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i.
Zuko remembers few things about his childhood, and his therapist tells him that’s a common reaction to trauma.
He remembers the day Azula was born— namely, the moment when Ursa had set Zuko on her lap, then the little bundle of Azula into his palms.
She’s been crying, absolutely wailing in the way she had since she’d taken her first breath— and against all odds, she’d stopped when she’d seen identical eyes looking into hers.
“That’s Azula,” Ursa had whispered into his ear before the fire, stroking the raven hair away from his eyes in a calming motion. “Can you say Azula, darling?”
He could not. Instead, with a flicker of determination burning hot in his stomach, he’d managed to narrowly avoid the lisp his father had backhanded him for, “Zula.”
She’d gurgled— not quite a laugh or even a grin, instead, she’d made a cooing nose like the stray cats that roam their family’s garden.
He decided then, that he would protect her.
ii.
Zuko had never been a prodigy like Azula— but there were things he’d begun to take pride in over the years.
Even the years marred by his father, the ones that become only memories, where he’s soaked in in his mother’s laugh and can feel the warm sun on his skin— the ones his mind had blocked as a response to his pain.
It took him years to realise that liking something and being good at something didn’t necessarily equate— that he didn’t have to be good at something to enjoy the process of it.
It’s something that took him years to learn— years to drown out the voice that sounded suspiciously like his father tell him that talent and passion do not have to be one and the same.
He’s allowed to paint, and dance— and he’s allowed to bake the worst cookies know to man because he cannot cook for shit.
He’s seventeen when he realises that he’s also allowed to enjoy reading— that it isn’t a waste of time. Seventeen when he realises that he feels closer to his mom with each landscape that his mind plays for him.
Because Zuko’s life, and the things that have happened to him— they’re confusing and complex and they hurt and twist and scratch and somehow he’s always drawn back to the small things that surround him.
He talks about his favourite classical books with Katara, and together they tear apart the allusions and metaphors piece by piece— they apply the meaning to modern life and topple the foundations of old principles. The rejection the notions of hatred— of the western eurocentrism, of the racism, of the xenophobia, or the sexism, of the homophobia— of the stereotypes that the authors create.
He reads to Toph while Suki paints the scenes on canvas— in paint that’s so textured she can feel the scenery with her fingertips.
And together, she and Zuko admire the way the scenes look, when they’re removed from the visions Suki has created based on the words echoed between beats of silence.
With Aang, he learns how to breath through religious study— and while he never fully believes in the Spirits and Gods in the way he did before the fire— he learns that maybe hope does truly hide in the human soul.
With Sokka, he learns that healing can only come from within— that he doesn’t need to force optimism about the future.
There’s a sobering moment that happens on his sixteenth birthday. He’s having a panic attack in the hard tile floor of a unisex bathroom, and Ty Lee is the one to breach the unlocked door. The rest of his friends standing outside for support.
He can’t breathe and his brain is absolute mush— but Ty Lee is there and she’s guiding him through the stupid breathing patterns
When he can form a coherent sentence, and manages to take small sips of water around his shaking hands— Ty Lee tells him, “you don’t need to force the happiness for us. You don’t need to be optimistic when you feel like breaking, Zuko. Even the most endless rays of sunshine leave deserts in their wake.”
“You sound like my uncle,” he muttered, teeth still chattering as he’d scrubbed at his eyes with a sloppy hand. “Please don’t ask me to play pai sho and drink tea with you now.”
There’s no deadlines for healing, and it’s not something he needs to be instinctively good at.
So when Sokka shakes him awake in the middle of their movie, eyebrows pulled together in a frown— Zuko doesn’t know how to interpret it.
“There’s a girl here— and she said she’s looking for you. Is there something you want to tell us about?” Something accusatory weighs heavily in Sokka’s words, but he doesn’t say anything about it.
“What d’you mean?” His words slur, sleepy muddling his voice as he glances around. Everyone is staring at him— except Ty Lee, who is very conveniently missing. “What girl?”
“She wouldn’t tell us.” Sokka states suddenly, unable to meet Zuko’s eyes when he mutters, “she’s in that picture that you hide behind your driver’s license though. The one with you and your uncle.”
