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The sky is still black when Zuko wakes him up, so early in the morning that there is no glimmer of light by which to see. Aang tries to roll over and nestle his face deeper into Appa’s warm fur, but Zuko’s hand shakes his shoulder again, insistent, so Aang swallows his sleepy protests and, smothering a yawn, follows him out of the Temple into the darkened courtyard.
The stones are cold against his bare feet. Wind whips hollowly through the courtyard, winding through the crevices of the mountainside with little echoing sighs. Aang shivers, just once, then drops down next to Zuko on the courtyard floor. He cannot make out Zuko's expression. Almost the only thing Aang can see is the little flame dancing in Zuko’s palm, a single flicker of brightness in the night.
His sifu often begins their training sessions before the sun rises, while their chi is still low from the rise of the moon, when there is no one else awake to observe. Zuko’s a different person when they’re alone like this. He’ll talk to Aang, quiet and serious, his dark hair falling in his eyes. He is patient with Aang’s mistakes, and his hands are gentle when he guides Aang’s faltering movements. Aang’s so often unfocused and impatient and distracted. But Zuko is surprisingly intent, focused, determined in a way Aang’s never seen from him before. He isn’t anything like Aang thought he would be as a teacher.
If only the others could see him like this, Aang thinks with a pang. They’d like him.
Zuko brings his flame close to his face. Aang can just make out his thoughtful expression. The rest of his form blends into the shadows, beyond the reach of the delicate firelight. “Show me your fire, Aang,” he murmurs.
Aang closes his eyes, then concentrates, gathering his chi. He tightens his focus, and there—a tiny golden flame appears in his own palm.
“I did it,” he whispers, awed. Creating fire is just as surprising and wondrous as the first time he’d done it. But now—the flame crackles and expands, burning hungrily, and Aang shrinks away from his own fire without meaning to.
The light in his palm wavers. Then, like a candle snuffed out by a swift wind, it flickers and dies.
Zuko shifts next to him.
“You’re still afraid,” he says pensively. “Even after meeting the dragons.”
Aang hunches his shoulders.
“I know I shouldn't be,” he admits softly. “Everyone’s counting on me. I’ve got to learn firebending, or else—” He finds he can’t go on.
“Or else what?”
“I can’t tell you,” Aang says despairingly. “You wouldn't want to keep teaching me if you knew all of it.”
“Do you trust me?” Zuko asks, very seriously, and Aang looks at him. He does trust Zuko, feels safe here with him. Maybe even safe enough to tell him about his fears, the worries he hasn’t been able to tell anyone else. Aang thinks if anyone would understand, it’s him.
“Yes,” he answers. “I trust you.”
“Then talk to me. Tell me what's bothering you.”
Aang draws himself up, wrapping his arms around his legs. He rests his chin on his knees.
“I’ll never catch up,” he confesses. “There’s too much to learn, I’ll never master firebending in time. I’ll never be good enough, strong enough to—”
He can’t say it. Not to Zuko, not even to himself.
“To kill my father,” Zuko finishes for him. His voice is oddly expressionless. "I know that's what you have to do."
Aang shakes his head, trying to shake away the tears that have welled up in the corners of his eyes.
“You’re not afraid of your fire,” Zuko says. “You’re afraid of yourself. What you have to do. What you might become.”
He’s right.
“I’m supposed to be better than this,” Aang whispers. “I’m the Avatar. I have a destiny. But what if the time comes, and I can't do what I'm supposed to do?”
“You’ll be enough,” Zuko says. “You already are.”
Night is beginning to fade. Already the stars are disappearing, replaced by the gray light of early dawn. Aang can just make out Zuko now, the way he sits curled in on himself, with his hands folded neatly in his lap, one on top of the other.
“I don't know how to stop being scared,” Aang tells him unhappily. "What if I never get past this?"
Zuko considers his words. “Tell me about your fear. What does it feel like, when you're afraid?”
Aang thinks about it. “I feel it in my stomach. In my back. I feel—tight. In my chest. It’s hard to breathe.”
He can barely make out the way Zuko nods his head. “That’s where I feel it, too.”
“You?” Aang finds it hard to believe. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen Zuko afraid, not ever. He scrubs his a fold of his tunics across his eyes. “But you didn't seem scared at all.”
“Well, I was,” says Zuko dryly. “I just learned not to show it. But I was afraid, almost all the time.”
Aang absorbs his words. "What were you afraid of?"
"Failing my father," Zuko answers. "Never being able to come back home. That nothing would ever change--that I'd go on, trapped forever on that ship, never able to escape. But my uncle said that I would never master firebending if I couldn’t master myself. If I couldn’t work through my fear and my shame. He was right.”
