to see you-” he bit off. “I’d love to see you try to capture him.”
She pulled her fist back, and Zuko closed his eyes. “No!” Iroh shouted, the stillness of the standoff broken.
But the fist never landed. Bellowing, Lu Ten, the only person close enough to reach them, threw himself through the air and caught Azula’s arm, dragging her down with him as he fell. Azula rolled and bounced back to her feet, but Lu Ten kept hold of her arm. She pulled in close to him to break away, and, for the first time, caught clear sight of his face. “You!” The whites around her eyes grew so large that her yellow irises seemed to shrink in on themselves. “You’re dead.”
Zuko watched his cousin nod as she tore her arm out of his grasp. He felt the blood sink deep into his limbs and as all eyes were on Lu Ten and Azula, he wrenched himself to his feet and broke the holds of the soldiers on his arms. He twisted away from them. He could feel their blood, rushing around their bodies. He could feel it thrumming through him. He remembered the sensation of Yue squeezing his hand when he had asked her and the way he had shuddered with revulsion at the very idea that such a thing was possible, but he raised that hand in front of him and made himself feel the push of all that blood.
And pulled.
The moonlight ripped though his veins, sapping away his strength for the power to bowl back the knot of soldiers who had held him captive and knock them to the ground like rice shafts under a sickle.
With a faint cry of shock, Ty Lee leapt forward and jabbed her fingers hard into the pressure points of Zuko’s legs, dropping him to the ground. But before she could get her fingers into his arms and cut off his bending again, he grabbed the blood in her hand and pushed. She danced away to the soldiers he had felled, stumbling around and around in tight circles as he pulled her hand high over her head and drove her back.
Zuko lay against the ground, struggling to hold his head up, weak from bending against the strengths and the wills of Ty Lee and his sister’s soldiers. Eyes squinted and teeth gritted to keep his eyes from snapping the rest of the way shut, he gazed out over his sister’s small army. He could never do it. He probably couldn’t bend any more than the six people he was already holding down. It was like bending the whole ocean, or every raindrop in a storm.
But no one else knew that yet.
Azula threw her cousin, clumsy and rusty from six years underneath Lake Laogai, back and advanced on her brother, both hands igniting at her sides. She towered over him, fury radiating off her in thick, seething waves. Hands still wreathed in flame, face taut, Azula reached for her brother.
His chest heaving with strain and cornered fear, Zuko could see in her face what she eagerly awaited for him back home, himself locked up, chained up, disfigured and blinded, unable to move against his bonds, trapped alone with his scornful fellow prisoners, shut away for all time. One of his hands sprang up between them, tensed, ready to throw her back away from him, to bend the blood inside her, ready to fail. He knew he would fail.
Azula’s eyes fell on that hand, face going rigid. Her fires snuffed out and she turned around and ran, beckoning her little army behind her.
Zuko’s arms fell to the ground and he sagged against the dusty road, gulping down heaves of air and fog.
~*~
Zuko wasn’t allowed to surprise Azula.
Alone on the ocean, secure in the dim light of her cabin on her brilliant, secret barge, Azula watched her two friends looking everywhere except at her. They had seen her run.
Her soldiers had seen her run.
From Zuko.
On her writing table sat a half-written letter to her father with no mention of that. She had filled it with news of her cousin’s sudden continued life, and a plea.
Ty Lee kept her eyes on the hand that had betrayed her under Zuko’s bending. “Nobody could expect him to do that to you, Azula,” she soothed. “You’ll have a plan for him next time.”
Azula turned to her sharply. “Of course.” That wasn’t even the question.
Mai reclined on the cabin window seat, feigning sleep, peering out the cabin window at the Earth Kingdom shoreline disappearing behind them. She turned over, eyes closed, and opened one, gazing sidelong at her princess, but she didn’t speak. Her relentless, emotionless gaze rubbed against Azula’s already frayed and fractured temper and unnerved her.
“Get out!” she raged at them both, and watched through eyes narrowed into slits with distrust as they left her alone with her letter.
~*~
Zuko drifted in and out of hazy, nervous sleep, too tired to stay awake, too wary of his sister’s return to stay asleep. When his eyes were open, he blinked blearily at his uncle and his cousins, (Rinzee was his cousin now wasn’t she?) together obscuring the signs of the battle from the soon-to-be waking Earth Kingdom. They extinguished the small grass fires and the burning tree in which Zuko had hidden with Ruili. They swept away the footprints, buried the ashes, and quietly destroying the evidence of the strange sort of battle that took place when one side was bent on capture and the other desperately trying not to kill.
Each time he closed his eyes again, his dreams simmered with his sister and father’s fire.
Iroh bent down and patted his nephew’s shoulder. The same creeping age and fatigue that had lulled him to sleep as he had tried to keep watch, left his wrinkled skin ashen. “Get up,” he said softly, glancing over his shoulder at the moon, hanging low in the western sky. “We have to go.”
Zuko rose to his feet, listing with exhaustion. His hat hung around his neck on its string, weighing so much heavier on him than straw should be able to. He pulled it up over his head and straightened it low over his eyes.
Lu Ten slung his makeshift pack over his shoulder as Rinzee hefted her softly whimpering daughter into her arms. Glowing from the side of the road he swore he could see the Painted Lady smiling at him, giving him a pleased nod as she stood with her hand in her husband’s, next to a pretty woman with white hair and ribbons billowing around her body and a thin, dour man with blue eyes and dark skin. Lu Ten’s hands balled into fists, weariness leaching the force from his voice. “We have to get off the road.”
Zuko swallowed and nodded, shaking himself to stay awake. “I know a stream.”
As he spoke, the white haired woman and the dour man came to stand beside him, but Zuko couldn’t see them. Yue laid a hand on his arm, and even though he didn’t know it was there, he remembered the pathetic way he had lain in the freezing meltwater under her pitying eye. The prickle of his cousins’ eyes on him, wary and calculating, examining this strange new creature who had the power to bend people. He shivered. He felt so cold.
