Chapter Text
Traditionally, the Avatar discovered their true identity at the age of sixteen. There were nearly as many ways of discovering it as there were Avatars. Many were told, but that could go a hundred ways, and others still learned through the activation of their own powers, as most regular benders did. There was a degree of instinct to every element, things that happened not by choice but by the same force that allowed calf-colts to walk. Firebenders keeping warm, airbenders falling softly, waterbenders not drowning, and little earthbender girls sensing where the garden’s edge is with their feet.
Iroh learned to firebend young. Not as young as Ozai, but younger than most and better faster than almost every firebender in the nation. The instinct had always been there. During the day, he never felt truly cold. But as the son of the Fire Lord, he mostly focused not on the instinct but on the combat potential, and that was where Iroh excelled.
He lived and married. He had a son and raised him. He threw fire with his hands. He commanded troops and ordered them to obliterate those in their path. He taught his son to fight like him, with dedication and confidence, loyalty and pride. He was so thrilled when they went together to Ba Sing Se. His son would be the Fire Lord after him some day and he was ready to learn his duty at Iroh’s side.
He watched his son die. He missed his wife’s funeral. He went from being a good bender to a great one. He watched something terrible happen and looked away.
It was then, closer to sixty than sixteen, that he for the first time realized something was not normal. He pressed a damp cloth to his unconscious nephew’s skin and watched as the water rippled beneath his hands. A trick of the light, he thought. But as he watched, the burn faded a little, and Zuko mumbled in his sleep, leaning into the touch.
Huh, Iroh thought, oddly at peace with what was happening. This is going to be interesting.
The healers agreed that Zuko’s burn was mending far sooner and better than they could have dreamed. He didn’t lose sight in his eye, which was deemed lucky, and though it was dark and obvious, Zuko didn’t seem to be in much pain. Iroh wanted to try it again, but didn’t find the opportunity.
And then they were hunting the Avatar. Iroh put two and two together. It wasn’t hard. He hated every minute of it for what he was doing to Zuko. Zuko deserved to be loved, to be accepted by his family, and Iroh was taking away his last chance to have that. Not that Ozai deserved his son’s devotion, but that was Zuko’s choice. If Iroh truly loved him, he would have given Zuko that chance.
And yet. Three avatars had died young to bring this power to him. Spirits had aligned to give this power to him not as a young man, who would have rained obliteration on everything in his path, but as an old one. He was a man who had seen dragons and the walls of Ba Sing Se. He had raised a child and caused the deaths of so many children. The sons of the Earth Kingdom were surely no older and or less innocent than his own. The warriors of the Water Tribe he saw, when they sailed south to look for the Avatar, were certainly younger. Younger even than Zuko was. They were all that was left after what Iroh and his kinda had done to their people.
He ran firebending katas on the deck of the ship and tried to stir the water beneath them, wondering, at every moment, how all this had happened. He breathed in meditation and tried to understand what airbending would have looked like, to make the winds dance at his fingertips. But he had little success other than with the healing. The healing came easily. He practiced on himself, and on Zuko, if the opportunity arose and nobody else was paying attention. If he could drag them to public baths, he would work there, exhausting himself in trying to understand this strange and terrible gift.
He told Zuko he was making tea and instead of heating it attempted to freeze the water. It worked, once or twice, and he knew that the healing was no fluke. He had the abilities of a waterbender.
When they went to the Southern Water Tribe, he knew there was no chance of finding the Avatar there. There couldn’t be. The Avatar was already with them.
He dreamed. There were many in his dreams. The most frequent, an earthbender from Ba Sing Se who didn’t like him very much, and a waterbender from the Southern Water Tribe, were children. No older than Lu Ten. They were accompanied, periodically, by an airbender who was even younger. He had never come alone before. Usually, he shied away from Iroh. But that night, he came alone.
“You need to help my friend,” he said. His voice was commanding but worried and Iroh wanted to sweep the child up and take him away from this dreamscape. The tattoos that marked his arms and forehead seemed almost black in the red light of the lava cave where Iroh often dreamed himself.
“Who?” Iroh asked him. From the ether he called a teapot and cups. This was not the spirit world, and here, dreams were a reality rather than simply nightmares.
The airbender shifted. “Aang,” he said. “My friend’s name is Aang. I left him near here when the storm came. I was supposed to get help but I fell and I- I guess it doesn’t matter now. But he’s stuck and you need to let him out.”
“How do I let him out?”
The child shrugged. He had an expressive face that seemed like it had often been pulled into smiles in life. “Iunno. I didn’t really get to that part. I did it with the Avatar State, but I don’t think you need that to undo it. You’re a firebender, just melt the ice.”