Clouds are drifting up the cliff sides, shrouding the courtyard in fog.
“What else are you afraid of, Aang?" Zuko asks. "Tell me."
Aang closes his eyes.
“That I'll hurt Katara again," he says slowly. "That I'll be too frightened to face the Fire Lord again, that I'll run away like I did before. If I’d just stayed at the Air Temple, I could have been a real Avatar, I could have learned all the elements like I was supposed to. I could have stopped the Fire Nation from—what they did.”
He feels lighter, just saying it. He gulps for air, and feels a hand descending on his shoulder.
“Just breathe,” Zuko murmurs. “Let it out. Breathe. Now, try to find your fire again—easy, easy.”
Aang presses his hands together and calls up his little flame. He can’t help but flinch from it again. But Zuko leans over and cups his hands around Aang’s fingers, protecting the little light from being blown out again by the wind that whips through the wide columns and parapets of the Temple.
“Uncle always said that fire comes from the breath. That breathing was the foundation of control. I hated it when he said that, but he was right about that too. He said that if you were really breathing deep, there wouldn’t be any room in your body for fear. So just keep breathing.”
Zuko’s hands are dry and rough, but his touch is gentle. “You need to get comfortable around your fire again," he tells Aang. "So just sit for a while and play with your flames. Get used to holding them. We’ve got time.”
They really haven’t. But he trusts Zuko, so he shifts his weight on the courtyard stones and concentrates on keeping his flame dancing between his fingers.
“Show me,” Aang says implusively.
“Show you what?”
“How you do it. Play. What do you do with your fire, when no one else is looking?”
“I haven’t done anything like that in years,” Zuko says. “Not since I was banished. At first. . . I was scared of my fire, for a long time. And then when I wasn’t, I had too much to do. My teachers always told me that fire’s a tool, not a toy.”
“But the dragons,” Aang prompts him. “That’s not what the dragons said.”
Life, the dragons had shown him, life and light and joy, all mixed together, impossible to separate, this is the meaning of fire.
Zuko hesitates. Aang pokes an elbow into his side.
“Come on, Zuko. I really want to see.”
“Okay, okay.”
Zuko reaches out and deftly plucks Aang’s fire out of his hand. He rolls the flame from palm to palm, letting it flicker on his fingertips. Then ribbons of flame, pretty things, bands of copper and gold glide between Zuko’s fingers.
His expression is quite serious, even as he sends the ribbons streaming up and down in the air so that the flames flutter like silk, and Aang wonders, as he has before, what had crushed all the gentleness and playfulness out of him, what had happened to make him so sober all the time.
In Zuko’s palm, the flames brighten and grow, rising into the air. Then the ribbons rise up to caress his face, curling around his neck like a sleepy dragonet. The dragonnet lifts its head and shakes its whiskers, sending sparks flying.
“Useless,” Zuko says, almost apologetically.
“No, it’s beautiful,” Aang says, watching the dragonet dancing through the air. He’s captivated by watching Zuko making something so intricate out of something so dangerous.
Zuko lets the dragonet coil itself around his forearm.
“Azula’s fire was brighter,” he says resentfully. “Even before she mastered the blue flames. She could do this better.”
“But this is yours. Your fire. She couldn't bend fire like you.” Aang struggles to put the words to what he wants to say. “Azula’s precise. Unflappable. You can't be like that and do what you just did. You make it beautiful. You make it flow. It’s special.”
Zuko looks at him out of the corner of his eye. “You think so?”
“Yeah. I really do.”
He watches Zuko play with the dragonet for a while, sending it dancing through the courtyard, winding it around columns and leaping across the fountain.
“Why’d you stop playing with your fire?” Aang asks eventually.
“Well. I guess I grew up.”
He’s not going to tell Aang about the scar, he’s not. This is the nearest he’s come to mentioning it at all. And Aang knows better than to ask. He knows a little bit, but he doesn’t know, not Zuko’s story, not told in Zuko’s own words. Maybe one day Zuko will want to share it with him.
“That’s sad,” Aang observes.
Zuko shrugs, determinedly casual. “It’s just what happens.”
“It shouldn’t. That’s not how it’s supposed to be.”
“Maybe not. But that’s how it is.”
Aang doesn't know what to say to him, doesn't know if there's even anything Zuko wants him to say. So instead he inches closer to Zuko, hoping that his presence might be enough.
