Chapter Text
The stones beneath Zuko’s cheek are moist. The whole damn prison is wet, water seeping everywhere, a creeping, constant dampness, mold in the air he breathes. The perfect punishment for a creature of fire and sun.
He tastes blood in his mouth, feels the throbbing pain from his last beating.
“Zuko, really I did underestimate you for so long, I admit it. Failed to see your true potential.” His father’s silky voice echoes in the heavy shadows of the prison cell. He’s been here for hours, just watching as the guards beat him. That’s usual. For him to talk – that’s different.
Zuko turns his head slowly. There’s one torch in a corner, flickering low now, but still enough to see Ozai. The long robes, the metal flame of the Fire Lord in his topknot again, gleaming gold in the torchlight.
Just over three years. That’s how long Zuko was able to hold the throne with his father in a prison rather than in a grave. So fucking helpful of Aang to find a way to hold his own precious morals, to think that an Ozai without bending was somehow a snake without its fangs.
Ozai kneels down on the filthy stones, and runs a finger along Zuko’s scar, smiling when Zuko shudders. “I understand, of course, my son,” he croons. “I killed my own father for the throne. I see now that you were only following your nature. My true child.” Zuko grits his teeth, feels his father place his hand against the scar fully, his hand fitting perfectly. When he was first thrown into this prison he would’ve fought to the death if his father had ever tried to touch him like this, in that fucking spot. Later, he would’ve at least tried to bite that hand, to draw blood.
Now, he lies quietly and waits. How many times in his life has suffering been his teacher? Now it has taught him the value of submission.
“Aligning with the Avatar to gain an ally that could destroy me and leave you with a clear path to the throne. Defeating your sister in an Agni Kai. Truly, Zuko, I am proud of you.”
Zuko closes his eyes, feeling that dripping of his father’s poison into his mind. He’s just so damn tired. And the constant cold and damp from the prison feels like it has wound its way inside his bones.
“You’ve had some time to consider your position, I think.”
Two years. He’s been in this cell for two years. Hasn’t seen the sun in this lightless hole, just endless days of feeling the weight of these wet stones all around him, this prison deep under the ground. He’s felt the hope of rescue slip away, day after day. Inside him, his fire is barely an ember.
“I think, my son, it is time to discuss your future.”
Zuko’s cheek scrapes against the stone as he lifts up his head, really looks at his father’s pale face. He’s a handsome man, really, still well in his prime. Before he gave Zuko a severe and permanent facial burn across half his face, everyone in court used to talk about how much Zuko looked like his father – how handsome he was going to be when he was all grown up. Hard to even see the three years of his own prison time – of course, Zuko had been so fucking humane in his father’s prison accommodations. Clean linens. Books. Not even a single beating.
What a fucking fool he’d been.
Zuko clears his throat, painfully, and, very slowly, rasps, “My future?”
They both know then that Zuko has truly given up. That Ozai has won.
The smile stretches across Ozai’s face, as pleased as a cat watching a bird bleed out in front of it. “Indeed. After all, you are the crown prince. My heir.”
Zuko’s eyes narrow. “What about Azula?”
His father makes a soft tsk. “Such a disappointment. I was too distracted by her bending, her delightful bloodthirstiness. But you defeated her, my son. And she is, really, not quite fit to rule anymore, wouldn’t you agree? Even after all your tender care?”
He’d ended up entrusting her to the Fire Sages, and she still lives in a monastery, tended by a number of skilled nurses. She never found the cracked pieces of herself after the Agni Kai.
“Perhaps a useful marriage,” Ozai muses.
Zuko laughs, hollowly, and his throat feels raw. This is the most that he’s talked in… fuck, he doesn’t even know, and his vocal cords feel strained already. “You’d better not need her bridegroom. He won’t survive very long.”
“Precautions would have to be taken, of course.” That reptilian smile flashes in the flickering light. “But so much is already in motion. So much that you would be able to assist me with. After all, I must deal with the board that you have set for me.”