In the night, Iroh slipped from his window and down onto the frosty sea. The three spirits swirled around him. Atka, the waterbender, showed him how to freeze it beneath him. Tiang, the airbender, held his hand and showed him the way. The earthbender didn’t offer her name, but the others called her Ila. She rarely spoke, even if she was around more than the others. She stood and watched over them with wide and frightful eyes.
They came, in time, to a boy in an iceberg. Iroh placed his hands on the surface and, as he had all his life, brought fire into being. Then, like it had never been at all, Iroh was back in bed.
“We will not be able to do this again,” Atka said. She laid her hand over his. “I’ve already given you all I could. You can heal for yourself, better than any man I’ve ever seen.”
Ila said, “I saw what you tried to do to my people. Think of doing it again and you will never learn the secrets of the Earth.”
Tiang said, “please, look after my friend.”
Iroh thought it was a dream, until ‘the Avatar’ escaped and Zuko, with the fire of purpose in his eyes, set to their mission.
They chased the ‘Avatar’ – Aang, Tiang whispered, a ghost of a dream – to the Northern Water tribe. His friend was probably trying to study waterbending, but from Atka’s experience with her tribe’s sexism, Iroh thought she would be disappointed.
So it went. Zuko chased Aang, who proved to be a more than worthy opponent with a deep skill in the spirit realm. Iroh looked after Zuko and practiced, practiced, practiced. On the ship, he focused on waterbending. In the Earth Kingdom, he focused on earthbending. Once or twice he snuck away and found someone willing to teach him a little. His favourite of which was the young girl – too young why are they always so young – who travelled with Aang. Once they reach Ba Sing Se, he practiced more liberally. There, only Zuko would have noticed something was amiss.
“Grandfather,” a girl said one morning, as he was practicing in a small public park, “why aren’t you better at earthbending?”
Her mother, a smiling young woman with dark hair that swirled around her face, mouthed an apology at him. She had another child strapped to her chest, sleeping.
“Because,” he told her, “I did not practice when I was young and now I must practice when I am old. All things are easier to learn in youth.”
This was an insufficiently interesting answer, and the girl wandered off to find someone her own age.
“Sorry,” the mother said aloud. “She never knows to hold her tongue.”
“It is no trouble. My son said such things also, in his time, and my niece, I am sure, has said much worse.”
Her smile returned. “My husband is an earthbender,” she said. “He could teach you some things.”
He worked in construction and was as smiling as his wife. He taught Iroh some things, about the steadiness of Earth, how it required broad stances and sure movement. Iroh had often tread heavily, for a firebender. It was not so difficult a shift as water, and in time, he grew to have a fondness for the surety that earthbending required.
And then their time at Ba Sing Se ended. Iroh kept to his firebending. He was a paltry waterbender save for his healing, an amature earthbender, and not an airbender in the slightest. He knew that if he revealed himself, and they learned that Aang had never been the Avatar, only an airbender with friends from many nations who periodically bent other elements around him, Zuko would die. Zuko could not die. It was unthinkable.
One of the spirits came to him for the first time in prison. Avatar Roku. Iroh had seen his face before in statues, but never knew it.
“I was merciful to Sozin,” he said. “I have regretted it every day since. You must end this as I could not. Go now. They will not expect you. End it.”
They could kill Zuko so easily. “I will not allow harm to come to my nephew. Your descendent.”
“I loved Sozin, once.”
Iroh closed his eyes, though he knew he could not banish his own past lives from his vision. “Sozin was a man. Zuko is just a boy. A child. I will not harm him.”
“Then you harm all the world’s children.”
Iroh wished desperately that the spirit would leave him, but knew he owed it to all his past selves to listen to his words. “All the world’s children save the one I owe the most.”
“And you would choose his life in the balance?”
No. Iroh cannot go that far. “I will leave on the Eclipse, when he will have some plausible deniability. I will train, and I will defeat my brother not as a firebender but as the Avatar. There is no other way.”
Roku sighed and, when Iroh opened his eyes, the other Avatar sat settled across from him in the lotus-like position more typical of the air nomads than of his own people.
“We can’t teach you,” he said, “that’s not really how this works. You need a tangible person to interact with. We can’t bend anymore.”
“Atka taught me, in the beginning.”
“You had already studied the forms of waterbending. You just didn’t know you could do it yourself. Atka did give you her healing, though. Once an avatar masters a unique skill like that, it can continue down the line, and Atka would have been the finest healer of her generation.”
Iroh was sure that as long as he lived, he would never cease to be grateful for Atka’s healing. “If you cannot teach me, I will try as well as I can to teach myself.”
Roku’s hand, intangible, came to rest on his shoulder. He was not so severe as he was portrayed in sculpture, Iroh thought, and he certainly had enough self doubt and loathing to be Zuko’s ancestor.
