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"I'll say it," Zuko mumbled. "I haven't been the best commander lately. I've been a little distracted by some… personal drama."
The last two words rolled out of his mouth with quite some distaste. Drama was right. Just days after reaching the South Pole, a bright light had split the sky open with Zuko's chance to finally regain his honor and win the love and respect of his father. He'd then ignored his mentor's advice to drink a cup of calming tea and promptly crashed into a village full of grandmothers, one mouthy teenaged boy, a … well, waterbender would have been an overly generous description back then, and a pre-pubescent one-hundred-and-twelve-year-old all-powerful legendary being.
And now, more than ever, Zuko was obsessed with finding the young (old?) airbender named Aang.
Some of this ended up being said out loud, judging by Uncle's reaction. Not that Zuko could tell properly what Uncle's reaction was; the old man's face floated fuzzily above him, sometimes splitting into doubles of itself, one pair of furrowed eyebrows suddenly becoming four furry caterpillars crawling across Zuko's vision before merging back into two.
"Msorry," he murmured again. "Didn't mean to get the ship blown up. I'll make it up to the crew Uncle, I swear. Stupid pirates."
"Rest, Prince Zuko," came Uncle's voice, "You've been badly hurt. I thought you were dead --"
Uncle's broke off with what might have been a sob, and now Zuko knew that he had a concussion because Uncle wouldn't really cry if he died. Everybody knew that Lu Ten was Uncle's real son, not Zuko, no matter how much Zuko liked to pretend to himself that he had a big strong brother instead of a little mean sister, and a dad that smelled like dried leaves and gave hugs instead of… instead of…
"-- Everyone thinks you're dead."
Even Mom? Zuko wanted to ask, but then he realized that Mom was gone. Lu Ten was gone, too, and Father didn't care that Zuko was gone, so Zuko would have to make him care, and …
And actually, Everyone Thinks The Dramatic Lead Is Dead was a classic theater trope that Zuko could totally work with.
Because if Everyone Thinks Zuko Is Dead, Uncle could take that job that Zhao had offered him, and Zuko could go undercover and hitch a free ride to the North Pole to capture the Avatar.
"It's okay," Zuko tried to explain, but words were never his friends at the best of times and today they were especially clunky bricks that refused to line up evenly. He thought Uncle understood what he meant though, about how he could still get his honor back even after being blown up, because the caterpillars above Uncle's eyes didn't look so painfully scrunched up anymore.
"It's okay," Zuko told himself, and it must have been, because he was able to fall asleep after that.
Iroh wished his nephew didn't have to do this. It was a familiar feeling.
He wished his nephew hadn't had to do a lot of things. Hadn't had to fight an Agni Kai against his own father. Hadn't had to leave the only home he'd ever known at thirteen, half-blinded by fire and fully blinded by the love and loyalty that even Ozai hadn't managed to burn out of him. Hadn't been sent on a joke of an impossible mission, hadn't had myth turn to reality before his eyes, hadn't had to compete with the scheming, power-hungry Commander-turned-Admiral Zhao for his very right to carry out that mission with a scrap-yard ship and crew held together by willpower and shouting.
And now even that had been taken from him, and Zuko's only hope -- bar Iroh's only hope for the boy, that he would one day learn to lead a happy life away from Ozai's poison -- was to sneak on to Zhao's flagship in disguise.
Lu Ten had been far easier, obsessed with age-appropriate topics like girls and gambling, rather than age-old spirit stories, but Iroh wasn't going to hold that against his nephew. He would, however, protest Zuko's plan to enlist as a footsoldier. It was a testament as to how much the prince was hurting that he'd agreed to Iroh's suggestion of interning -- especially after Iroh had not-so-subtly reminded him of how that had gone the last time, and the few remaining spots of unblemished skin on Zuko's face had turned bright red.
"The most impenetrable wall is but a bump in the landscape when viewed from a great height," Iroh intoned solemnly as he reluctantly slid the skull faceplate into place, relegating Prince Zuko to the nameless masses. He paused for a breath, recalling what happened the last time he'd quoted a proverb before Zuko ventured out in disguise, and hastily clarified his meaning: "Think of this as getting a fresh perspective."
His nephew nodded sharply and squared his shoulders.
