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The Fire Nation has refined the display of sympathies to an art form, so Ursa’s first letter is identical to thirty others lying unread in Iroh’s tent.
Her second letter comes too quickly, in her own faint hand rather than her secretary’s. Between the lines it bears warnings about further losses, about his brother’s soaring ambitions. Iroh reads only the first paragraph before looking away.
/
Ozai hasn’t burnt Iroh from the family tree by the time he comes home from Ba Sing Se. Still there is no official welcome, no family waiting at the door.
Ursa’s daughter ambushes him first as he walks through the palace square, dashing from spirits-know-where into the colonnade. She’s breathless, her top-knot askew with most of her hair spilling free, and Iroh wonders for one surreal moment if she’ll attempt an embrace.
Instead she stays far away and explodes into giggles.
“Princess!” Azula’s attendants rush forward too late, one pulling her away by the hand. The others express their overlapping apologies: “We don’t know how she keeps getting free, and we offer our deepest sympathies-”
The girl’s laughter keeps crackling through the halls. But she always was a strange one, and Iroh puts this too from his mind.
/
“Where is my father?”
“The Fire Lord is visiting Ember Island.”
“And my brother?”
“He left recently for the southern front.”
“Ursa?”
“She…” The servant delivering Iroh’s tray shifts, a shadow darkening his brow. “She is also away from the palace.”
Too weary to pry, Iroh dismisses him and shifts all his attention to his dinner. His stomach full, his limbs impossibly heavy, he falls asleep and dreams of ashes slipping away.
/
He wakes hours too early, gasping for breath, and for a moment he still sees the red on his hands. He grabs his robe and stumbles out into the hallway.
“Your Royal Highness, we must not have heard you call-”
He waves away their concerns. “Where is Zuko?”
/
The physician’s hall.
Iroh goes in his slippers and robe, not caring about the looks the servants shoot him. He thrusts open the hall’s doors.
“The young prince can have no visitors,” the court’s main physician informs him, with a new weariness on her brow. “It is the first time he’s fallen asleep since-”
“I will be quiet.” And Iroh is, creeping forth with some unutterable fear that Zuko too lies in pieces. Deathly quiet, he pushes open the door, ready to find another scene of gore. His sleep-addled mind conjures the memory so easily, how his own hands were red and his son was no longer breathing-
“He isn’t here.” Iroh spins around and leaves the hall, still led by the dazed logic of a dream, not caring as the doctors shove past him into the room. They will find a perfectly made empty bed and an open window, its ghost-white curtains fluttering.
The physician’s hall stands apart from the palace, a tall building jutting from a flat lawn, but as he circles the building he cannot spot another living soul. There is no sign of his nephew, not until he looks up to a rooftop terrace above the hall, ringed by a wrought-iron railing. A small figure in white sits balanced on the iron, legs hanging over the edge, and for one eerie moment, Iroh mistakes it for a spirit.
He takes the stairs two at a time, barging out the door at the top onto the terrace before stopping, breathless. The phantom in white glances back at him, and it’s Zuko’s face, his features both young and impossibly aged, his skin unnaturally pale in the moonlight. When he looks at his uncle, there’s no spark of recognition, only a flicker of fear so brief Iroh hopes he imagined it.
Zuko turns away, looking out once more. Iroh steps forward, searching for some visible sign of injury, but he sits still and perfectly straight, face blank, hair let down in a sheet of jet black. The skin revealed by his long white hospital gown is smooth and unmarred.
“I could jump,” Zuko says, and Iroh cannot move.
“Or you could push me if you’d like,” he adds, matter-of-fact like he’s only observing that the fire lilies smell lovely tonight. “We could also wait for the lightning.”
Iroh looks up, grotesquely hopeful. It’s a clear summer sky without a thundercloud in sight.
“Prince Zuko,” he ventures, “I do not know what you mean.”
“I mean you can kill me like Lu Ten.”
Iroh flinches. Though he casts about for words, language has wholly deserted him.
“Sorry,” Zuko says abruptly, “that sounded wrong. Sorry. I’m not really here right now.”