Zuko feels a brief stab of satisfaction. Three years had been enough for him to demobilize. To grant the colonies independence, to begin shifting the economy, sending men back from the military to their home villages, to change factory production to focus on trade goods, to rebuild their own food cultivation. The taste of financial prosperity for more than just the military had been enough to whet the appetite of a nation locked into war for a century. Even Ozai had to be cautious not to disturb that delicate balance.
Not that it had gone well for Zuko. How easy it had been for Ozai to swear to uphold all the treaties that Zuko had bled for, to say that a change in the head of state was a purely internal matter, an issue between father and son, and no business for an outside nation to interfere with. Not if they wanted the larger peace to be maintained, of course.
How easy it had been for Ozai to lock the Avatar into place. To make certain that no other nation would lift a finger for Zuko.
The peace was bigger than one life, after all.
Admittedly, Zuko had not quite expected it to go this way.
Still. Even a broken Zuko has to give a choking laugh, to ask, roughly, “And are you enjoying the new world order, Father?”
Ozai is impossible to bait, and just continues smiling at him. “There are opportunities. You have taught me a great lesson as well, my son. About how far I had overextended our forces. There are other ways to assure Fire Nation dominance. After all, your actions made certain that our cities were never burned, never conquered. The Earth Kingdoms still rebuild. The South Pole is still depopulated, the North still crouches behind its walls and clings to isolation. Peace could, surprisingly, go so well for us.”
Zuko stares at him. For most of his conversation he has been assuming that the executioner was waiting outside the door, sharpening his ax, and his father’s mood would determine how many swings it took to take Zuko’s head from his body. It suddenly occurs to him that something else might be brewing.
He can’t trust this. There’s nothing Ozai loves better than to bait a trap with hope.
His father traces his scar one last time, then leans back, his long silk sleeves brushing against the filthy straw. “Would you like to come out of this cell, Zuko? Your room at the palace is waiting for you. You can take a bath. Have a fine dinner. Put on clean clothes. There is a meeting of the ministers tomorrow afternoon, and I would be so glad if my heir would attend.”
Maybe the executioner really is waiting, and this is all a trap.
But, maybe not.
Zuko has always been a survivor.
And he has been in this cell long enough to know that no one is coming for him.
**
Five levels up, they pass the first window, and the sunlight after two years below ground slices through Zuko’s brain, sends him nearly to his knees in a terrible combination of the agony in his eyes and the desperate, clawing relief of finally feeling it on his skin again, feeling it soak in and call to that fluttering ember inside him.
He wishes he could stand and just absorb it for hours, but he continues stumbling forward in his father’s wake.
After all, he has learned the necessity of obedience.
**
Before they leave the prison, Zuko’s rough prison robe is removed and he is subjected to the indignity of a full delousing process, buckets of water emptied over his head and a truly noxious liquid scrubbed roughly through his ragged, matted hair, then over his bony, emaciated body. Whenever it hits an open wound, of which there are quite a few to choose from, the burning agony of it makes him suck in a breath on a gasp, barely holding back the screams that build in his throat.
Ozai sits in a chair and takes in the whole fucking show, a look of almost delighted interest across his face as he watches his heir get deloused like a stray puppy.
Zuko is fairly sure that this is the first time in his whole life that his father has seen him bathed – the rumor in the palace was that his father hadn’t visited the nursery a single time for the first three years, preferring to wait until Zuko was fully toilet trained and presentable before he bothered to check in on his progress in person.
Apparently Ozai has decided to take a much more hands-on approach to parenting.
**
Zuko doesn’t sleep the first night — he is sitting and waiting for his father’s soldiers to arrive and throw him back into his prison cell. It would be so very Ozai, after all, to deliberately make him think that he was safe, and then start the misery again.
The feeling of the silk of his robes against his skin is foreign after so long. His hair is combed out, falling well past his shoulders now, more than enough for a very princely topknot. The bed in the room is plush and loaded with silken sheets and plump pillows, covers folded back invitingly for him to crawl between them and sleep.