Zuko is eighteen when he learns that some things never change, and that fears never really seem to go away.
He hauls himself to his feet, shoving a hand through his hair in a desperate attempt to fix the mess his nap has made of it.
He sees her in the hallway— her hair is down, and her eyes hold a softness he’s never seen before. If he didn’t know better— if he didn’t know her any better, he’d call it guilt.
“Azula.” His voice is stiff, and she looks as uncomfortable as he does. “How did you find me?”
She looks so much like their mom— his resolve nearly crumbles. But he knows her, and he’s not sure that five years could change her in the way that he needs them to.
The bag drops from her shoulder, and before he can think to block any attack, she’s holding him.
She’s holding him, and his heart is tight in his chest, and nothing feels real. It’s a dream, he thinks, he’ll wake up like he always does.
He feels his friends eyes on him— he feels his only sibling’s face buried in his shoulder as he body shakes and suddenly it doesn’t feel like a dream. It feels all too real.
And Azula always lies. The sixteen year old draped around him— always lies.
“What are you doing?” He chokes, hot pain pressing at the back of his eyes and further fraying the burn on the leftmost side of his face. “Why are you here?”
“I didn’t know,” she croaks back, squeezing him with the strength oh a komodo rhino, all while feeling infinitesimal. “Zuko, he— I didn’t know.”
The stars align, and Zuko’s world combusts— and despite the chaos in wake of the siblings discoveries, Zuko bridges the gap and wraps his arms around her.
iii.
Zuko admittedly remembers very little about the days before they stopped being siblings— a rivalry not completely opposite to Ako Vendetta— but sometimes, they hit him like wildfire. And he is always left wondering if he’s meant to stop drop and roll to avoid getting burned again.
Sometimes the memories are sweet and warm, like the taste of honey and tea on a cool winters day— and sometimes they’re bitter, like broken glass and shattered dreams and Zuko is left wishing he’d never been born at all.
On those days, he reminds himself that Azula was born lucky— and that he was lucky to have been born at all.
It comes in snippets— and he is seldom prepared for the days when Azula would help he toss stolen peas into the turtle duck pond at the end of the property, the days before their parents moulded them into things they were not.
He loves his mother, but he’d have to be more blind than Toph to ignore the impact she’d had on forming Azula’s broken and battered psyche.
If Zuko had been burned, Azula had been thrown into the fire. Their mother called her a monster, and their father pitted them against each other. They were made to hate each other in such a deep capacity that some days it’s impossible to remembers the nights Azula would crawl into his bed to try and fill the void that their mother’s bedtime stories had left.
The house they’d moved into after Ozai inherited their grandfathers company had felt so much more empty and lifeless than the the one bedroom apartment they’d once shared. Their parents fought in the kitchen, hateful declarations spewing through the vents and in the aftermath their mother’s car tires screeching out of the driveway.
Father told them the next morning that she’d been in an accident— but Zuko never really believed it was an accident anyway.
When he thinks of sword training, he thinks of the night that their father had grabbed Azula by the arm, hauled her to the mat and told her that if she didn’t win, there’d be consequences.
The night he was burned— he remembers the face of his fathers friends, with little regard for the well being of a thirteen year old boy— the kitchen stove his newest companion, suffering his old best friend, and waking up with a fever on his uncle’s doorstep.
He doesn’t remember much of Azula— he doesn’t remember his own name for weeks. When he can balance, soon walk, and eventually learns how to cope with his sudden lack of depth perception he remembers his sister.
And for a long time he hates her for something she couldn’t control.
iv.
With a cup of tea in her hands, she tells Zuko that with the right strings pulled she’d found Iroh— she tells him (and the rest of the room who drop in without asking permission)
Her hands shake— and her cheeks are hallow, eyes sunken and drained of whatever light the completion spurred to life within her.
His spark had long since faded, and it seemed, Ozai had finally taken hers too.
“I don’t understand,” Zuko licks his lips, aureus irises focused on the hardwood beneath his socked feet. “Why are you here?
“I didn’t know.” She repeats, and suddenly he’s scared that she’s become a broken record as he had after his father had torched half of his face. “I didn’t know that he burned you. He told me— it was another game for him.”