Zuko stepped off the dusty road and onto the grassy, sloping gully-side, between the two fire spirits, and only Lu Ten could watch the four spirits together fracture into wisps of light and blow away. Resigned, he moved to follow, his father and Rinzee with Ruili after him as Zuko led their shambling, weary group through the grass and the predawn, to the stream.
The End
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 Three: Fire
His uncle and cousin were waiting for him at the edge of town when he wove through the brush, back to them. He did his best not to bristle as Lu Ten tousled his hair. The grassland fell away at the border, and transformed into broad, tree lined boulevards that wound around and into each other, like wider, prettier versions of the alleyways next to the docks.
Lu Ten let his hand rest on the surface of the ornamented wooden gate that led into his garden. “I don’t know who she’s going to be when you’re done,” he confessed, meeting his cousin’s eyes. The Mudan he knew was going to die.
He pushed the gate open and stepped though, and then waited as his father and Zuko stepped across the threshold before closing it politely behind them, smiling strangely at the lights in the house windows.
“Let’s get this over with,” Zuko muttered, staring at his boots as Lu Ten opened the house door and ushered them inside.
As they stepped into the light, the woman whose real name was Rinzee dropped the porcelain cups she had been holding to the floor. They shattered on the wood into a thousand tiny splinters. “You brought them back here? The guards let them go?”
Ruili wobbled her way across the floor to her father and smiled utterly unconcerned up at him. Picking her up, he gazed at his wife, steadily. “It’s alright, Mudan, please.”
“It’s a very, uh.” Iroh gazed around the room, and his eyes rested on his son, holding his granddaughter, trying to draw the sight in and hold it. “Nice place you have here.”
“You would know,” the woman who was Rinzee snapped. “Having just tried to rob it. You probably scouted out our house already. Ao!”
“It’s fine, I swear, just-” He turned to his cousin. “Zuko, can you just- We talked about this, please!”
Zuko shifted his weight back the way Yue had taught him and the water lifted out of the jar on the hearth and flowed to him. He spun it around itself, between his hands, to keep it moving as he walked forward.
“What are you doing?” she yelped, falling back against the wall and raising her hands. She probably didn’t even know what raising her hands that way was for.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he rasped, trying to sooth her.
Her eyes were huge in her head, pupils so wide the gold irises were almost invisible between their black, and the whites of her eyes. The fire flew from her hand, and Zuko caught it automatically on his arm to break it, but he wasn’t a firebender anymore. That didn’t work. He howled as the flesh bubbled, and the water between his hands splashed to the floor.
Ruili screamed, hiding her face in her father’s chest as her mother sucked in a breath and started to scream too.
Collapsing to the floor, Zuko curled his arm against his chest, high pitched moans leaving his throat with every breath.
“Do you have a well?” Iroh had to shout above the noise.
“And a koi pond, out back,” he gasped, pressing his daughter tight against him with one arm and looping the other around his cousin’s chest. As Iroh followed suit, he tucked Zuko’s burned arm up, trying to get Zuko’s limp fingers to latch onto his own shoulder, to keep the arm from flopping around.
“I didn’t...” The woman who didn’t know she was a firebender slumped against the wall. “I can’t...”
Lu Ten turned his head to look at her. “Just come with us, Mudan, please, this is important, please!”
They carried Zuko between them, out to the garden behind the house and did their best to set him down gently on the stone pathway and the rushes next to the koi pond. Eyes closed, face twisted, Zuko let his arm fall into the green, slimy water, and let the water glow and hum in that strange way it did, until his arm stopped hurting, but his body didn’t feel like his own. He pulled his arm out of the water, shivering and shaking, trying to pull himself together.
The woman who wasn’t Mudan hadn’t followed and Lu Ten stepped back into the house to get her. Zuko’s arm was coated in a film of sludge up to his elbow, and he scraped it off with his other hand with distaste. There was nothing under the muck, not even a scar, just new, pink, unburned skin.
His uncle brought him a bucket of water from the well, and he poured it over his arm, scrubbing until the green slime ran off his arm, down between the stones.
Lu Ten led his wife out into the garden, to sit on the stone path next to the koi pond, the unnatural, trusting, pliant way the mindbent Dai Li wives had with their husbands making her let him. “Are you sure it’s okay?” she asked, trembling.
Zuko took the bucket of water down to the well and filled it up. His arms shook with fatigue. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he told her croakily, putting the bucket down beside her and raising the water into his hands.
The woman who didn’t even know her own real name put her hand over her her husband’s hand, resting on her shoulder, until the water lit up like candle flame, and she started to fight. Lu Ten held her down as she thrashed, and Zuko kept the water to her head. Zuko’s stomach filled with boiling acid. The water felt sticky and didn’t want to move, but he could feel the ripples in it, that said that his fingers were shaking, twitching with small, faint movements, the kind that said he was still alive.
The water fell to the ground, soaking her, and Zuko staggered back, heaving and gagging. “I can’t,” he coughed.
Drool ran down her face, and her expression was empty. When Lu Ten touched her face, she didn’t react. “You have to,” he pleaded. “You can’t leave her like this.”
Zuko clutched his stomach and his head. “I can’t!” He couldn’t touch that again. He could barely stand.
“Please!” He grabbed onto Zuko’s arm and dragged his cousin back, stumbling to her, taking advantage of his cousin’s exhaustion to do it without any real fight. “Just bring her back, just...”
Zuko couldn’t pick himself off the ground to walk away again as Lu Ten filled the bucket with water again and brought it to him. The water ran through Zuko’s fingers as he tried to lift it out again. He finally gave up and trickled the water down onto her temple. When the water began to glow, it stopped falling. Zuko breathed hard though his nose, fighting off the horror and nausea, until she started to blink. The breath caught in her throat. “What’s-” she gasped. “What’s-”
“Mudan?” Lu Ten asked anxiously.