Iroh wants to reach out and hold him, to assure himself that Zuko hasn’t been replaced by some deceiver from the spirit world, but he fears the boy might fall if touched. The image looks real enough, but Zuko’s words are wrong, and his voice is as numb as Iroh has felt these past weeks, and his face-
(There is a creature called Koh in the spirit world, who steals the face of anyone who dares show a real expression. Zuko speaks like he’s addressing Koh now, like he’ll be stolen if he betrays the slightest glimmer of feeling.)
(Like he’s already been stolen.)
“And where are you, if not here?” asks Iroh, trying to unspool the logic of this nightmare.
“I feel like I’m watching a play. It’s not very well-written.”
“What happened?”
Iroh’s gaze floats to the palace, its pristine red towers flickering with lights. Zuko stares at him, eyes narrowed.
He says, “Why are you here?”
“You were not in your bed, so I worried for your safety. What happened?” Iroh repeats, more gently.
Zuko waits too long to answer, his jaw trembling. “There was a training accident.”
Even through the daze, Iroh notes the awful lie.
“And what happened,” Iroh says, eyes now drifting to the horizon towards Ba Sing Se, “in this training accident?”
“I don’t remember.”
He says it swiftly, and Iroh cannot guess whether it’s true.
“Please,” he whispers, “Prince Zuko. Come back to bed.”
After a moment, his nephew obeys, smoothly swinging his legs back over the railing. His gown flutters up, revealing a red feather-light scar that branches like a tree, trailing from his ankle up, up.
/
The servants tell Iroh the young prince was in a training accident.
The doctors tell him that he’s suffered electrical burns, that the tree-shaped scars that come only from lightning have spared his face and hands and claimed the rest of him. They tell him that Zuko should have died, and when Iroh frowns they hastily correct themselves, clarifying that they only expected a child’s heart to fail immediately under such pressure.
When he asks how a child could sustain such damage, they too tell him it’s a training accident.
/
Azula always lies.
It was a mantra of Zuko’s, but Iroh sees no other option. His niece laughs again when he asks, but there’s terror glinting in her eyes as she tells him a story so warped, so hideous Iroh instantly knows it as truth.
She tells him that his brother sought an audience with the Fire Lord while she and Zuko hid behind the throne room’s curtains. She explains that Ozai tried to saw Iroh off the family tree and steal his throne, and that the Fire Lord’s rage at his second son’s presumption burned like an inferno. Perfectly matter-of-fact, she observes that the Fire Lord wished to do justice and thus turned to revenge, demonstrating Iroh’s pain at losing his first-born son by sacrificing Ozai’s own.
She can’t tell him who threw the lightning- Ozai or Azulon- but she’s unmistakably clear whom they threw it for.
“They did it to honor Lu Ten, Uncle. And you.”
/
Forgetting Ba Sing Se, Iroh thinks of burning Caldera to the ground.
/
“Would you like to try some tea?” a kindly uncle murmurs, seated by his nephew’s bedside. “An Earth Kingdom blend?”
Zuko shakes his head.
“Perhaps a friendly game of pai sho?”
“No, thank you.”
Iroh is there when the doctors tell Zuko that his heart beats out of time now. It’s only a matter of time before the lightning finishes its work. The boy shows no sign of surprise; he must have guessed already by listening to his own body. Though the doctors wait, Zuko shows no sign of anything.
/
Iroh seeks out Ursa in the shadows of the city keep.
“You aren’t supposed to be here.”
“Neither are you.”
“It’s hardly unexpected-” she smiles, as poised, self-possessed and miserable in her cell as in the palace- “when one tries to kill the Fire Lord.”
“Did you mean to succeed?”
“No, I only needed the guards to get Zuko out. How is he now?”
“He is still breathing.”
It’s all he can say. Ursa’s face falls.
“If you did not mean to kill the Fire Lord, then perhaps he will forgive you-”
“Only if I beg and grovel,” she spits.
“Lie if you must-” his voice takes on a sharpness he thought lost to the war- “but get yourself out. You have a daughter, and for the first time, she doubts her father. There is hope for her yet.”
“Is Zuko gone, then?”
Iroh looks away.