“I said I could not teach you, not that I would not help you.”
They could not do the hard work of bending, but they did come to Iroh to speak of the techniques of bending, the theory of it. This study was always an area where Iroh shone. It was what allowed him to redirect lightning, to learn from the dragons. It was what took him from a good firebender to a true master. Now he knew he had to learn the same for elements he barely could touch. Other Avatars came. Roku, mostly, but periodically his predecessor Kyoshi, a terrifyingly violent woman who was even more certain than Roku was that Iroh should kill his own brother. They were offset by Tiang and Atka, who, despite their relative inexperience, insisted that Iroh needed them.
“Airbending needs youth,” Tiang insisted, on one occasion. “It needs a lightness in the self. The monks did that by ridding themselves of worldliness. But it’s easier to be lighter in yourself as a kid, I think.”
Perhaps that was why Iroh was no airbender. He’d seen Aang do so, of course, but it never came to him the way earth and water had. There in the cell, he had little water, and could not move the earth, so he turned his mind largely to the air around him.
As long as he wasn’t firebending, the guards didn’t mind him moving around the cell, exercising and meditating within its limits. Tiang showed him the ways that air, like fire and water and earth, was one of the building blocks of life. They spoke of the shifting currents like tides, and the way air, like fire, had a rhythm to its motion.
One night, Iroh made a ball of air in his hands, and Tiang’s beaming smile was reward enough for any man.
Atka had stayed too, for very different reasons.
“I can’t teach you to fight,” she admitted, bluntly. “That was never something I learned how to do. But you don’t need me to teach you to fight. None of them have a single thing to teach you about fighting except Kyoshi.”
It was likely true. “So, what are you here to teach me, little one?”
She shifted anxiously. She had a softer, rounder face than Aang’s waterbender friend, and she was missing one of her front teeth, which she said had been knocked out in an accident when she was scrapping with her little brother.
“I’m here because I was there when you healed Zuko. Of all of us, I think I’m the one who understands best how much you love him.”
“The others have children.” Atka was far too young to understand this. Roku, a father himself, should have.
“Yes,” Atka agreed, “but you should know better than anyone that having children is not enough to make a man understand the worth of another’s child.” She folded her small hand over Iroh’s.
So it went. Kyoshi spoke of earth shattering beneath her feet, the epic power of it all. Roku spoke of what it was, to be a firebender studying the other elements, of the ways they felt different but the same. Tiang spoke of growing up with Aang, who had insisted on being his friend even after Tiang found out he was the Avatar, and all the games they played. He still never explained how Aang had come to be preserved in the iceberg, but obviously he was ashamed of it. Atka spoke of water, of life and death and the making and unmaking of things.
When the eclipse came, Iroh knocked a guard unconscious by shoving him with air, bent a hole clean through the wall of the prison, and escaped into the open sky. He stepped free from the building, and slowed his own fall enough to make it an easy landing. Ozai would think that the Invaders did this, somehow, and Iroh was pleased to allow it.
He had two stops. The first, with his friends in the White Lotus. There, he finally studied earth and water with true masters. They had all met Aang, and all knew that he was not truly the Avatar. But all of them were shocked to learn that Iroh was.
“Is Tiang with you?” Bumi asked him once, in one of his rare serious moments.
Iroh could feel the heart of his past life beating within him. “Yes. It was he who guided me to free Aang from the iceberg. They were together, initially.”
“I heard that much from Aang.” He stomped to launch a rock at the side of Iroh’s head and his training began again.
Iroh, it resolved, was already a more skilled waterbender than he had given himself credit for. Pakku said, “I thought for a long time that healing and fighting were arts that had to be seperate. Now I know differently.”
Firebenders could not heal, but even they had arts that were taught more readily to some people than others. This they divided not by gender but by class. Azula and Zuko had seen things, studied things, that the average firebender could but dream of.
Iroh had never really had time to waterbend without being seen, but he spent three years at sea trying to bend the entire ocean beneath him.
“It’s pointless to fight the tides,” Pakku said. “I’m not surprised you never saw any results. But what you were doing was like trying to pull an iceberg on a rope. It didn’t work, but it made you strong.”
He taught Iroh the katas and motions of true waterbending combat, to form water whips and freeze the enemy instinctively and all sorts of other things. In earthbending, where Iroh had far more practice and training, Bumi challenged him, made him better, and showed him things he could scarcely have dreamed of.
They were going to take back Ba Sing Se, and Iroh so desperately wanted to be there with them. But he knew that Ozai would use the comet for nothing good, and that he had other places to be. So, he went looking for Aang.
He found them at the Western air temple. Tiang showed him the way down for non-airbenders, which Iroh still qualified as, and from there, Iroh followed the sounds of someone practicing bending until he walked out into an open courtyard and–
“Uncle?” Toph demanded. She was the only one of them who’d noticed him. “What are you doing here?”
