Work Text:
Once, when Zuko was very small and his father was still proud (but not very proud, as he once had been), they spent the afternoon on Ember Island watching the waves and meditating.
Zuko was five. His sister had mastered flame before walking and Zuko had no flame at all. His mother and the Fire Sages said this was normal, but he could feel his father’s attention drifting away, like the model naval ship Zuko had put in the stream once. The current had carried it away and although Zuko spent hours looking for it, he never found where that little boat had been shipwrecked. (Maybe it had made it out to sea, and sailed the open ocean, where it was the best ship in the whole world.)
He thought, if only he tried harder or was just a little smarter, he could, if not become a bender, still be valuable to his father.
So he worked very hard at bending and trying, and being smarter, and while it would never be good enough for Ozai, it did have the secondary effect of making Zuko good at being very stubborn.
(He was very good at all these things, but he was never allowed to believe he was)
What Zuko did not know was that no one was good enough for Ozai, because Ozai himself was not good enough in his own eyes. There was a hole in Ozai that he could not fill. He had hoped a beautiful woman and the descendant of Roku would be enough, and when she wasn’t, he hoped the son they made would make him feel whole. But the boy had been born inauspiciously and was weak. The woman was beautiful but distant, like one of the statues that dotted the gardens.
And the hole remained.
Ozai was the second son, so he would eventually be given his own manor and land. He was not a renowned warrior like his brother, who was charismatic and decisively violent and who curried their father’s affection more than Ozai ever could.
Iroh’s son was just as charismatic and strategic as his father, but with a measure of equanimity that he must have gotten from his mother’s side.
There were already rumors that Lu Ten might finally broker peace, once he ascended to the Dragon Throne.
So Ozai wasn’t even better than his nephew, and his own son was subpar, terrible, even, by every measure that mattered.
One of the Sages said, “The boy shows great promise but it is not rage or anger that drives him. Perhaps he might learn better in an older method, before Sozin?”
Ozai had the Sage banished to a temple in an impoverished region best known for tea, which it had not produced in fifty years, since the land had been poisoned with mine tailings.
Ozai thought himself better, at least, than this old Sage, so he sat on the shores with Zuko and said, “Breathe, my son, and think of what angers you and gives you life.”
Zuko meditated and thought, and in time said, “I’m not angry, father. I am happy to be with you.”
Ozai hit his son. The boy held his cheek and stared at his father owlishly.
“You are weak,” Ozai stood, shaking the sand from his robes.
“Yes, father,” Zuko agreed, his cheek reddening.
Ozai strode towards their seaward home.
That night, he took his rage out on his wife.
0o0o0o0o0o0o0o
Azula was clever in the ways her brother was not, and Ozai encouraged her tantrums, especially when they were against her brother or Ursa. He hated to see her toddle after her brother, her eyes bright with love.
She was young, so her propensity to misdirect her fire was high. One afternoon in late fall, she accidentally burned her brother as they played in the gardens. They came running to Ursa, Zuko’s eyes wet with tears, the flesh of his arm blistered and black, and Azula wailing.
“Very good, Azula,” Ozai hummed. “If your brother was worth anything at all, he would have been able to block it.”
He ignored the sharp look Ursa gave him as she pulled Zuko into her arms and carried him to the healing rooms.
Encouraging Azula’s violence towards her brother had two positive effects: a wedge developed between the siblings,
and
Zuko finally found his anger, and therefore, his flame.
Zuko was still not very good. Ozai felt the hatred towards his son curdle. How could he have made something so weak. It must have come from Ursa. Roku had been the Avatar, this was true, but he had been rightfully murdered by Sozin when he'd refused to support the Fire Lord in his intent to spread the light of the Fire Nation over the reductive savages of the other nations.
As his hatred towards his son, and by extension, his wife, grew, he finally found that he could fill the gaping hole, a maw of hatred that was sated with every hurt look Zuko gave him, every failed kata the boy performed, every failed attempt to prove himself.
But still, the boy loved him.
Because Ozai himself was not capable of love, he believed this made his son even weaker than he already was.
On the day that news of Lu Ten’s death reached the palace, Ozai held a celebration in his heart. The dead prince would not bring peace. He would not be written in the scrolls as one of the greatest Fire Lords to ever rule.
He would be little more than a footnote.
Ozai’s joy grew when he found out his brother had also been broken. The siege was called off. For the first time in his career, he had not led a decisive victory. He was an old, broken man, certainly too old to become Fire Lord, especially without an heir.
Azulon had always loved Iroh more than Ozai. This was a poorly concealed truth. He had recognized as a child that Ozai was missing something fundamental, something that made him nearly inhuman.
There is a story in the Fire Nation, of those who had lived their lives without honor and so, upon their death, are not returned to Agni’s pyre but instead are buried in the ground. Their souls are cursed to wander the lowlands and jungles as fire wisps. They lure wayward travelers to their deaths and no matter how many people they consume, it is never enough to fill the emptiness.
Many times, Azulon wondered if his younger son had wandered into a swamp and came back possessed by the cold fire of a fire wisp.
There are those, especially the citizens of the Southern Water Tribe, that likely considered Azulon a cruel man. But he tried to rule fairly; cultivated trade with the Earth Kingdom even as they warred, and did not encourage abject destruction when it wasn’t warranted.
He would not admit it, but Ozai frightened him.
He was also afraid for his grandson.
So when Ozai came to him and said, “Iroh is weak and broken, I should be named heir."
Azulon responded, “You will know the pain of losing your firstborn son.”
He called for his scribe and had the line of succession changed—Iroh would remain as the Crown Prince but he would raise Zuko as his own. The boy would become the heir apparent upon his death.
That evening he summoned Ursa to tell her his plans. However, as he drank from the tea she served, slightly sweet with an undercurrent of bitterness, he realized what Ursa understood from whatever she had heard, had been twisted in the telling.
He sighed. “It has been a pleasure, Princess Ursa. You are dismissed. Call for my scribe. Good luck, daughter.”
She gave him a peculiar look as she bowed. As he waited for his scribe, he wrote his last will and testament. He sealed it and handed it to his scribe.
“Give this to Iroh when he returns. Be gone before the sun rises, and do not return until my rightful heir takes the throne. Go to the estate of Piandao. You will be rewarded for your many years of hard work, Fat. A stipend will be sent to you.“
The scribe bowed.
It is said Azulon died in his sleep.
What became of Ursa has no official tale. One day, she simply ceased to exist, reduced to a footnote in the annals.
(Except for one account: that of a banished Fire Sage who drank spoiled tea and gathered rumors, scraps of stories that did not match the ones flowing out of the palace.)
0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o
On a fine spring day—high pressure settled over the Caldera, bright clouds scattered across the horizon like spun fire candy—the broken elder brother allowed his nephew in to the war council.
What happens next is known.
What followed surprised everyone, even Ozai, who had never learned to care for another human being, least of all his brother and son.
“I will share his banishment,” Iroh said. “To guide him. To bring him home again.”
Ozai did not grant them a farewell. He hoped to never see either of them ever again.
And so they set sail in a forgotten, rusting tub of a ship. Iroh slipped milk of the poppy into his nephew’s cup and prayed—not only to the spirits he had met, but especially to Agni—to save the boy, his nephew (his son), from death.
And the boy lived.