Iroh didn't want to let him go. True, he'd never tried shield his nephew from the world as much as he'd tried to prepare him for it, yet the parental instinct to burn the world before he watched his child walk into the belly of the beast remained.
"Let's intern." Zuko declared, voice firm, and walked out.
Iroh didn't follow him.
One does not simply walk onto Admiral Zhao's bridge. Lieutenant Nariaki had learned this the hard way, and now, for his troubles, he was the intern coordinator. But hey, at least he was still alive, even though he was psychologically scarred for life.
Which was more than could be said about the former Crown Prince, Nariaki thought, eyeing the sketch accompanying the press release that Private Izumi had just handed to him. He looked back up across the desk at his second-in-command, trusting that she would feel the pain of dealing with utter incompetents that was pulsing throughout his posture.
They'd gotten the dregs before of course, but this latest batch was unpalatably bitter. With Zhao commandeering crews left and right, the intern office was being handed anyone troublesome or just straight up too stupid to be trusted with anything more than beverage orders. Case in point, whichever ersatz sketch artist had been assigned to draw the Prince's face for his death announcement.
Nariaki pointed at the patch of dark shading that could be interpreted as a scar. "She put it on the wrong side." He drew out the last word until it ended in a world-weary laugh. Cynically, he wondered if the universe could hand him another intern who could actually draw. Or follow directions, but that might be too much to ask.
It seemed as if the universe had granted part of his request; an unfamiliar armored form was descending the ladder into the intern office. Office was a bit of a euphemism; the porthole-less space couldn't seem to decide if it was a cargo bay or a stable, yet it somehow managed to convey exactly what Zhao thought of the people who worked there.
"Hey guys, I'm Kuzon, the new intern," said Kuzon, the new intern.
Nariaki stared at the skull faceplate. Okay, so this one could at least read the very large notice that said keep your helmet on at all times, which immediately put him a step ahead of the crowd.
"OK boomer. Right?" asked Kuzon hopefully, dashing Nariaki's budding hopes for someone remotely capable.
No. Wrong. Definitely wrong. Was this some weird colony slang? Whatever it was Nariaki didn't like it. It made him feel… dated and irrelevant, and he was in fact only thirty-three and jaded. Whether that was a result of existing in Zhao's general vicinity or from managing interns he wasn't quite sure, but he hardly felt out of touch.
"OK boomer," Kuzon repeated, and Nariaki stopped trading confused looks with Izumi to see if anyone else knew what this guy was talking about.
Crewman Wei, seeking the human interaction he wasn't going to get in the Human Resources office, was giving newly-demoted Crewman Ayumi an epic side-eye. She was doing her best to avoid everyone else in the room, so the effort was wasted on her but at least it reassured Nariaki that he wasn't the only one doubting Kuzon's sanity.
Reassurance was on a sliding scale, here in the intern office. Nariaki forced a chuckle out. "All right," he said, for lack of anything else to say.
"Okay," said Kuzon, who apparently did not lack things to say. "Hey, so what do you guys think, that when Prince Zuko captures the Avatar for the second time, he'll go with him?"
Kuzon must not have read the news, Nariaki mused. Kids these days, getting all their information from the tweeting of little birds instead of from the strong, reliable claws of messenger hawks.
"Who cares?" Ayumi intoned from her crate-seat next to her crate-desk, in the tones of one who had no artistic talent whatsoever and was not afraid to admit it.
"I do," growled Kuzon, getting up in her face in a way very reminiscent of their fleet commander. "I do."
Ayumi looked much less creeped out than she would have been had it actually been Zhao, but that was perfectly understandable. No one did creepy like Zhao. "Okay," was all she said to that, probably deciding against informing the new intern that she'd just drawn, however badly, a picture of the prince in question because he was dead.
Speaking of which…
"Hey kid, can you draw?" asked Nariaki, and then remembered that he didn't actually need to ask. "Draw Prince Zuko from memory," he ordered. Since the guy was so obsessed with him, and it was a fifty-fifty shot as to whether he put the scar on the right side. Left side? Correct side.
Ayumi happily made way at her drawing crate, and the rest of the interns crowded around Kuzon because they had nothing better to do at the moment then smother a young artist in overly critical feedback.
Nariaki sighed, shook his head, and went back to paperwork.