Everything in him screams that Azula always lies, that this is a game to her and she’s going to be the winner. That she’s going to let Ozai claw his way between them, expanding the space that the years and memories have left in the middle of their, long since, frayed relationship.
“I don’t understand.”
And he doesn’t. Ozai would use this to enforce obedience— Azula isn’t him.
“He told me you’d left me.” She utters simply, eyes staring into the tea in her lap. “He knew that would be what broke me. He knew that you were the only person I loved. He knew that I’d think him staying meant he loved me.”
Theres horror in his friends eyes, and belatedly Zuko realises that all of this must be new information to them.
“I know I’m a monster.” She eases off the gas, and somehow, it’s harder for Zuko to believe. “I was at school a few years after, and the headlines about you started to break. About the brother and son who had become estranged, the ones suing father for burning his face— and I left.”
“What?”
“I left.” She repeats quietly. “Mai’s cousin had just turned eighteen, and was leasing an apartment from school— so I left. I stayed there, and I talked to uncle and we got a therapist and I’m trying to be better.”
She must see the hesitation in his eyes when amber meets gold, because she closes her eyes and drops her head once more.
“I didn’t believe it at first— I let him convince me that you were trying to get under my skin from wherever you were.” She sinks into the couch, in a way that is so painfully unlike the ridged girl he once knew.
Maybe, he thinks, she has changed. No longer is her hair tied in a severe bun, and no longer do her eyes carry the pristine look they once did.
She looks as tired as he feels. She looks human— and that’s a look Zuko’s never really seen on her.
Her eyebrows come together, chipped nail polish coated fingertips tracing the rim of the mug in her heads, “I didn’t want to believe it. Mai called Ty Lee though— and it turned out to be true. I’ve hurt a lot of people. I know that now. I knew it then too— but I’m trying to learn how to care for more than myself.”
Zuko sucks in a deep breath, letting it leave his lungs in the form of a long sigh. “Azula—“
“You once told me that the day I was born you wanted to protect me.” He doesn’t know where she’s going with this— he’s not sure he wants to know.
For a moment he thinks, there’s the old Azula— she’ll manipulate you until she controls the string without moving them herself. She wants him to destroy himself.
But then she continues, and something in Zuko breaks in an inexplicable way. “How come you never let anyone protect you?”
It’s a question Zuko wouldn’t have been able to answer a few years ago— but now, his lips curl into a dry smile and he whispers back: “I guess were both learning to be better in different ways.”
v.
“Are we going to unpack the burn comment?” Sokka asks, hand pushing through his hair as Zuko sits on the floor by Azula’s sleeping head. “Or are supposed to let that one ruminate until you’re more comfortable sharing?”
Zuko shrugs distantly, eyes focused on a chip in the coffee table as the room stares at him. Suddenly, it’s as if the apartment’s oxygen is depleting, and he’s the only one who can fix it.
“I don’t— there’s not much to talk about,” he says, voice stilted as if he’s had to answer this question before. “It’s just apart of me, I guess.”
Belatedly, they realise that Zuko’s father had gone to trail— and— maybe he had gone through this before. “I disrespected him, and he held my face to a kitchen burner. I was in the hospital for a month, and I had to learn.... everything all over again.”
He swallows thickly, eyebrows coming together, “you deserve a better answer than that— but the last time I tried to talk about it I fainted after I got off of the witness stand and the time before that I had a panic attack so bad that I had to take a full Xanax tablet.”
It’s like a dam— and he’s cracked the foundation. Guilt spills over his lips and out to his friends, “I was mute for six months after it— I remember Uncle’s face the first time I spoke again. The first thing I said was that it was my fault, and I thought that’s why he couldn’t look at me. He cried, and I thought I fucked everything up again. Zuko, the royal fuck up of the family.”
He can’t meet their eyes, he’s too scared of what he’ll see. It’s easier to stare at the ground that he wishes would swallow him whole.
“I still have nightmares about it— and sometimes they’re so bad at when we’re at the dorm that I wake up Sokka with my screams. Even when I try not to.” He scrubs at his knuckles, hot pain returning to the back of his eyes as he forces down the sob that threatens to claw its way out. “Sometimes I get flashbacks, and those aren’t great either, but they don’t happen as much anymore.”