She launched herself to her feet, wiping the drool off her face and running backwards, back to the house. “No!”
Lu Ten heaved air into his lungs. “Rinzee?”
She stopped in the doorway, the firelight and the candles inside glinting off the lacquer and wire inlays of her Earth Kingdom headdress, and off the silk of her Earth Kingdom clothes. “Who are you?” she demanded. “All of you. Ao? How did you know, how did you know?”
Lu Ten went to her, and tried to hold her, but she shoved him away. “Rinzee.”
“No!” she shouted, shaking her head compulsively. “Don’t... touch me! I’m never going back there.”
“I’m never going to let anyone make you,” he assured her, reaching up to put his hands on her arms, but when she flinched back, he let them fall awkwardly to his sides. “You’re safe here. No one’s going to mindbend you. I’m not going to tell anybody who you are.”
She sank back against the doorway. “I don’t even know why I’m married to you.”
“The Dai Li mindbent everybody they captured.” Lu Ten heaved a shuddering sigh. “The men who were strong firebenders, good fighters, they made Dai Li. They-” he swallowed. “We married the firebending women so that the children would be benders, and the sons would grow up and become Dai Li.”
She smacked him across the face. “You did this to me?” she shouted. “You- And then you married me?” Fire blossomed in her hands.
“No!” He raised his hands to block any blow she might try to land. “They mindbent you before they mindbent me, and I was so scared, that I just went along with it when they introduced us.” He shuddered again.
“I don’t know your name,” she whispered.
He closed her eyes, like he was just waiting for her to set him on fire. “Lu Ten.”
Her brow furrowed. “Like the prince? Are you kidding me?”
He glanced back at his father, and at Zuko, lying against the ground, unmoving. “Yeah, like the prince. I was borrowing a private’s uniform, because when I wore mine, the wall defenders would aim for me, so they didn’t know who I was.”
She slapped him again, sobbing. “Don’t lie to me!”
“I’m not lying! Why would I lie?”
“And who are they?” She jabbed her finger at Zuko and Iroh. “The Earth King? A lost Air Nomad? No, really I want to know.”
“My father and cousin.”
She laughed hysterically.
“Come on, just come inside.” He glanced over the wall at their neighbors, and the possibility of open windows. I’ll tell you everything.”
“I’m not leaving my daughter with those men!” she retorted. “Whoever they are!”
Lu Ten looked back at his father, who had Ruili on his lap, where she was playing with his sideburns. “Please, Rinzee, I know what it’s like. They did it to me too.”
“No!” she yelled, sprinting back into the garden, to her daughter. “You don’t. You had your firebending, didn’t you? And I bet you knew all about having been someone else, being part of the Dai Li, didn’t you. Well I didn’t.” She snatched Ruili out of Iroh’s lap, still turned to her husband. “I couldn’t figure out what hurt so bad all the time, or why I didn’t have a past like everybody else, or a family. I wasn’t stupid, I knew something was missing, I knew it, and I couldn’t say anything!”
“I’m sorry.” Lu Ten mumbled.
“And I didn’t even get to have my firebending! Don’t tell me you know what it’s like!”
She looked down. Zuko had his hand around her ankle, and he used it to haul himself up painstakingly, so that he was sitting on the path instead of lying across it. “I know what that’s like,” he muttered. “I lost my firebending, because the moon spirit screwed up.”
“Are you really his cousin?” she asked, voice high and afraid.
He nodded. “Zuko.”
“And is he really...”
He nodded again.
“H-how did you find us?”
“We didn’t,” he muttered. “We were stealing clothes.”
She laughed.
~*~
Rinzee slept curled up around their daughter on the futon as Lu Ten wrapped the spare blanket around himself. The wooden floor was hard, and he envied his father and cousin with the better, thicker blankets, and borrowed clothes. The soft, steady sounds of everyone breathing around him in their sleep filled the house, but he couldn’t sleep.
Fog rolled in off the the ocean, and billowed through the open windows. The Painted Lady rolled in with it and floated down to stand in front of him. “It’s good to see you when you’re awake.” She smiled, her mouth the only thing visible under her hat. “In your own world.”
“I thought you weren’t going to come again,” he told her, almost reproving.
She smirked. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because I remember who I am now.” He stood up, and crossed his arms across his chest. “You got what you wanted.”
“I don’t have what I want until the world is in balance again, and you sit on the dragon throne.” She tipped her had back and shook her head. “Shame. You’ll be a good Firelord. Zuko would have been a great one.”
“Zuko said the moon spirit messed up when she made him a waterbender,” he said. The Painted Lady inclined her head, and a bright, clean rush of rage burned through him. “And if she hadn’t? Would you have just left M- Rinzee and me like that, like you’ve left thousands of people, for hundreds of years?”
She snorted, and put a finger to her lips and pointed around at his family. “You don’t want to wake them.”
“Answer my question,” he growled, deep in his throat.
She exhaled heavily, and vanished.
“Coward,” he sneered softly.
~*~
The next day, Zuko slept late, until the moon rose in the afternoon. He kicked away the blanket and pulled the clothes he had borrowed from his cousin straight on his body. After the Water Tribe furs, the Earth Kingdom clothes were almost familiar, almost like Fire Nation clothes. They rasped against his skin as if they were full of sand. He stepped out from the screened off alcove. “Why didn’t anybody wake me up?”
Iroh poured a cup of tea from the pot and pressed it into Zuko’s hand. “I figured you needed the rest.”
“Thank you,” he replied, resentful, and uncertain of what exactly he was resenting.
“Lu Ten is still at work,” his uncle tried.