/
He strolls through the palace’s quiet halls, a bastion of serenity that’s set the world on fire. A home that renders its own sons as ghosts.
(These halls are haunted. Iroh has slept and eaten and run through half his store of tea leaves, yet still he hears Lu Ten in every echoing footstep.)
The fire lilies bloom fragrant, choking. They entwine with another smell to draw him towards the center of the palace- the scent of delicious, roasting meat. He steps into the central garden to see the blinding summer sun, baking down on five smoking masses in the middle of the pond.
The dream snaps.
Iroh cannot look away.
So he charges forward, fearing that Ozai’s won, that he’s at last warped Zuko and made him sadistic enough to belong on the family tree, though by nature the boy was another species entirely. Zuko seems to ignore his approach, sitting statue-still. He only lifts his eyes when Iroh reaches the pool.
“It’s not like I wanted to,” he says before Iroh can speak. His brow crumples, but he smooths it out too quickly. “They’re just so small. And little. And nobody but- nobody cares about them.”
“Every life matters,” Iroh says carefully. It should be the safest statement, but Zuko scowls at him.
“Nobody cares,” he shoots back, not stopping when his voice breaks, when his eyes well up with red. “And I’m not going to let Azula get to them after-”
He stops, and Iroh fears he might never start again.
“So it’s nicer-” he raises a hand quickly, violently, to scrape his cheeks dry- “to save them pain and make it fast.”
(Iroh thought Zuko had sleep-walked onto the roof that first night, caught in an aimless, foggy dream. With dawning horror, he realizes Zuko could have made the climb while wide awake, with a well-defined purpose.)
“And we’re at war,” the boy continues. His voice cracks, and he charges on anyway. “And heroes are dying every day. So why, in a world where Lu Ten dies in battle, should a bunch of stupid, useless turtleducks get to live?”
(Iroh has considered variations of the same question, though he asked them only of himself.)
Iroh moves to grab his nephew, to hold him tight and close. He knows how to read the spaces between the lines of a poem. There is a question Zuko’s asking that’s not about turtleducks at all.
“Every life matters,” he repeats, burying his face in Zuko’s hair.
“Some matter more than others.”
“You might be right,” Iroh replies. “To me, now, you matter the most.”
Zuko shatters at last, his back quaking as Iroh rubs a gentle hand back and forth, holding him together through one breath after another.
(His nephew is still breathing. The way he weeps for the turtleducks shows a kind heart still beating, locked down deep under a lightning-tree scar.)
“Would you like to get away, Prince Zuko? Leave the palace and the hospital wing for the sea?”
“If you want,” he mumbles into his uncle’s damp shoulder, and it’s the closest he’s gotten to interest. Iroh clings to that.
At first he only thinks of the house Ozai keeps on Ember Island. But he was a general, he is the Dragon of the West, and his ambitions expand rapidly. His brother and father hurt Zuko in his name, in his name and Lu Ten’s. Iroh imagines a world where their legacy is Zuko’s death and finds he cannot accept it.
“Then I will find us a boat,” he murmurs. There are healers among the waterbenders; he will smuggle Zuko behind their walls. He will keep this child’s flame alive.
(He will take Zuko for himself and save him, a matter of both justice and revenge. Ozai and Azulon shall lose both their first-born sons with one stroke.)
(The family tree is diseased, and Iroh wonders, idly, if he might afterwards go looking for the Avatar.)
/
With a crew chosen from his most loyal soldiers and an impossible mission, Iroh boards a ship. He’s briefly looked into the legal consequences of his unsanctioned departure and expects to be banished in short order. His crew will follow him regardless.
“We are losing Zuko,” he tells them, “and we must find him again.”
He does not intend to fail. He cannot, when his honor- and his family’s and his son’s- depends on it.
Zuko stands beside him on the deck. His mind comes and goes, and once again he’s staring forwards without being entirely here. Iroh placed a cup of tea in his hands, and there it remains, held gently, forgotten.
Subtly, Iroh warms it again. The heat makes his nephew start, and he takes a sip and lets out a sigh that might just come from contentment.
Zuko’s still breathing.
(Where there’s air, there’s hope of fire.)