He doesn’t dare. It will make the dirty straw of the prison cell that much worse if he gets into that bed now.
These aren’t the rooms he slept in the last time he was in this palace. Then, he slept in the Fire Lord’s suite, and that belongs to his father again.
These are the rooms he slept in as a child, then a teenager. The Crown Prince’s suite. And it’s all as he left it the day he fled the palace when he was seventeen, the Day of Black Sun. Off to join the Avatar and overthrow his father.
Well, that worked out like fucking shit, didn’t it.
When morning comes, he is still in his room, still seated in the same chair. Servants arrive to draw him a bath. His father is waiting to have breakfast with him.
After so long in prison, Zuko can barely eat anything before his stomach cramps shut in protest. He’s been surviving on too little, for too long, and now he has to be careful with food or he’ll end up vomiting it all up.
He learned that in his first meal after prison, curled up next to the table, puking his guts out, while his father just sat and smiled.
It is a week before he sleeps through the night, and that is just sheer exhaustion finally winning out. The next morning, his father gives him that small, reptilian smile, and notes that Zuko is looking well rested. And that night he can’t sleep again.
**
The doctors come and go silently. They are draining infected wounds, putting poultices on deep bruises, and doing very little good at all.
It’s not that they aren’t good doctors. They’re no Water Healers, but none of those can be found outside the Poles or a few neighborhoods in Republic City.
It’s just that having doctors come in two years after the beatings started is a bit more about standing back and assessing the permanent damage and less like doing any real mending.
**
Zuko stands in the training courtyard that is reserved for the crown prince, and he struggles to bend.
He has smoke and sparks, but not fire. He struggles to remember what it was like to stand beneath the dragons when he was seventeen, to watch their fire and all its colors and strength, to move with Aang through the motions of the dragon dance.
He can’t. It used to feel so sharp and immediate, the sheer wonder of it permanently carved into his brain. Now it feels muffled and distant.
After two days of trying, Zuko takes a deep breath and thinks about the prison instead, about being locked away and every day waiting for his friends to come and save him, about spending two years never begging his father for mercy because he was so sure that his friends would come any day now. And it turns out that he should’ve just started begging the first week, because all Ozai really wanted was his complete submission, and no one was coming. Ever.
His fire is like an explosion in the training yard.
When he was seventeen, Zuko decided that he didn’t want the spark of his fire to come from rage and hatred anymore, but it appears that he was wrong about a lot of things at that age.
**
He could, if he wanted to, get laid.
He has been in a prison cell for two years, and is very aware that he had been missing out on more than just a soft mattress and a clean bathroom (though those are definitely not to be dismissed lightly – the closest he came to crying at any point after getting out of prison was when he was able to sit down on an actual toilet rather than a cracked bucket that he would be smelling for the next few days). His father even makes a few silky suggestions, but while Zuko has followed all the rest of his father’s ‘suggestions’ like an obedient son, this one he doesn’t.
It’s not from any moral objection. He never visited a brothel as a teenager, and from the time he was seventeen to his overthrow he was usually at some point in the cycle of break-up-get-back-together that typified dating Mai, but at the moment he is twenty-two and has no personal objections to putting down money and getting exactly what he wants.
The problem is that he doesn’t actually want anything. His body feels utterly hollowed out, dry and empty, and even if he had any physical desire (which at the moment is a resounding no), the thought of someone else putting their hands on him right now is utterly revolting. The doctors examining the wreck of his body were bad enough, and he dismissed them as soon as the last of the infected pus in his wounds was cleared. He makes sure that even the servants are out of the room before he drops his robes, and he had the mirrors removed from his suite early on.
He makes a mild comment to his father about following the Fire Sage teaching of personal discipline, and his father gives one of his rare chuckles, the one that always makes Zuko feel like spiders are running up his spine.