“Yeah,” Zuko snapped, trying to keep the anger out of his voice. “Lu Ten.”
“What is wrong, nephew?” Iroh, put a hand on Zuko’s shoulder and looked up at the face hiding under the conical straw hat. “I thought you loved your cousin.”
Zuko shrugged his uncle’s hand off, a nest of eel-snakes gnawing away at his insides. “Yeah.”
“Aren’t you happy?” He examined his nephew’s shadowed expression, for once, utterly at a loss. “He is alive. We thought he was dead. You should be rejoicing.”
“Yeah,” Zuko choked out. “Sure.”
When he fled into the garden, his uncle didn’t follow. And that was the problem, wasn’t it?
~*~
“So you’re the Dragon of the West.” Rinzee came up to stand next to her father-in-law. Her silence for most of the day made her words hang in the air and demand his notice, even though he had heard the same sequence of words so many times they ran together into one.
He nodded, taking her hands. “Believe me when I say I’m very glad to meet you.”
“Here I am surrounded by royalty. Even Ruili-” She shook her head. “My parents are fisherfolk. My brothers probably are too, by now, if they haven’t enlisted.”
“It doesn’t matter to me who your parents are. Besides.” He winked at her. “You have given me a lovely granddaughter.” They watched Ruili make her way outside and curl up in Zuko’s lap. She took the hat off his head, revealing his expression of complete bafflement, and shoved it down onto her own. She pushed it onto her face and wore it like a mask, and her father’s cousin quickly snatched it out of her hands.
“Ten years...” Rinzee fought back tears. “I’m married. I have a daughter, and I didn’t get a say in any of it.”
Iroh was silent for a long moment. “No one would think any less of you if you were to run.”
“Is that what you want me to do?” she asked sharply.
“No, but you are right. You deserve a choice in the way your life will go. And should he find out about the three of you, my brother would happily see to it that Lu Ten is once again safely dead, along with my granddaughter. It would be a great comfort to know you had taken her far away, where he couldn’t find her.”
“He’s supposed to be my lord. I fought in the Fire Nation army!” She took one of her hands out of his and rubbed it against her face. “This isn’t the way things are supposed to go.”
“No,” Iroh agreed. “It isn’t.”
Rinzee didn’t talk for a long time. Together, they watched Ruili steal Zuko’s hat again, and press it to his face. “I need to talk to your nephew about leaving the back door latched. Ruili could fall down the well, or drown in the koi pond, or something.”
“I’ll talk to him tonight, if you want me to,” Iroh assured her with a soft smile.
Outside, Zuko tried to pry it away from her, but her tiny hands were stronger than they looked, and when she finally lost her grip, he fell back against the ground in surprise. Shrieking with laughter, she climbed onto his chest and grabbed the hat back.
“We should rescue him,” Rinzee said.
“Yes, we should.” Neither of them made any such attempt. Ruili sauntered over to the edge of the pond, set the hat upside down in the water, and watched it float away. With a sharp, frustrated cry, Zuko plucked his hat out of the pond, and gazed in despair at the coating of filth on top. Iroh and Rinzee glanced at each other, and then looked down.
~*~
“Are you drunk?” Azula demanded as Ty Lee swayed back up the gangway, wearing the tightest Earth Kingdom robe any of them had ever seen. It was part of Ty Lee’s own special genius that she was always able to find that kind of thing.
“The guardsman’s son kept pouring me drinks,” she slurred slightly. “I thought this was what you wanted.”
“Guardsman’s son?” Mai asked.
“Well, his dad was ancient.” Ty Lee sat down more heavily than she meant to on a coil of rope.
Mai raised an incredulous eyebrow. “They just have the one?”
“Did you find anything out?” Azula cut in impatiently, looming over Ty Lee.
Ty Lee gazed up at her, unconcerned. “He said the Water Tribe ships don’t usually come here, because it’s so small. Mostly they go to Tianshui, a couple of days southeast of here.”
Azula waved her away.
“If you wake up tomorrow hung over, I am not cleaning up your vomit,” Mai called as Ty Lee slipped away.
~*~
Three evenings later, Iroh left the circle of his son and his son’s family and stepped outside to sit on the back step and watch his nephew. The water passed between Zuko’s hands, the scales of the koi fish inside gleaming in the lantern light like the sparks that danced around Ruili’s fingers when she was bored. He shifted his weight and pulled the water along with it, letting the fish slip gently back into the pond. The ball of water raised back off the water and froze. The ball melted and split in two, only to refreeze. He divided the balls again and again, until each ball was the size of a thumbprint, and then the balls elongated into minuscule, green, needle-like shards. They flew for Iroh’s head, but fell to the ground just before they could hit. “What are you doing out here?” Zuko asked sulkily.
Iroh took a sip from his teacup. “Watching you.”
The ice shards flew back to the air and landed in the pond, melting. “Yeah, well don’t.”
“I don’t understand.” Iroh gazed up wearily. “You barely talk to any of us for days, to me, and now you don’t even let me spend time with you?”
“It’s nothing, Uncle. Go back inside.”
Iroh didn’t leave. “Come in with me.”
Zuko flinched. “No.” He couldn’t. He couldn’t go in there and watch his uncle with his cousin and have his face rubbed in the fact that he had nothing again. “I mean... I think I’ll stay out here for a while.”
Iroh resettled himself back on the step. “Then I will watch.”
Zuko raised water out of the pond again, but it sloshed back down before he could get it between his hands. He let his hand fall to his sides in defeat, fists balling, his concentration shot to pieces with his uncle’s presence. He stood there, feeling like an idiot, in the darkness, not looking at his uncle. The wind whistled through the silence, making it bigger and louder. “Are you just going to stay here?” Zuko bust out at last, cutting it wide open.
“Yes.” Iroh smiled, and patted the step beside him.
“And me?” Zuko hissed, the desperation in his voice so thick it almost choked away his words.