Sokka regrets asking him as the next thirty seconds of his best friends life unfold around them.
Because for the first time in years, Zuko— emotionally detached, ‘I’m fine’, doesn’t need protecting Zuko— absolutely crumbles in front of their very eyes. And Gods, it hurts more than that time Sokka broke his leg in three places while skateboarding.
First comes the traitorous tears, melting scorching tear tracks down his cheeks— then, the sob that hits him like a train, wracking his entire body with a force that no teenager should ever have to feel.
“I should be past this— it’s been five years. I need to get my shit together and move on.”
There’s a strangled, mirthless laugh attached— the type that bubbles into a sob and leaves him struggling not to trip over the ledge and into a chasm of self loathing.
But it takes one shared look between them to know that— no, he’s never been more wrong.
“No.” Sokka rasps, and the moment he pulls Zuko into his chest— he finally fully breaks. “You deserve to feel.”
Katara and Toph find his free sides, Toph’s service dogs Badger nuzzling against Zuko’s legs and Aang and Suki disappearing to get him a glass of water.
Ivory fingers find their way into the navy blue fabric of Sokka’s cotton hoodie, as bronze fingers comb through the hair at the nape of Zuko’s neck.
Sokka’s body moves with Zuko’s muffled cries, and he has to screw his eyes shut to keep his own tears at bat as he rests his cheek against the crown of Zuko’s head.
Azula is awake now— and if Katara is honest, she probably has been for a long time. Her eyes are damp, and her fists are clutching the the blanket wrapped around her.
Zuko can’t help but think, that just as Chinua Achebe said:
Things Fall Apart.
But instead of palm wine and kola nuts, Zuko brings his father jail time and a shitty cell— and that’s all he can really ask (for now).
vi.
Sokka is eighteen, and his best friend has successfully snotted all over his favourite blue hoodie— Sokka is eighteen, and he does not give a flying lemur fuck about his favourite blue hoodie.
Because on his chest, his best friend is more peaceful than he’s been in the hours since his past has come back to haunt him— and from across the room, he can feel a twin pair of golden eyes focused on him.
“I’m sorry.”
Sokka risks a glance a Zuko, whose chest still rises and falls as the sun rises and sets (he can hear Zuko whispering, soles occidere et redire possunt, Sokka).
Zuko’s always been a bit of sunshine— even when he’s at his worst. Vulnerability makes him human, and being human is what makes him so deeply lovable.
He allows his fingers to continue to curl against the base of Zuko’s neck, echoes of his friends talking in the kitchen about everything that has happened throughout the last six hours, “what are you sorry for?”
Azula blinks, as if she wasn’t expecting an elaboration— as if it were obvious. “Everything. This. Zuko.”
“It’s okay.” Sokka responds, even thought it’s really not. It’s not okay that Zuko’s just cried himself out and had to relive several years of trauma at once. “It’s probably a good thing he cried. He never lets himself do that.”
“You don’t believe I’ve changed.”
It’s not a question, and Sokka thinks she might finally be onto something. Instead he answers, “I dunno. Seeing the good in people has always been Aang’s job. I didn’t even see the good in Zuko at first. He was a ball of fire— he ran hot and if you got too close you got burned. It took him having a panic attack during our first period class my sophomore to realise that he wasn’t so bad.”
Sokka shakes his head, “the little shit took five minutes to agree to take a sip from my water bottle after. Then I talked him into sitting with me in the nurses office, and the first real conversation I had with him was about not having a mom.”
Sokka snorts quietly, glancing back down at Zuko, “he said I knew too much and that he would have to pass away from embarrassment. We’ve been friends since.”
“Thank you for being there for him.” There’s something in her voice that Sokka can’t place— something that dangles precariously between guilt and despair.
“He talked about you sometimes,” Sokka mumbles, “I guess I just... he always called you Zula and never explained who you were. He does love you, but he’s always been scared to love, y’know?”
“He’s working on it. I am too.”
“Yeah.” Sokka agrees, and finally a gain smile curls onto his lips. “I’m proud of him.”
She flashes what looks like an attempt at a smile— something small and awkward and painfully like the old Zuko would.
And that, Sokka decides, has gotta count for something.