Katara made a strangled noise and a great deal of water came up to wrap around her fists. Her brother hefted a very fine sword, another young man sank into an earthbending stance, and –
Zuko pulled himself out of the fountain, dripping wet and with a sword in his left hand. He pushed his hair out of his face and said, “what’s happening?”
Iroh breathed deep and low like an earthbender. “I am here to speak to Aang,” he said.
Zuko sat down hard on the edge of the fountain. Toph said, “how many times do we have to drill it into your thick skulls? Aang is not the Avatar.”
Aang, who was hovering a little behind Zuko, nodded decisively in agreement.
“No,” Iroh agreed. “He is not. Tiang of the Air Nomads was, and Atka of the Northern Water Tribe after him, and Ila of Ba Sing Se after her, and after Ila… me.”
They all stared at him. Iroh pulled some water from the fountain to illustrate his point. They all stared even more, except for Toph who said, “wicked,” and Zuko, who dropped his blade there, leaving it to clatter on the stones with uncharacteristic disrespect as he fled.
Iroh wanted to go after him, but thought it might do more harm than good.
“I’ll go,” Sokka said, and bolted after Zuko so quickly as to leave a trail of dust in his wake.
Katara returned her water to its place, but her hands remained balled into fists. “How could you?” She hissed. “All that time we spent running from you, running from Zuko, and you were supposed to be saving us.”
“How is it,” Iroh asked her, “that Zuko never caught and kept you? I was undermining him, but I could not leave him.”
Another girl, older than Katara and dressed in very familiar fire nation prisoner’s clothing, stepped out of the shadows and crossed her arms angrily. Zuko’s other dao was tied at her waist. “But you could lie to him? I saw the look on his face just now. Since I got here, Zuko’s basically spent all his time training to kill his father because he thought there was nobody else to do it!”
“Suki,” Katara hissed.
They broke into infighting, with the issue on the table being whether betraying Zuko would have been better – Katara – or was also innately bad – Suki – until Toph stomped her foot and sent both of them tumbling to the ground.
“Hey jerks,” she snapped, “has either of you considered the fact that we should maybe ask Uncle to explain himself.”
Once again, the collective turned to Iroh.
He had spent a great deal of time imagining how he would justify his actions. The truth was that there was no justification. He had allowed others to suffer for his own indecision, as Roku had. But, for most of his time as the Avatar, he had not known enough to make another choice.
“I have only known I was the Avatar for three years,” he said, to break the seal. “In the beginning, I thought that perhaps I had imagined it. And even if I hadn’t, there was no way for me to learn airbending, nothing left to save. I trained as best I could, worked with my friends in the White Lotus, and I waited. Then, one day, I had a dream. A young airbender called Tiang came to me, and asked me to rescue his friend.”
“You let me out,” Aang said, rather accusatory. “If Katara and Sokka hadn’t found me, I would have frozen to death.” Then he shook himself a little. “What happened to Tiang? He promised to come back but he didn’t.”
Tiang had never gone into specifics, and if he had, Iroh would not have wanted this child to imagine it. “An accident, nothing more. The Avatar spirit passed to Atka. She’s from the Northern Water Tribe and died of a plague in her sixteenth year, healing others but not herself. Then to Ila of Ba Sing Se, who never even knew of the war in her lifetime, and to me. But I did not know as a child or a young man. I only know now, and I will do what I can to correct for my past errors.” He forced himself to address all of them with the confidence the Avatar should have. “I have studied water and earth, to the best of my abilities, and I am here now to learn from the last airbender so that I might defeat my brother before the comet comes.”
Suki asked, “and if you do defeat him? Then what?”
Iroh had thought that far ahead. “The Avatar must be removed from such partisan things. Zuko will be Fire Lord, as is his birthright. I know that my background will make it difficult for the other nations to trust me, but I swear I shall endeavour to protect them as long as the Avatar is me.”
Aang, who was as hopeful and as gentle as Tiang was, asked, “how did you find out that you’re the Avatar, then?”
“That,” Iroh said, “I must tell Zuko first.”
Zuko and Sokka returned to them more than an hour later. It was obvious that Zuko had been crying, and when he came around the corner, Suki pulled him and Sokka both into a hug, pressing Zuko’s dao back into his hand after she drew away. Iroh, who was learning to create a ball of air under himself from Aang while Tiang watched from the corner of his mind, set himself back on the ground, feeling the thrumming connections of the earth beneath him as well as the sky above.