“Where do you want to go?” Iroh asked.
“Anywhere.” Zuko shrugged jerkily. “Somewhere, I don’t know, just... It doesn’t matter.” He paced back and fourth, eyes darting around, as if they could see through the darkness to whatever was driving him.
But he couldn’t see it, because it wasn’t out there. For three years, Zuko had not rested. For three years, he had chased something, and somewhere along the way, without Iroh noticing, it had stopped being about the chase and started being about the running. And even once the quarry was out of his reach, he couldn’t stop, and now that he was no longer the hunter, he was the hunted.
“Then stay here,” Iroh urged, “Train. Rest.”
Zuko flinched, and stared around, trapped. “I’m not going to waterbend for you just because you’re too curious about all the other elements to stay inside with your son.” He opened his mouth like he was about to say more, but nothing more came out of his mouth except the soft sibilance of his breath around his clenched teeth.
Iroh blinked. “Zuko,” he murmured, reaching out to his nephew.
“No!” Zuko thrust out his hands to push him back, but his uncle sat back down, startled, before Zuko could touch him. “I can’t, I can’t-”
A dozen little things clicked together in Iroh’s head. Gathering his determination, Iroh climbed back to his feet again and pulled his nephew close against his chest. Zuko squirmed half-heartedly, but Iroh didn’t let him go. “Are you jealous, nephew?” Iroh asked softly.
“No!” Zuko denied, terrified, trying to pull away. “You- No!”
Iroh refused to let go, keeping his nephew pinned against his chest. “Afraid?” One handed, he ran his fingers through Zuko’s hair soothingly, as if his nephew was a little boy again. “Worried I wouldn’t love you now that I have my son back?”
Before he realized it, Zuko was nodding, tears running down out of his good eye, soaking the front of his uncle’s robe. A sick sort of humiliation left his cheeks hot and flushed at needing his uncle this way. He should’t be crying. It was just going to make everything worse when his uncle could see- He shouldn’t need anyone. He was supposed to be...
He wasn’t supposed to be this weak.
Iroh sank back down onto the step, guiding Zuko down with him. “It doesn’t work like that,” he said gently. “Finding Lu Ten again just means I have two sons.”
“Not your son,” Zuko muttered, voice muffled against his uncle’s chest.
“I am never going to stop loving you, or thinking of you as my son.” Iroh patted his nephew’s head. “Didn’t I tell you, you don’t get rid of me that easily?”
As Zuko lay slumped against his uncle’s side, he tried to stop crying. He should stop crying. But he wasn’t sure he believed his uncle anyway.
~*~
A hand brushed across Lu Ten’s shoulder, and he jerked awake. “You!” he snapped lowly at the Painted Lady, kneeling just above the floor next to him.
“I thought you’d want to know your cousin’s in town.”
“I know. He’s sleeping right over there!” He pointed his finger at the wood and paper screen between himself and his father and cousin. “You know this; he gave me back my memories!”
The Painted Lady shook her head and smirked. “Not him. Azula.”
“Here?” Lu Ten sucked in a breath. “What? Why?”
Cocking her head, she stood up and tipped up her hat. “Your father’s been declared a traitor, and your uncle wants Zuko dragged home in chains. Azula’s only too happy to do it for him.”
“But how did she find us? Now?” He searched her face, and a dark thought flashed across his mind. “Did you-”
“There aren’t any spirits whispering in her ear, if that’s what you’re insinuating,” she grumbled.
“You want me to leave this place, you want me to become Firelord, you brought her to me, didn’t you?” He glanced around at his sleeping family, voice rumbling low in his throat.
“I already told you I didn’t.” Her eyes narrowed reprovingly at him. “Now, go wake up your family.”
She vanished, and the darkness of her passing made spots dance across his open eyes. His heartbeat pounded in his ears, and he swallowed, struggling to stop his hands from shaking, but they wouldn’t. Everything was happening so fast.
He gave up and shook Rinzee awake.
~*~
Azula kicked down the door, but no panicked chaos erupted within. The house was empty.
“Are you sure this is the right house?” Mai asked, peering around her.
Ty Lee tilted her head as she slipped inside and turned back to her friends, and the disguised soldiers behind them. “This is where they s-”
Azula’s eyes took in the mess and the ransacked chests and wardrobes. Her lips curved up. “Positive.”
~*~
The predawn shadows lingered over the town and the docks as Zuko gazed over them, as if he really thought he would be able to see Azula coming towards them.
He hadn’t seen her in three years. He wondered how much she had changed.
Their feet kicked up dust on the trail, and Ruili whimpered in confusion. Rinzee passed her to Iroh and hitched her pack higher up on her shoulders without looking at any of them. “I don’t get it,” she said. “You said she’s only fourteen. She can’t be that scary.”
Zuko and his uncle shared a significant glance, remembering what she had been like at eleven.
Lu Ten turned his eyes to his boots. “She’s probably got an army with her.”
An army, and supplies, and dispatches, and intellegence reports, and all of the things Zuko didn’t have when-
Rinzee dragged in a shuddering breath and started walking a little faster.
~*~
The night took a long time to fall. The fog rolled in off the sea and caught up with them, and they stopped in a valley, next to a dry riverbed. Lu Ten kicked the dust and stones at the riverbed bottom. “Damn it, it’s supposed to be full this time of year!”
Ruili whined as she swallowed the last mouthful of water and her grandfather pulled the empty waterskin away. Zuko tasted salt on his lips in the fog and growled. It just made him thirstier. “There’s a stream south of here.”
Rinzee spread a blanket over the ground. “We’ll find it tomorrow morning,” she said waspishly.
“I will take first watch,” Iroh yawned, tucking himself between the roots of a tree.
~*~
“Wake up, Zuko.” Yue’s voice floated down through the trees, and her long hair brushed across his face. “Wake up.”