Eventually Kuzon stomped over -- was he not used to the armored boots or did he just think walking worked that way? -- and slammed a paper on the desk. Nariaki looked at the blue-and-white striped-and-horned demon face adorning it, and snorted. "Nice, making fun of Zhao, I see."
He would never not approve that, although this was to remain strictly off the record.
"Yes," replied the intern in the shifty tones of an outright lie. "That is what I was doing."
…Okay, so it seemed like Kuzon was not actually trying to mock Zhao losing the Avatar to a spirit, and instead had used the full extent of his clearly limited artistic talent to make a serious attempt to draw Prince Zuko. "Right. Kuzon, you're on beverage duty."
On the bright side, Ayumi's original sketch was looking a whole lot better now.
Zuko had quickly learned that the interns here did all the grunt work. Grunt work that there hadn't been on the Wani, because everyone there could at least pretend to be freaking adults who filled out their own complaint forms for Zuko to burn without reading, fetched their own food and drinks, and wrangled their own Komodo-rhinos.
He was halfway to engineering when he remembered that he was on a much bigger ship than the Wani, and that the chief engineer or whoever was in charge of fuel invoices might have a cushy office instead of a hammock slung between rusty pipes. Zuko saw a soldier who had come from the direction of the engine room approaching, and stopped them to ask: "Do you know who's in charge of fuel invoices?"
The helmeted figure glanced at his name tag, then leaned over to skim the papers Zuko shoved under their nose. "Oh yeah, I think you're looking for.. these nuts," answered the soldier, demonstrating exactly what he meant by that before sauntering off.
"Hilarious," Zuko growled at the retreating figure, but oddly enough he felt unexpectedly lighthearted.
Because he'd know that insubordinate voice wracked with teenaged insecurities anywhere. What Zuko couldn't figure out was how Kazuto had the basic intelligence required to learn how to read. The bluffing made sense, he supposed; Kazuto had never known what was happening on the Wani either, even if he'd liked to pretend that he did.
Zuko resolutely squashed down on the traitorous part of his mind that said, it's nice to hear a familiar voice, and attributed that to that feeling of camaraderie one gets with fellow prisoners. He'd felt something similar with the Avatar, after all, fighting Zhao in perfect sync... maybe whatever this was was just something that Zhao inspired in people. No, Zuko corrected himself, shuddering; the only thing Zhao inspired in him was an overwhelming desire to be heavily armed and in a different maritime zone.
Yet it had been good to run into Kazuto and his constant need to show Zuko up. A rivalry that Zuko returned in spades, and far louder and with deck-scrubbing duty thrown in for good measure because he could. Maybe they were friends…
"… Said no one ever," Zuko finished out loud.
But strangely everything had stopped hurting for a second, Zuko realized as he resumed stomping down the hallway and the pain from his injuries hit him again.
He wondered why.
"The fleet is amassing in Yukinko Cove," proclaimed Admiral Zhao, marinating in the majestic reverberations of his favorite sound in the world -- his own voice.
The flow of what surely would have gone down in the history scrolls as one of the most inspiring routine command meeting introductory statements of all time was interrupted by one of his least favorite types of people in the world -- an intern.
Interns, who were down there with the fire-ants under his feet and banished princes. The latter of which Zhao had personally put in the dirt the other day, figuratively speaking. Literally speaking, Zhao would say under the waves, but he was clever with his turns of phrase like that.
"One Blue Star tea?" asked the intern in a voice decidedly inferior to Zhao's own rich caramel tones.
"That's mine," Zhao declared imperiously, with an impatient gesture at the pot the intern was holding out. "With rabiroo cream, yes."
"Ooooohhhhh." The idiot drew out the word as he watched the pot travel past him, borne on the hands of a minor league sycophant who thought he had half a chance of winning Zhao's favor. As if. "I'll go back."
Zhao sighed. The last thing he needed was another interruption to one of his speeches. "Don't go back. Cups?"
The negative answer was somehow written all over the intern's skull faceplate.
"Great!" Zhao exclaimed. If the numbskull hadn't even thought to bring cups he certainly wouldn't know that rabiroo cream actually meant the good spiced rum, and then what was the point of hot leaf juice in the first place? "We'll just suck it out of the little hole in the spout! Thank you," Zhao grabbed the intern's shoulder-piece and hauled him closer to examine the name etched into it, "Kuzon." He shoved the boy away with perfectly necessary excessive force, and waggled his fingers in a sarcastic wave. "Goodbye. Bye now. Goodbye."