“I used to think that my father was trying to make me stronger,” Zuko says unexpectedly. His hand drifts up to his face, covering his eye. “Burning me like that. My instructors always taught me that firebending comes from strong emotion. From anger. I thought he might be giving me something to draw on, to make my firebending stronger. He’d always said that I was too weak to master my bending.”
“But it didn’t make you stronger, did it,” Aang says softly.
“No. It just hurt.”
They both sit silently. The dragonet spins around itself in midair, a continuous circle.
“But Uncle. I wanted him to teach me all the advanced sets, the most powerful techniques. I thought I needed to be stronger, to be able to fight—well, you . But he wouldn’t teach me any of those things.”
“So what did he teach you, then?”
Zuko huffs, something that’s almost a laugh, coming from him. “He taught me lightning redirection. He taught me the breath of fire. I thought they were just tricks. Silly things, to waste my time.”
His profile is pensive. “I didn’t realize until after I’d left him that he’d been teaching me what I’d need to save my life.”
“I’m glad he did,” Aang says honestly. “I wouldn’t want anyone but you for my teacher.”
Zuko makes a noise of disagreement. “Uncle would be better. He knows more than me.”
“But you can teach me more than just how to bend fire. Nobody else could teach me what you know about how to stop being afraid.”
Zuko tilts his head, considering. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
The dragonet is shedding sparks as it twists above their heads. Aang puts up a hand and catches one on his finger. He doesn't even feel a sting.
“You know, it’s funny. I hated you for so long,” Zuko admits. “You had friends and you had. You had your destiny. You were important. You were even important to my father. My father, who didn’t even want me, he wanted you, even all twisted and wrong, the way it was. He wanted you, and I was so jealous.”
Aang stares at him. “You were jealous of me?”
“I wanted a destiny like that so badly. I guess because it would meant that all the bad stuff that happened would have meant something. That everything that I went though would have mattered.”
“That makes sense. I can see why you’d think that.”
Zuko lifts a shoulder, then drops it. “It was easier to chase you all around the world than it was to face the truth of what my father was. It was easier to blame you than to accept that he was a monster.”
Aang nods. He thinks he understands. “Well, I always knew I wanted to be your friend.”
“But I was so awful,” Zuko says frankly. “I hunted you. I tried to kill you.”
“Well, yeah, but you were also amazing.”
Zuko looks at him sideways, out from under the fringe of hair that’s always hanging in his eyes. Aang’s started to think he likes it that way, being hidden from sight. A way of controlling how others see him, maybe.
“You thought that?”
“Ever since Pohuai,” Aang supplies. “I thought you were incredible. And we were pretty evenly matched when we fought. I learned from you, even back when we were fighting all the time.”
Zuko releases a breath of air. Long strands of dark hair flutter away from his face. “I learned from you, too.”
The dragonet has come back to their corner of the courtyard. Aang watches the way the dragonet frolicks around Zuko's silent figure for a while, mesmerized by the play of light and shadow, until a warm sleepy feeling starts to spread through his arms and legs. He leans into the warmth of Zuko’s shoulder, and Zuko lets him.
“You think I could learn to do that?” he mumbles into the thin red silk of Zuko’s sleeve.
“You’re pretty smart,” his sifu allows. “I bet you could, easy.”
“You’ll teach me how?”
“Yeah. I’ll teach you.”
Zuko takes his hand and slips it between his own palm and the dancing flame so that Aang’s the one holding the fire. The flame is prickly against his palm and temperamental, flaring and popping sparks every now and then. Kind of like Zuko himself. But it doesn’t burn his skin, and it doesn’t flare out of control either.
Aang’s too surprised and sleepy to be alarmed, and the flame twists and coils slowly in his hand as Zuko moves both their hands in a slow curving motion. Zuko’s fingers are warm and black with coal and there are angry red blisters on his fingertips, and Aang has never felt so safe in his life.
Zuko is so angry and reckless and stubborn and he is the only person Aang can ever imagine being the one to teach him, Zuko who works so hard and doesn’t remember how to play, who keeps standing back up even after being hurt again and again, stubborn and persistent to a fault, Zuko who bends his fire even though it frightens him, who never feels safe unless he’s surrounded by the very element that hurt him, and Aang wants to be just like him; Zuko who never gives up, not even on Aang.
The sun is almost at the horizon now, and he can make out Zuko clearly now: The damp fringe of hair that hangs into his eyes, the line between his eyebrows that appears whenever he is concentrating very intently on whatever it is he means to do.
There is so much Aang can learn from him.
“Here,” Zuko murmurs. “You see?”
Aang looks at him.
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “I do.”