There was an interconnectedness within elements, and also between them. That was what Iroh had learned during his time in prison. He could not learn to move the earth or touch the stars from spirits, but they could teach him to think like every kind of bender, to feel like them. Iroh had learned to feel the earth beneath him, deep down into the fiery core that came so close to the surface, there in the Caldera. He had learned to feel the air around him moving, the impreceptable currents of a single breath so very like the currents of the sea. Kyoshi had shown him what she had seen, the day she broke an island free from the land, how she had understood in that moment that the world was made of plates floating atop magma like icebergs upon the sea. Iroh had come to understand in a true, fundamental way, that the elements were not separate or distinct at all. Fire came from air, firebending from breath; earth was shaped by heat and earthbending required the bender to have the power of fire and the ceaselessness of water. Water carved through earth, was carried by air and put out fires if the fires did not vaporize it first. All four elements were equally fundamental to life. Air in the lungs, water in the veins, earth in the stomach, and the warmth of fire ensuring that it would never fade.
“Prince Zuko,” he said, “I am sorry. I have failed you both as your Uncle, who should have been more loyal, and as the Avatar, who should have been more able to protect you.”
There was a tense moment. Suki grabbed Sokka by the arm, Toph shoved Katara, and they all left with Aang trailing behind. Zuko and Iroh were finally alone.
Zuko’s hair was messy around his head. Without speaking, he collected his second dao from where it rested by the fountain, cleaned the water off, and returned the pair to their sheath. As if performing a ritual, he finished drying himself off with simple, precise motions. It was the easiest Iroh had ever seen bending come to his nephew. Then, and only then, did he come and sit across from Iroh.
“I thought that I failed you,” he said, doing everything but meeting Iroh’s eyes. “I did fail you. And I’m sorry. Even if you weren’t really the Avatar, you wouldn’t have wanted me to capture Aang, would you?”
“No,” Iroh admitted, thinking of the single Pai Sho tile in his pocket. “Probably not.”
Zuko nodded. “I didn’t think so. The Sun Warriors told me that you helped them hide the dragons, but they didn’t know you were the Avatar.”
That explained part of what seemed so different about his bending. Zuko was no longer drawing his fire only from anger. “I did not know I was the Avatar when I studied with the Masters.”
Zuko’s hands were tightly fisted in his lap. “When did you know?”
“I healed you, after the Agni Kai. I had a need, and the water – and Avatar Atka – guided my way.” It was impossible, as he said it, not to look at the scar on Zuko’s eye. He thought that now, with knowledge of his own capacity and years of experience, he could have stopped it from scarring entirely. But that had not happened. At least it had not scarred very deep. Only the surface level wounds remained.
“Katara said that,” Zuko whispered, almost to himself. “She told me it looked like someone had healed it, below the surface. She said that my eyelid was far more able to retract than it should have been.”
Iroh said nothing, and, after a moment, Zuko finally looked up at him. He was crying again, silently.
Iroh said, “you never failed me, Zuko. I was worried for you because I believed you had lost yourself and because I knew I had failed you.”
He fidgeted. “You aren’t angry with me? Even after everything I did? I got you thrown in prison. I almost got Aang killed. I thought you would hate me.”
Never in Zuko’s life had anyone who owed him love and acceptance offered it. Even Iroh had lied to him, manipulated him. “I swear to you now, I will never hate you. Never. It is my duty as your uncle to offer you more than that. I may be angry with some decisions you make, and I may disagree with you, but I will never hate you.”
Zuko inhaled raggedly, choking himself on his tears, and threw himself into Iroh’s arms. They stayed there for a long time, speaking not at all, and Iroh allowed himself to weep with relief. “Thank you,” Zuko said, still believing that he was not owed the love that all children should receive from their families. “Thank you.”
“Thank you,” Iroh corrected, “for allowing me to be a part of your life.”
They had much more to speak of, but the words were hard. Iroh spun for Zuko the entirety of his tale, of his perspective on their time at sea, of his learning the beginnings of earthbending – ironically, from Toph – and of his recent study with many great masters. He did his best to infuse all of it with the underlying force that had first shown Iroh his gifts – his love for Zuko. After all, the Avatar was born, but Iroh had not touched his abilities as a child. They had not come when he studied with the Masters, or to tear down the walls of Ba Sing Se, or when he cradled Lu Ten’s broked body in his arms and wished for a miracle. They had come for Zuko who was, perhaps, the last person remaining in the world that Iroh loved.
Zuko wove a story of his own in turn. He told of how he had left his father, of how he had gone to free Iroh and then of how he had chased Aang and the others here.