Ugh. Kuzons. The fewer of them the better. Zhao was going to have to do something about that. He'd heard the schmucks who had to load the catapults had a high fatality rate. Come to think of it, that simpering colonel who'd grabbed the teapot was a Kuzon too, wasn't he? Zhao felt a twisted little grin spread across his face unquestionably handsome face. Oh goody.
Zuko stomped back down the hallway back to the kitchen with an enthusiasm he hadn't had since… well, since his last encounter with Zhao. How he hated that man. Irrationally. No, rationally. Perfectly rationally. What kind of devil was a jerk to waitstaff? Zhao, that's who. Which was fine, because Zuko would never stoop so low as to even accept any tips from that bastard, who assuredly under-tipped at every establishment he ever visited anyhow.
Zuko calmed himself down by imagining the back of Zhao's head sprouting a picturesque bloody splatter as Zuko smashed it against the wall like the smelly rotten egg-with-sideburns that it was. It wasn't Uncle's recommended calming-tea technique, but it did the trick.
So did vowing to never serve tea again in his life.
Kazuto stared at the back of the intern who had just stomped past, muttering in great detail about bloody murder.
"That intern is Prince Zuko, right?" he asked the empty air. Then shook the empty air out of his own head; it was impossible. Prince Zuko was dead, for starters, they'd all seen the wreckage, and anyway, the poor kid would never have had the basic social intelligence required to change his go-to alias from 'Lee' to 'Kuzon'.
Still. Kazuto didn't want to speak poorly of the dead, and in theory he wanted the spirit of his commander-slash-rival-but-definitely-not-a-friend to have gone somewhere pleasant, which was about the exact opposite of the intern office on Zhao's flagship. This place was so bad that Kazuto could honestly say he missed Zuko's yelling. Spirits, he even missed Hanako's yelling. Zhao's punishments for unintentional incompetence were so much more… creative.
Yup, the prince was better off dead, Kazuto grumbled to himself as he started the long walk back to hell.
The intern office was on fire.
Again.
Nariaki debated turning a blind eye as Kuzon smacked the printing press, insulted it, and then complained at it: "I just did that."
In the end, Nariaki had seen what he'd seen, and denial wouldn't get those flyers printed faster. "It thinks the paper tray is empty," he explained. If the right weight balance wasn't achieved, the mechanism wouldn't start. It was in the manual. Everything was in the manual, but the first and only qualification of being an intern these days was being too dumb, impatient, or illiterate to read the manual first, so.
The printer self-immolated in a level of firebending force that no intern should possess.
This, Nariaki did choose to turn a blind eye to.
"He broke another printing press," Lieutenant Nariaki complained to Wei. "And did you hear he made death threats against--" and here the Lieutenant coughed unexpectedly before continuing -- "some admiral?"
Wei very much hoped that Nariaki wasn't telling this to him because, as of two days ago, Wei was the fleet's entire HR department. It sounded like a personnel complaint, but there was maybe a form for that and this could just be co-workers gossiping together, couldn't it?
Wei chose to go with the latter interpretation because he still had no idea how to handle the former. "Earlier, he came up to me and was, like, so in my face."
Oh, and there was a term for that, wasn't there? "He agressed me. He agressed me," Wei repeated, trying out the conjugation of the new lingo.
The loud noise of sudden exothermic energy release startled them both into looking towards the source; Nariaki sighed, moved over to the counter proclaiming 'It has been 5 hours since the last fireball encountered our mostly-wooden office furniture', and re-set the number to zero.
Wei considered the empty HR department and its abandoned counter of 'It has been 0 days since the last sexual harassment complaint'. He thought about the large pile of forms featuring a single high-ranking name, collecting dust on the former department head's desk, and then about where all the employees had disappeared to.
Wei wondered if he should be afraid for his life.
Friday Funday was a bit of an inside joke, as there was little to no fun to be had on Zhao's flagship. But it sounded more mentally healthy than Friday drink-to-forget-day or Friday-we're-fucked-day, so HR had approved it before… well, before HR had its own personal Friday-we're-fucked-day.
For Private Izumi, it was definitely one of those Friday farewell-my-hopes-and-dreams-day. At least she had an excuse for her quiet sobbing. She'd always been a weepy drunk.