Zuko opened his eyes. They watered at the brightness that was Yue and refused to focus on the darkness around them both. “What-”
“Your sister is almost here.” She pointed at the cloud of dust coming inexorably closer along the path.
Zuko glanced over at his uncle, dozing against the tree trunk, and snarled, throwing the blanket off himself as Yue’s body broke up into little flecks of moonlight. He grabbed his uncle’s shoulder and shook him hard. “What are you doing?”
Iroh woke with a start and blinked up at his nephew. “What time is it?”
Zuko stared up at the moon, high in the sky and almost full. “Almost midnight!” he snapped.
“Well I might as well go back to sleep and let you take the next watch,” Iroh said slowly, closing his eyes again.
Zuko shook his shoulder again and pointed at the dust cloud almost upon them. “No, because now we have to wake up everyone.”
Iroh’s sleep clouded eyes cleared and sharpened. He put a hand on his son’s shoulder and squeezed.
As Zuko leaned over Rinzee and prodded her arm, he tried not to watch his uncle and his cousin. He stared out over the empty grassland beyond the trees overhanging the dry river, feeling sick to his stomach. There was nowhere to go out there, nowhere to hide.
Rinzee yelped and batted his hand away, but Zuko snatched her arm off the blanket and pulled her to her feet. “Come on,” he ordered, forcing himself not to whisper. “Azula.”
At her mother’s cry and the sudden absense of both her parents on the blanket with her, Ruili woke up and started wailing. Azula’s army was close enough that the sound of their feet rumbled all around them. Rinzee lifted her daughter off the blanket and pressed her to her chest. She glanced down at the dry riverbed and then at Zuko. “You!” she said, making a discission and holding Ruili out to him. “Take her.”
Zuko’s eyes followed hers to the empty river, and slid over to the empty waterskins, and he snatched the girl out of her mother’s arms, shaking with fury at himself. He had no water. He didn’t have anything to bend. Firebenders didn’t... didn’t have to keep track of things like that. It was so stupid that all his sister had to do was corner him somewhere dry, and he was... He pulled the knife his uncle had given him out of his boot and held Ruili one handed against his hip. Squirming, she shouted into the fog, her tiny baby voice crying out the only two words she knew. “Nonono, mama!”
Zuko held her tighter as her mother turned back to them both. She saw his knife and bared her teeth. “Don’t you dare! You, you keep her out-”
From where he was climbing up the side of the ravine, in which they had been sleeping, to the road, Iroh turned around to face his nephew. “Hide,” he insisted.
Helpless humiliation rolled over Zuko as his uncle, cousin, and cousin-in-law climbed over the lip of the ravine. There was no water, just a tiny knife, and instead of being an asset, a warrior, he was a useless non-combatant like Ruili.
She kept crying. He shoved his knife back into his boot and covered her mouth to muffle the noise. Under the bright full moon, the blanket on which they had slept stood out on the pale, brownish grass and dust like a smudge of ink on an otherwise clean sheet of paper. Zuko yanked it off the ground, bundling it around Ruili while she sent him foul looks and sniffled into the blanket she suddenly found wrapped around herself.
Fireballs whizzed over his head, fizzling in the fog. They kept drawing Zuko’s eyes across the sky. Ruili’s hands filled with sparks to match them in small, but her hands were bunched up in the blanket. The cloth caught fire, and Ruili screamed. Zuko cried out in surprise and threw the blanket down to stomp the flames away. Smoke curled in the air, rising off the charred blanket as Zuko scooped it back up into his arms and Ruili’s fists beat against his chest. Her knuckles and the backs of her hands were covered in angry red burns and she howled with rage and pain.
A harsh, hot jet of blue fire split the air, speeding down towards them. Zuko yelled in shock and jumped aside, the flames close enough for him to feel their heat in his scarred skin as they passed. They crashed into the ground, and swept down in a line, igniting the grass, crackling and popping and lighting up the darkness around them.
Ruili screamed louder. In desperation, Zuko’s fingers found a corner of the blanket and stuffed it into her mouth. As she tried to push it out with her lips and tongue, she let out little muffled screams Zuko could barely hear above the noise of the battle and the sound of his own ragged breathing as he ran. He sprinted, the stones of the riverbed jarring through the too-supple soles of his boots, and peered through the fog and darkness at the fires ripping through the sky above.
He couldn’t see the people, only the flash of fire, and the only fire that looked different from everyone else’s was Azula’s. She was the only person he knew was still standing.
He launched himself at the closest tall tree, and he pulled himself one handed up onto the lowest branch. Slowly, he dragged himself upward, the bark digging into his palms and catching on the cloth wrapped around his baby cousin. She shot him a dark glower over her blanket gag as he wedged her between a branch above the fighting and the trunk before he swung himself up next to her. There were tears running down her face, which was flushed with defenseless misery. Zuko glared right back at her, slipping her hands out of the fabric trapping them. Immediately she started pounding his arm again, and he pinned her arms down against her sides.
He ground his teeth together. He stared through the leaves and the roiling mist, and he still couldn’t see anything.
“Pffftht!” He heard the sound of the spit-sodden corner of the blanket pop out of her mouth right before the air rushed into her lungs. “Nnnnoaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh!”
Zuko slammed his hand down over her mouth, but it was too late. Azula’s hand filled with fire, and through the shadows and fog, he saw it light up her face. She turned to the sound of Ruili’s voice and her lips curled up in a vicious, triumphant smirk. The fire blazed towards him, and his arm throbbed a warning where it had been burned, and he ducked instead of trying to block.
It hit the tree trunk where his head had been. The leaves in its wake exploded into flame, catching the leaves beside them, until the whole tree around him roared with the noise of the fire.
Zuko did the only thing he could do. He tucked Ruili up against his chest and jumped. The blanket unfurled as they fell, and the fog rushed past his face. He could feel it.