“I didn’t believe them at first,” he admitted, “but then Aang told me about Tiang, and how he was the real Avatar, and I had to believe him. I thought about giving up, trying something else or looking for you or going back to Ba Sing Se… I don’t know. Something. But then Aang pointed out that there might not be any more Avatars. If it went through the cycle and got back to air, I don’t know what would happen. So we decided that if there wasn’t a real Avatar, a fake one would have to do. With Toph and Katara and Aang and I, we have all four elements. None of us could take down my father alone, but together…”
They were so young. It seemed Iroh’s curse to watch all the mistakes of his life and of his family fall as burdens upon the shoulders of the young.
“It will not be your duty to face your father, Zuko.” Iroh would not allow this, and the pure relief on Zuko’s face affirmed his belief. “That is not something that I would ask of you. I will do that. Your duty is one far greater. It will fall to you to lead your people, as Fire Lord.”
So it went. Iroh trained with Aang, but also with Katara, who was tough as Pakku and actually knew something of water healing and how it worked. Toph made his life harder every time he so much as thought he had a grasp on earthbending. Her deep sense of the earth, even in metals, was truly remarkable. Zuko mostly seemed to train with Sokka and Suki, barely touching his firebending. And yet the influence of the dragons was so clear on him. He moved lithely as any firebender should, dancing with it.
“The firebending scared Aang and Katara,” Zuko admitted, when they were alone. “Less so for Aang after he came with me to find the Sun Warriors. They showed him that there was life and beauty in it. But Katara doesn’t trust me.”
That changed after Azula chased them after the Western Air Temple. Zuko and Katara vanished with little explanation – “I know what happened to Katara’s mother, Uncle. I need to help her find… Something.” – and returned with some kind of bond forged between them. After that, Zuko trained openly with fire. It was clear that, somewhere along their journey, he had gone from being a good firebender – better than average, whatever Ozai thought – to a truly extraordinary one. And just sixteen. With a little more trust and care younger, a little less of the fear that was anathema to good firebending, he might have been as skilled as his father. Perhaps better, without the reliance on hatred that fueled Ozai. Iroh’s pride was unspeakable, but he tried his best to convey it anyhow.
Four days before the Comet, when Aang and Iroh were meant to be meditating in the early morning light, Aang said, “I don’t think you should kill the Fire Lord.”
That stopped the meditation, but Iroh maintained his concentration, keeping several distinct balls of air orbiting above his head. “And why not, young Aang?”
Aang hopped up. He moved in broad, emotive ways. Iroh imagined that, had he ever known Tiang in life, they would have been much the same. “The monks taught us that all life is sacred, even the bumblebee-fly that stings you has a purpose. I know you’re not an Air Nomad, but this all happened because Fire Lord Sozin killed my people. That means we should get a say in what happens, and I don’t think we would want you to kill your brother.”
Aang was possessed of a truly remarkable quality of hope. “And what would you have me do with him?”
Emotive as always, Aang physically deflated, sinking to the ground. “I don’t know, but I just wish I could think of something.”
That night, or early the next morning, the lion-turtle came, and Iroh finally found the last piece to understand the interconnectedness of all the elements.
As he waited for Ozai on the edge of the Earth Kingdom, the others came to him. First Kyoshi, who Iroh thought he understood much better now that he knew Suki.
“You won’t hesitate to do what must be done?” She demanded. It was an assurance she needed, and one that Iroh needed too.
“I promise,” he told her, and watched her fade away so Roku could take her place.
“You trust your nephew to be better than his father?” Roku asked.
So like Roku, to worry about that more than about the fight at hand. “I also trust him to be better than his great-grandfather, Avatar Roku. Make of that what you will.”
Smiling in the face of the insult, Roku vanished and let Tiang take his place.
“Thank you,” Tiang said, “for listening to my friend.”
“He must have been a very good friend indeed.”
Tiang smiled, despite his obvious sorrow. “He was worth it, I think. He’s much, much better at this than I ever would have been.”
“You would have been a great Avatar, in time,” Iroh assured him, reflexive from years of Zuko’s self-doubt.
“Perhaps,” Tiang agreed, “but then we never would have seen the Avatar that you have been.”
Iroh wondered, sometimes, what the world where it truly had been the Avatar frozen would have looked like. He hoped that he would have been less foolish, that Zuko would still have found his way. They will never know, but he could hope anyways.
Tiang faded but, instead of Atka, it was Ila who took his place. “You learned the secrets,” Ila said, “remember your duty.”
“Aang and the Order will save the city,” Iroh promised her. “I will stop Ozai, and Zuko will be better than what he was.”
Ila was, of his past selves, perhaps both the hardest and the most innocent. So, it was a shock when she said, “Kyoshi and Roku don’t trust him. But… he was lied to, like I was lied to. If I couldn’t even notice there was a war going on, how can I expect anyone to know, by instinct, what the right thing to do in it is? You kept your bond to me. If you trust Zuko, I do too.”