Izumi swiped at her trickling tears and contemplated the bottom of her cup as if it held the answer to the mysteries of the universe. Or at the very least the answer to the mysteries of sexism.
Men were universally jerks seemed too simple a conclusion to come to, no matter how tempting it was; the real answer was certainly more complex and dealt with things like ingrained power dynamics, years of tradition and the careful curation of different expectations for different genders, but Izumi didn't feel up to pondering all that right now.
"What's wrong?" asked a young male voice muffled behind a helmet.
"Oh, nothing," said Izumi, in the understatement of the year. But she had neither the time nor effort to go into all that now.
The man -- the new intern, Izumi realized -- was looking distinctly uncomfortable, but then it was just how he seemed to look around the office, so maybe her tears weren't as off-putting as she'd thought.
And she didn't have the self-control not to talk to him, no matter how much she knew some people didn't like hearing about problems. Izumi herself had never understood that; she loved talking to people and connecting with them. Especially in times like these. Why not get to know her co-workers, they might all be dead tomorrow and they might want a shoulder to cry on as much as she did at the moment, and Izumi would never not be there for someone, given a choice.
"I," she started, sniffling. "I applied to be an Imperial Firebender, and the director, he was like, 'the only way for a woman to join the Imperial Firebenders is with a direct order from a member of the Royal family'. Like that'll ever happen."
"Uh," said Kuzon, but he wasn't squirming yet. "That's rough," he came up with eventually.
If Izumi herself had said that to a crying friend, she would have smacked herself for being so insensitive. But this was Kuzon, and she didn't know a lot about him, but he didn't seem like a people person. Or a party person, for that matter, and yet here he was and he'd made an effort for her, so he was at the very least a nice person. That, much more than the awkward shoulder-pat he tried to issue next, made Izumi smile through her tears.
"Sit with me for a bit?" she suggested, and proffered her full glass to his empty hand. Kuzon shook his head but sat down anyway, posture gradually relaxing below the unchanging stare of the helmet as she drank and talked. He didn't say much, but Izumi had learned that some people were just like that, and that was fine with her. What else was the human experience, besides people searching for meaningful interaction in their own separate ways.
And here at the end of the day, she'd take Kuzon's vague noises of encouragement, because Izumi wasn't ready yet to give up her dream. Besides, Friday-new-friend day had a better ring to it.
The culture here needs to change, Zuko thought to himself. Not only were women being denied their legally-mandated equality, everyone seemed oddly… afraid for their lives. Zuko could understand that, he was supposed to be dead after all and definitely would be if Zhao found out he wasn't, but these people weren't banished from the Fire Nation. So whatever was going on here was entrenched in the workplace environment.
Employees with job security anxiety underperformed relative to their counterparts, he'd read on Haystack Exchange. The Earth Kingdom message boards that tended to pop up near haystacks contained a surprising wealth of crowdsourced knowledge on an abundance of topics, including workplace relationships, and Zuko had started paying more attention to them after his first undercover foray. He'd never seen an answer to a question even similar to "Rival company has toxic workplace culture, what can I as an intern do to enact change", but Zuko was nothing if not adaptable.
And perhaps he couldn’t do anything about the long-term safety of his co-workers -- Zhao's crew, he tried and failed to remind himself, because no one deserved to have to be labeled together with Zhao -- but he could help Private Izumi.
This had nothing to do with the fact that it had been his very first party (not counting the ones he'd been invited to because of Azula), and he'd managed to talk to a pretty girl with a lovely name. It was something that Uncle always said he ought to be doing, so Zuko was pleased to think that he'd done something right after all, even though she'd been crying. Especially because he hadn't even been the one to make her cry in the first place!
"Everyone deserves a shot," he whispered an explanation to Uncle in a shadowed corner that night. "If I can be a small part of that change, I will." He hoped his tone left no room for argument, and indeed, Uncle agreed to his request.
Zuko tried to shut down the fluttery feeling of pride that started swelling in his stomach. It wasn't even a big change, really. He imagined this director person telling Hanako or Teruko that they couldn't do something because they were women. That wouldn't fly, he knew, because he'd been trying to tell Teruko what not to do for almost three years now, not because she was a woman but because she was a natural disaster on two legs. Then he pictured the director, or even Zhao, trying to keep Azula from the battlefield, and almost laughed out loud at the absurdity of it all.