Right now the feeling of taking a bath in hot water, then lying down on a large mattress, is about as much physical relief as Zuko needs.
**
Two months pass. He hasn’t been sent back to prison yet, but he waits for it every night. Or would his father wait until the morning? There are a lot of possibilities.
Zuko moves through his days — there are council meetings to attend, then a hundred small tasks to perform, ministers and budgets to oversee. He must act as his father’s agent, eyes, and ears, always aware of the hundred small traps his father has scattered in his path to test whether his leash has become too long.
Zuko has no intentions of allowing his leash to be shortened in any way, so he is careful to always report any whisper of rebellion, any hints of mismanagement. What is planted, what is real, who could be trusted — he doesn’t know, so is careful to note and report it all. He is the perfect Crown Prince, a useful tool in his father’s knowledgeable hands.
He never felt really comfortable in social situations. Azula was the one who could work a room, could find the weak spots in people and exploit them. Other than the half a year when Zuko was traveling with Team Avatar, he never really even had friends. There was his mother, then Uncle, and now both are long gone, one in a grave and one in a tea shop in Ba Sing Se, which right now feels about the same.
He is alone in the court, always feeling the yawning vulnerability of his own back.
How many ministers and functionaries does he speak with now who once knelt and called him Fire Lord? A surprising amount, actually, and whenever he catches any of them in some oversight, or a petty little piece of graft, it gives him a distinct pleasure to give them an icy glare and mention how very disappointed his father will be to hear of this transgression, and see their cold sweat and fear, to know that Ozai is the Fire Lord they wanted, so they can damn well deal with the consequences.
Was anyone ever truly loyal to him? He assumes, if they were, then they are either very far from court now or extremely dead. Whenever someone makes a subtle hint to him, attempts to reference the time when he was in power, he is swift to shut it down. Reading people, manipulating them, collecting up a hundred leashes with soft political power, that was never his strength. He can use a blade, he can burn with a skill few other firebenders can match, he can scan through rows of figures and see the hints of funds being siphoned away, he can read reports and treaties for eight hours and still keep plowing through until he sees the coy little clause tucked away like a sleeping viper and strike it through with a slash of ink, but, most importantly, he can focus on his own fucking survival this time.
**
In the private courtyard for his bending, when Zuko is done training with fire and steel, he often just sits in the sun, trying to soak in enough that he can drive the damp and the chill of two years of prison from his bones and lungs, but it never seems to be enough.
**
Five months after Zuko’s release from prison — a delegation from the Southern Water Tribe arrives, led by the Water Tribe siblings.
Now they come, he thinks, every thought like acid. Now that he doesn’t need them, but they want something from the Fire Nation. They were once so close that he would’ve happily died for either of them, and now he just wishes he could get away with killing them both.
Two years waiting for the rescue that never came, and they come with a fucking diplomatic delegation. To talk with his father.
Zuko is fairly sure that this incident will be enough to feed his fire for the rest of his fucking life.
They are both formally dressed. Zuko hasn’t seen Katara in a long time, and never like this. Her dress falls to the floor, periwinkle blues and lilacs. She is wearing makeup, skillfully applied to turn her blue eyes into bottomless pools, and her hair tumbles down her back, with just the small loops at her temples, and those blue beads. A careful touch of what is exotic to a Fire Nation eye. The prettiness that she had at fifteen is now fully realized, and at twenty she is absolutely stunning, and there’s a ripple of double-takes through the Fire Court as she walks beside her brother. Zuko used to spend so much of his time trying not to look at her, but now he only feels that hollowness inside himself, and her beauty is just one more reason to hate her.
Time has also passed over her brother. Sokka is much taller, his shoulders wider now, the whiplike frame he had at seventeen fully filled in with heavy Water Tribe muscle. He’s also formally dressed, a long blue tunic with fine embroidery. Did his sister sew it, or have the children of the Southern Water Tribe’s chief moved up in the world enough that they no longer have to make their own clothes?