It surprised him how much the words mattered. As the war balloons appeared on the horizon and Iroh stood to meet them, it was Atka who came to him. Atka, first and last. It made a kind of sense.
“I’m glad you listened to Aang,” she said. Spirits were always dressed the same, and her warm gear seemed incongruous with the heat that Iroh could feel in his bones from the comet. “You are not just the Avatar, you are a healer, and the first rule of being a healer is to do no harm. Even if our patients are delirious or mad and attempt to hurt us, we must see that they do not harm themselves and that we do not harm them.”
“And what if we need to cut out a tumour?” Iroh asked, mostly to be contrary.
Atka looked at him like he was stupid. “People aren’t tumours, Iroh.”
She stayed with him, until Ozai came.
“I can’t believe you came to try and stop me,” he laughed. He wasn’t dressed as the Fire Lord, which was odd. “You. You couldn’t stop me when we were children. The Avatar couldn’t stop me. Nothing could.”
Iroh hoped that nothing had happened to Aang. “The Avatar has never tried to stop you, Ozai. Not really. He still does not need to, if you are willing to cooperate.”
“What, so you can take the throne for yourself? You can have it, if you can defeat Azula for the prize. I have moved on to greater things.”
Iroh sank into an earthbending stance. “Zuko will be Fire Lord, when this ends, and a better one than you ever could have dreamed.”
Ozai laughed. “You made him even weaker than he already was.”
“No. He made himself strong. You never saw it in him, but he is stronger than you ever could have dreamed. If our father had burnt you and cast you out at thirteen, you would have folded. Zuko never so much as bent. Even when his mission was impossible, he never gave up. He grew stronger, worked harder and became better. Compared to him, you are weak, Ozai. You have always been weak.”
“Enough of this.”
He shot a burst of fire at Iroh, who deflected it easily with a flame of his own, and the match was on.
They hadn’t sparred in many years, and this was far different than a sparring match. They kept to fire, for a while. It was still Iroh’s best element, and it was stronger now than he had ever felt it, the power of the comet roaring in his ears. Then, as their fight pressed back towards the shore, Iroh remembered his years trying to move the sea. He was more powerful now than he had been then, by several orders of magnitude. He reached out and, moving with the waves as they crashed forward, brought a massive wall of water crashing down on Ozai’s shocked head. With the advantage this afforded, he brought up the earth to immobilize his hands. Ozai kicked his way free and their fight resumed in earnest.
“How dare you?” Ozai hissed, when they were close and grappling. “You hid this from me all our lives. Traitor.”
It was too long a story to explain. “No. If I had this power in the moment you burned Zuko, I would have killed you where you stood.” Iroh shoved him away with a blast of air.
Ozai shot lightning at him. Iroh caught it and sent it into the sky. Ozai laughed. “You aren’t even trying to kill me now!”
“No,” Iroh agreed. “I am not.”
They’d all had different opinions on how he should enter the Avatar State. The old airbenders had been insistent on clearing emotion, and Roku had advocated for clearing thought entirely as the true fire Avatar way. But Iroh thought that in his time sitting in prison, he had found something else. He closed his eyes, and felt the earth beneath him and the sky above him. The radiating heat of the sun and the comet and the water that ran through his body. All in order, all as one.
“I’m sorry, Ozai,” he said, and then, launching himself close with airbending, he grabbed his brother and shoved their spirits together as they fell from their position atop the earthen pillars.
In reality, the entire sequence took but the span of couple breaths. In Iroh’s mind, it seemed infinite. He saw himself and every Avatar stretching back beyond even their shared memory. As he bent the energy in Ozai, their spirits crashed together. Iroh had been warned of the potential to lose himself, but he had spent all his youth almost losing himself in the face of Ozai’s domineering personality and their father’s also. He had acted for himself only twice. In his choice of bride, and in his choice to save the dragons. But at Ba Sing Se, he had learned the consequences of acting for others rather than choosing for yourself, and at Zuko’s side, when need guided him to be the Avatar, he had sworn to never again allow Ozai to overrule Iroh’s heart.
I am Iroh, he thought. I am the son of Azulon and Ilah who will end their legacy. I am the brother of Ozai, but not bound to him. I have watched my only child die, and I will live to see my son become Fire Lord. I am the Dragon of the West, yet I have never slain a dragon nor will I. I entered Ba Sing Se without conquering it. I am a soldier and a healer. I am a Grand Lotus. I am made of earth and fire, of air and water. In me, the elements exist equally, none lesser or greater. I choose that the legacy of the Avatar will not be one of further bloodshed.
Ozai fell away before him and, in the second before they hit the ground, he ceased to be a firebender entirely. Iroh planted his feet under him, shaking the ground with the connectivity of his earthbending. By instinct, he bound Ozai’s wrists with stone, and leant up against the base of one of the pillars.