He could feel it.
He was an idiot. He knew he was an idiot. This sort of thing shouldn’t keep surprising him.
It felt like the ground and his sister were leaping up to meet him.
He whipped his arms around and sucked the fog out of the air and pressed his forearms to his chest, around Ruili, to cushion her.
His legs hit Azula hard in the back as she tried to dodge, knocking her to the ground. Ruili gulped in shock as she crash landed on the blanket covered armor over the shoulders of her other cousin, Zuko’s arms keeping her safe from the impact.
“What the-?” Azula shoved the blanket down, only to see her brother, pinning Ruili to his chest, a globe of cloud-water shifting between his hands. The water froze into icicle daggers, and Zuko grasped onto them. Azula balled her hand into a fist and fire blazed around it. She rammed it through the air at him, but he leaned to the side. “Who’s the child, Zuko?” she asked, hooking her arm to punch fire at his head.
The icicles melted and refroze into a flat pane of ice.
“Zuko?” A voice came out of the fog and floated through the fog. A woman with knives in both hands, turned away from the battle for just a second as she spoke, and the ice shattered. Azula wrenched her knee up from under him and flipped him over, slamming him down into the dust.
There was a hole in the fog, above and around them, from where Zuko had pulled the water out of the air, and the full moon shown through. He had the full moon, water all around him, surprise, every advantage as he could ask for and he still ended up on his back in the dirt.
“Mamamamamama!” Ruili twisted away from them. Azula’s gaze followed her, amused before she turned back to her brother, but Zuko used the time to wriggle his arm free. He elbowed her hard beneath her ribs and knocked her away from him, gagging and gasping. Staggering to his feet, he stumbled backwards, and tried to catch his feet.
“Ruili!” Rinzee yelled, dashing to her and scooping her up. She shoved her little, burned hands at her mother and bawled into her shoulder. Rinzee shot Zuko a filthy look as she pressed her daughter to her chest and sent a fist full of flame into the face of an oncoming soldier.
As he tried and failed to find his feet, Zuko whirled his arms again, drawing in more fog. In the sudden clarity, Zuko could see the woman with the knives who had spoken before. “Mai?” he whispered, without realizing he had spoken.
He caught himself from falling and stood steady. He flung the water through the air like knives at the soldiers closing in on his cousin-in-law. He breathed in, a little of the panic and self-loathing subsiding as he watched his sister gulp down mouthfuls of air and force her breathing back under control. Then a shadow fell over the ground behind him, and a few sharp jabs brought the water splashing down at his feet and left his body numb and falling into the arms of Azula’s soldiers, and it came rushing back. “Ty Lee?”
She cocked her head as she stepped around him, pulling her lips into her mouth with her teeth, voice very quiet. “Sorry.”
Zuko roared in frustration, and threw his head, the only part of his body he could still move, back into the face of the soldier behind him. She yelled in shock and he could feel her nose crunch, and the blood start running down. His hat fell off his head to hang around his neck, his hair colorless, like an old man’s, like the fog creeping back in around them, under the moonlight. The blood from the soldier’s nose gushed into Zuko’s hair and down onto his face.
Everybody stopped moving. Fires died all around them, leaching the color out of the world.
Mai kept staring at him. He could feel it.
Azula walked to him with measured, ominous slowness and drew in a single, steady breath. “Hello, Zu-zu.”
She raised her hand full of bright blue flame and held it close to Zuko’s scarred cheek. The air pressed in on his ribs. He couldn’t draw in a breath. It hurt so much to breathe.
“I’m going to take you home, Zu-zu,” she told him. “Isn’t that what you wanted?” He still didn’t answer. He couldn’t. The silence hung in the air, and the stares of everyone around them weighed him down. Azula’s lips pulled back, showing her teeth gritted and frustration. Her flame came even closer to his face. “I wonder if Father’s just going to kill you, or if he’s going to lock you away with the other waterbenders. There are still some of them down there, you know.”
Zuko shuddered convulsively and the air rushed into him like a lungful of daggers. His own blood pounded in his ears. He tried to push it all away. His fingers tingled and his arms hung heavily in the soldiers’s grasp. The blood didn’t rush around in them. He couldn’t feel it. The sweat beaded on his forehead as he pictured the blood pouring into his limbs. He could almost feel the blood moving, almost imagine he was slowly bending it down into his fingertips. He exhaled, and the daggers he had breathed in floated out on the air.
Ice crystals. They glittered in the moonlight like bits of broken glass before falling to the dust, and the fog fluttered and dispersed in the wake of his breath, leaving the air around them clear again. The fire in Azula’s hand flared, sharp with her anger. Ice rimmed her hair and gathered on her clothes, where he had breathed. She thrust her hand closer to his face and bent low to mutter in his ear, stroking his scar with the back of her hand. The fire was so close, the heat so intense, his skin reddened under it. “I wonder if he will finish what he started with this,” she murmured, tapping his scar with her knuckles. “and blind you with fire, cook your eyes in your head like he should have done back then. I wonder if they will still be blue after that.” Zuko flinched away, and Azula’s lips curved. “Not that there’s any point. It’s not like you could escape to humiliate the family again. You couldn’t even capture one little boy.”
Zuko’s head snapped up, around her hand, out of the way of the fire, and his eyes narrowed with cold, indignant rage. “I’d love to see you-” he bit off. “I’d love to see you try to capture him.”
She pulled her fist back, and Zuko closed his eyes. “No!” Iroh shouted, the stillness of the standoff broken.
But the fist never landed. Bellowing, Lu Ten, the only person close enough to reach them, threw himself through the air and caught Azula’s arm, dragging her down with him as he fell. Azula rolled and bounced back to her feet, but Lu Ten kept hold of her arm. She pulled in close to him to break away, and, for the first time, caught clear sight of his face. “You!” The whites around her eyes grew so large that her yellow irises seemed to shrink in on themselves. “You’re dead.”