Prison has left Zuko caustic, has sharpened all the edges of his personality until on some days he just feels like a blade that wants to draw blood. Preferably someone else’s, if only for a change of pace.
When the prison door had first slammed shut, he’d already known better than to expect Aang to come. There had been too many arguments, too many summits where the Avatar was too busy rebuilding the air temples, seeking new acolytes, to attend. The peace gave Aang the space he needed to focus on his own people. When he’d been reading scrolls about the Avatars past, in the years on his ship, Zuko had seen that criticism before. No Avatar truly moved beyond their own element — they always favored their own people. A nation’s time with their own Avatar always led to their own ascendance. Roku had been no different — an Earth or Water Avatar would’ve dealt with Sozin years before he’d truly become a threat.
But it had taken years before Zuko had stopped waiting for the others. How many nights did he go to sleep and dream of a rescue led by Sokka’s planning, fueled by Katara’s whips of ice? Toph would’ve had no problems with the bars of his cage.
The siblings aren’t looking at Zuko, who stands below and to the side of his father’s throne, a perfect prince. Minus the scar, minus the way he’s still too thin under his robes, two years of deprivation not easily shrugged off. The silk of his robe hides the damage so well. His father had left orders that his face be left alone – had Ozai already been thinking ahead to moments like this, or did he just not want to detract from his own excellent handiwork displayed on Zuko’s face?
It doesn’t really matter.
Sokka looks up, his face perfectly expressionless as he addresses Ozai on his throne. “We are here to formally ratify the treaty between our two nations, and we thank the Phoenix King for his grace in upholding the negotiated reparations.”
King of the Jerkbenders, Sokka used to call Ozai. Now Phoenix King slips off his tongue with such ease. At least Zuko isn’t the only one who has had to learn to crawl in the last two years, and he feels the edge of a nasty smile curl at his lip.
“Of course.” Ozai is so smooth, as if Sokka didn’t bring his airship army tumbling from the sky. “My son’s wisdom was great. For too long has there been strife between our nations. How prescient of my heir to see a better way.”
As if Ozai had never ordered the Southern Fleet to slaughter the waterbenders and drive the South to its knees. As if Ozai’s orders hadn’t led to Sokka’s mother being burned to death in her own home.
Sokka’s face twitches, hard, but he never looks away from Ozai. Not fucking once at Zuko. Is he ashamed? Zuko hopes so. He hopes that Sokka knows that Zuko is a living symbol of that fucking man’s cowardice. He once walked into the most notorious prison in the Fire Nation with Sokka, and then Sokka returned the favor by letting him rot. “How true. And the South is grateful. So grateful that we would propose even closer ties between our nations.”
Ozai’s voice is so silky, and his mask is almost perfect. Zuko is sure that he’s the only one who knows Ozai well enough to see that spark of greedy interest in his father’s eyes. “Oh? How so?”
Sokka’s blue eyes narrow. “An alliance.”
The hair on the back of Zuko’s neck stands up, and he feels every muscle in his body freeze.
Sokka keeps talking. The court is silent – a pindrop could be heard right now as everyone stares at the Water Tribe man. “The Southern and Northern Water Tribes are united in this action. A marriage between the only chief’s daughter left alive, and the Crown Prince.” He looks right into Ozai’s eyes. “We wish to do this to show that we will not raise arms again against the Fire Nation. Not when our most precious daughter and sister is wed.”
What.
What the fuck.
What the fuck are they DOING.
What the hell are they offering — to Ozai? A deal he’d never pass on — a promise not to fight if Ozai turned on the Earth Kingdom — a repudiation of their own ties in the war — why? Why?
Across from Zuko, Katara slowly lifts up her chin, and looks directly at him for the first time since she walked into the room. He knows that look on her face. He’s seen it before too many times to ever mistake it – and his heart starts pounding in his chest as he realizes with a gut-churning lurch the why —
They didn’t forget him.
Somehow this is their plan.
A shudder runs up his spine.
This is a terrible fucking plan.