“The Avatar state sucks,” he said, channeling what he thought Zuko’s young friends would say. It had the desired effect. As the other Avatars faded from his mind, he caught a hint of Tiang, Ila and Atka’s laughter.
Ozai struggled to kick free as he had before, but to no avail. He was no bender any longer. “What did you do?” He hissed. For the first time, he sounded afraid. “Iroh, what did you do?” His voice was small. “I’m so cold. I can’t feel the sun, Iroh, what’s happening?”
They had never been friends as children, had never been vulnerable in front of each other unless the circumstances were truly dire. But this was how Ozai’s voice had sounded then, in the most desperate of moments, when he fell from a tree, when he accidentally burned one of Father’s tapestries. Iroh knew from experience that there were no words that Ozai would accept as comfort in times like this. So instead, Iroh sat beside him, murmuring soothing nonsense under his breath and running his hands through Ozai’s hair until he subsided into a grief-stricken silence. Bending water, he healed both their injuries and stood as a war balloon landed and Suki, Sokka and Toph piled out.
Sokka was leaning on Suki, obviously limping, while Toph kissed the ground beneath her. Then, sight returning as she made contact, Toph jerked her head towards Iroh and Ozai, letting them know that she was looking.
“Hey Uncle,” she said, “I thought you were supposed to kill the Fire Lord, not braid his hair.”
Ozai was silent as stone. Iroh said, “Aang asked me to find a solution where Ozai would live, so I took his bending away.” With a decisive motion of his hand, he melted Ozai’s restraints back into the ground and lifted him up. “Now, tell me – did you go through with the plan as originally intended?”
They had. Zuko had insisted that they trust Iroh would be there when needed, so they hadn’t amended the plan. Aang had gone to the White Lotus to retake Ba Sing Se, while Zuko and Katara had gone to the Caldera to see Zuko named Fire Lord.
“Aang can look after himself,” Suki said, decisively, as they lifted back into the air. “And anyways, they’ll fill us with boulders if we bring this ship to Ba Sing Se. Let’s head for Caldera City.”
“I’m sure Zuko will appreciate you showing up to bury him,” Ozai hissed. With an audience, he’d gotten mean again.
Sokka jerked his head. “Suki,” he said, “you know what to do.” She raised an eyebrow. “Please. I’d do it myself but I’m all the way over here.”
“I’m driving,” Suki reminded him, but she still took her hands from the wheel, just for a second, to knock Ozai out cold with a single punch. “Luckily for you, I’ve also been waiting to do that since Zuko told us how he got his scar.”
Iroh could understand that. It surprised him how quickly Aang’s friends, Sokka and Suki in particular, had come to be fiercely protective of Zuko.
“Zuko has a scar?” Toph demanded, and waited for them to begin to explain before she said, “I’m joking, lovebird-beetles. I was there for the play and his rant about how it was on the wrong side. He hasn’t told me where he got it, but there’s only so many people who could burn a prince and get away with it.”
The palace had been scarred with flames. Some portions of the roof still burned. In the central courtyard, Azula sat chained in place. She screamed horribly when Iroh stepped out with Ozai in his arms. A wave of water splashed her, and Iroh turned to see Katara, seated against a pillar with Zuko cradled to her chest. He wasn’t moving.
Toph caught Ozai with a few pillars of earth as Iroh threw himself to Katara’s side.
“He reflected the first bolt of lightning,” she said, not looking up from where her hands held glowing blue water over Zuko’s chest. “But she threw the second one at me, and he ran to catch it instead. The one he deflected already weakened him, I think. I’m keeping him stable but I can’t do much more than that.”
He should have been dead already, but he wasn’t. That alone proved Katara’s strength. She’d likely been keeping him in stasis for several hours. Iroh called water to his fingertips and layered his hands over Katara’s. His anxiety was so strong that he shook. This plan of his had almost killed Zuko. Might yet, judging by the unsteady fluttering of his heart.
Atka’s hands, ethereal, came to rest atop his. “You know what you’re doing,” she said. “Just do it.”
It was the first thing Iroh had done as the Avatar, and this time, he wasn’t doing it alone.
Together, he and Katara healed. Zuko’s breathing steadied and in time, he came to a natural sleep.
Sokka and Suki, who had been hovering nearby, knelt beside them. Or, rather, Suki set Sokka down and knelt herself.
“You stupid idiot,” Sokka said, fondly, reaching out to feel for Zuko’s pulse, to ensure he really had survived. Suki, long suffering, shook her head.
Iroh finally allowed himself to breathe. Against all the odds, none of his family had died. Not a single one of them.
Thank you, he thought, to Ila and Atka, Tiang and Roku and Kyoshi and all the Avatars before them. Thank you.