It really was just a tiny little thing that he'd done.
Zuko did another little thing the next morning, and delivered the new helmet with the special insignia to the intern office for Private Izumi to find.
He did not expect to find her later, staring giddily at the helmet and the note that Uncle had attached.
"Congratulations," Zuko said, hoping that was the appropriate thing to say.
"I'm so happy right now," cried Izumi, looking dangerously close to tears.
Good tears, Zuko thought optimistically. He was getting a strangely warm feeling; likely Izumi was already training her passive bending to heat the ambient air around her. A work ethic Zuko could approve of. "Maybe one of these days you'll be as good a firebender as Prince Zuko," he encouraged her.
"Prince Zuko?" Izumi almost laughed, as if that were absurd. Zuko would have been hurt more by that except that he'd belatedly remembered that he was supposed to be dead. "Nah, I want to fight like General Iroh."
At least she hadn't said Azula. Zuko would've been tempted to set her hair on fire just a little if she had.
"How did it go?" Uncle asked him, doubtless for lack of anything else to do but count the vulture-gulls circling overhead or the bodies bobbing past in the frigid water.
Zuko thought back to before turtle-seal tunnels, a powered-up waterbender, the temporary death of the Moon, an enraged Ocean Spirit, and the more permanent death of a fleet.
"I'd say pretty good," he replied, unable to avoid the biting sarcasm that he was usually on the receiving end of from a Water Tribe boy. As unfitting as it was for a prince to stoop to the level of a peasant, it had just been one of those days. Weeks. Five months. Three years.
"I made four new friends, and probably only killed all but one of them," Zuko bit out. Chances that Private Izumi was alive were higher than for the rest of them, since the Imperial Firebenders had led the ground assault.
Although all of this could have been avoided if Zuko hadn't failed again at his one job and captured the Avatar for good. No Avatar, no spirit possession, no Water Tribe possibly… but at least there would still be a fleet, and probably still the Moon, because Uncle Iroh wouldn't have let anything happen to the Moon. "I'd say that's a pretty good start."
"Prince Zuko," said Uncle, and even though Zuko didn't see a frown on his face, it was there in his voice. "Don't blame yourself for the things that happened which were out of your control."
"They were in my control, Uncle!" Zuko protested, because he wasn't that much of a failure that he hadn't managed to capture the Avatar in the first place. It was just keeping him that was continuing to be… problematic. "I had him right there, don't tell me I didn't have it under control!"
Iroh sighed. "Prince Zuko. Even if you had kept a hold of the Avatar -- there was nothing you could have done about Zhao, or the Ocean Spirit's anger for what was done to its partner. The current of the Ocean would have pulled in the nearest host to exact its revenge. Would you rather it was someone unequipped for that amount of power? The young lady waterbender perhaps? Her brother? Or one of Agni's children?"
Zuko couldn't suppress the involuntary shudder that wracked him at that image. The thought of being possessed by the Ocean was even worse than the thought of being possessed by … and Zuko didn't want to think poorly of the dead, but Zhao was still the worst person he could imagine. "I didn't want anyone to have to die, Uncle. Not even someone as horrible as Zhao. Why do people always die?"
"Does the seedling beneath the great tree mourn that it must shed its leaves to preserve the young life throughout the frigid winter? Should it decline to rise and welcome the spring sun?"
"I don't know what that means," said Zuko, crossly. Why did Uncle always think proverbs were the answers to everything?
"It means that," Iroh started, pausing over a dry throat. "If you think of every death as an ending, you will never forgive yourself enough to begin again."
Despite the dehydration, Uncle's scratchy voice still managed to find gentleness. "Do you understand?"
Zuko pondered, for a long time. It was something they had an excess of, pulled by the currents to who knows where. Would they be pushed into an early grave, or a to fresh start on new shores?
Zuko lacked both the energy and eloquence to voice his conclusions, so he decided to emulate a gesture he'd learned at the intern office. Slowly, he extended a stiff arm and clenched the hand into a fist, except for his thumb, which waggled forlornly in the air. It didn't look quite right, Zuko thought. His fingers probably had frostbite.
Frustrated at his inability to even get a simple hand sign right, Zuko shook out the offending digits.
Then he began again.