Zuko watched his cousin nod as she tore her arm out of his grasp. He felt the blood sink deep into his limbs and as all eyes were on Lu Ten and Azula, he wrenched himself to his feet and broke the holds of the soldiers on his arms. He twisted away from them. He could feel their blood, rushing around their bodies. He could feel it thrumming through him. He remembered the sensation of Yue squeezing his hand when he had asked her and the way he had shuddered with revulsion at the very idea that such a thing was possible, but he raised that hand in front of him and made himself feel the push of all that blood.
And pulled.
The moonlight ripped though his veins, sapping away his strength for the power to bowl back the knot of soldiers who had held him captive and knock them to the ground like rice shafts under a sickle.
With a faint cry of shock, Ty Lee leapt forward and jabbed her fingers hard into the pressure points of Zuko’s legs, dropping him to the ground. But before she could get her fingers into his arms and cut off his bending again, he grabbed the blood in her hand and pushed. She danced away to the soldiers he had felled, stumbling around and around in tight circles as he pulled her hand high over her head and drove her back.
Zuko lay against the ground, struggling to hold his head up, weak from bending against the strengths and the wills of Ty Lee and his sister’s soldiers. Eyes squinted and teeth gritted to keep his eyes from snapping the rest of the way shut, he gazed out over his sister’s small army. He could never do it. He probably couldn’t bend any more than the six people he was already holding down. It was like bending the whole ocean, or every raindrop in a storm.
But no one else knew that yet.
Azula threw her cousin, clumsy and rusty from six years underneath Lake Laogai, back and advanced on her brother, both hands igniting at her sides. She towered over him, fury radiating off her in thick, seething waves. Hands still wreathed in flame, face taut, Azula reached for her brother.
His chest heaving with strain and cornered fear, Zuko could see in her face what she eagerly awaited for him back home, himself locked up, chained up, disfigured and blinded, unable to move against his bonds, trapped alone with his scornful fellow prisoners, shut away for all time. One of his hands sprang up between them, tensed, ready to throw her back away from him, to bend the blood inside her, ready to fail. He knew he would fail.
Azula’s eyes fell on that hand, face going rigid. Her fires snuffed out and she turned around and ran, beckoning her little army behind her.
Zuko’s arms fell to the ground and he sagged against the dusty road, gulping down heaves of air and fog.
~*~
Zuko wasn’t allowed to surprise Azula.
Alone on the ocean, secure in the dim light of her cabin on her brilliant, secret barge, Azula watched her two friends looking everywhere except at her. They had seen her run.
Her soldiers had seen her run.
From Zuko.
On her writing table sat a half-written letter to her father with no mention of that. She had filled it with news of her cousin’s sudden continued life, and a plea.
Ty Lee kept her eyes on the hand that had betrayed her under Zuko’s bending. “Nobody could expect him to do that to you, Azula,” she soothed. “You’ll have a plan for him next time.”
Azula turned to her sharply. “Of course.” That wasn’t even the question.
Mai reclined on the cabin window seat, feigning sleep, peering out the cabin window at the Earth Kingdom shoreline disappearing behind them. She turned over, eyes closed, and opened one, gazing sidelong at her princess, but she didn’t speak. Her relentless, emotionless gaze rubbed against Azula’s already frayed and fractured temper and unnerved her.
“Get out!” she raged at them both, and watched through eyes narrowed into slits with distrust as they left her alone with her letter.
~*~
Zuko drifted in and out of hazy, nervous sleep, too tired to stay awake, too wary of his sister’s return to stay asleep. When his eyes were open, he blinked blearily at his uncle and his cousins, (Rinzee was his cousin now wasn’t she?) together obscuring the signs of the battle from the soon-to-be waking Earth Kingdom. They extinguished the small grass fires and the burning tree in which Zuko had hidden with Ruili. They swept away the footprints, buried the ashes, and quietly destroying the evidence of the strange sort of battle that took place when one side was bent on capture and the other desperately trying not to kill.
Each time he closed his eyes again, his dreams simmered with his sister and father’s fire.
Iroh bent down and patted his nephew’s shoulder. The same creeping age and fatigue that had lulled him to sleep as he had tried to keep watch, left his wrinkled skin ashen. “Get up,” he said softly, glancing over his shoulder at the moon, hanging low in the western sky. “We have to go.”
Zuko rose to his feet, listing with exhaustion. His hat hung around his neck on its string, weighing so much heavier on him than straw should be able to. He pulled it up over his head and straightened it low over his eyes.
Lu Ten slung his makeshift pack over his shoulder as Rinzee hefted her softly whimpering daughter into her arms. Glowing from the side of the road he swore he could see the Painted Lady smiling at him, giving him a pleased nod as she stood with her hand in her husband’s, next to a pretty woman with white hair and ribbons billowing around her body and a thin, dour man with blue eyes and dark skin. Lu Ten’s hands balled into fists, weariness leaching the force from his voice. “We have to get off the road.”
Zuko swallowed and nodded, shaking himself to stay awake. “I know a stream.”
As he spoke, the white haired woman and the dour man came to stand beside him, but Zuko couldn’t see them. Yue laid a hand on his arm, and even though he didn’t know it was there, he remembered the pathetic way he had lain in the freezing meltwater under her pitying eye. The prickle of his cousins’ eyes on him, wary and calculating, examining this strange new creature who had the power to bend people. He shivered. He felt so cold.
Zuko stepped off the dusty road and onto the grassy, sloping gully-side, between the two fire spirits, and only Lu Ten could watch the four spirits together fracture into wisps of light and blow away. Resigned, he moved to follow, his father and Rinzee with Ruili after him as Zuko led their shambling, weary group through the grass and the predawn, to the stream.
The End
