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They leave him at the furthest port from home with nothing but rough brown robes that don’t quite fit and the knife Mai snuck to him before he was sent away. Thirteen years old and alone in the Earth Kingdom, thrown out of his life and family and destiny with the burn on his face still raw and new, Zuko does not want to go on.
Except never give up without a fight, the knife reminds him every time his fingers find it, and then he has to go on after all. He tries to leave it behind but it is all he has, the only thing he has of his old life. Maybe that’s supposed to be funny, that the only reminder he has of the Fire Nation is unmistakably from the Earth Kingdom, or maybe it’s just pathetic, but he still can’t let it go.
How can he, when he has nothing, not even his honor, and he can trust no one? He is far from his nation’s colonies, farther still from his nation itself, and his people’s enemies are everywhere and all he can think about is what they will do to him if they discover who he is, if they—
Except Zuko is not who he is anymore. There is no more Prince Zuko. He is disrespectful and weak and a coward and his father ordered the sages to write him out of existence, made it so he never was in the eyes of his people.
Instead he is here, thirteen years old, a firebender with a burned face, a boy with a knife, for the first time in his life a face no one knows.
The first time he steals he does it so he won’t starve—a roll of bread, nowhere near enough to satisfy him and even if it were the guilt has him throwing it up right after, quaking and shaking in an anonymous alley and hating himself for committing such a dishonorable act.
Stupid, he tells himself. He has no honor. It doesn’t matter what he does.
He wipes off his mouth and forces his ragged breathing to even out, and then goes back out into the world and finds something a little less heavy to steal. Never give up without a fight, the knife tells him again, and he pretends he can survive this and then his mouth and fingers are sticky with moon-peach juice and he is a thief twice in one day but his stomach doesn’t hurt so bad and this time he doesn’t throw up.
Cries, almost, but no shame can compare to the shame of backing out of an Agni Kai and begging for mercy in front of the whole world, so in the end he doesn’t. Not until that night, frightened in the dark and lost for where to go and what to do, lost in a strange city like every night, sleeping in the most secret place he can find and too afraid to be around people. The enemy, he reminds himself, hard and fierce, and days and weeks go by and he goes numb and when a man catches him trying to steal his purse and thrashes him so hard he thinks he’ll die, he just crawls into the nearest pile of garbage and wishes that he will.
He fought, didn’t he? It’s not his fault he was born to lose, it’s not his fault the enemy is everywhere and he is all alone, it’s not his—
Hands touch his face, soft and gentle, and even without opening his eyes he hates whoever they belong to.
“Hey,” a girl’s voice says, soft and quiet. “Hey, can you hear me? What’s your name?”
No one has ever asked Zuko this question before, but of course it would only come up when he doesn’t have an answer.
“Can you hear me?” the girl repeats, and he tries to open his eyes but it doesn’t quite work. The burned eye healed shut, at some point or another, and his good eye’s so swollen it hurts to even try. “Wake up. Stay with me. Your name—”
“Don’t have one,” Zuko rasps, and then the concussion gets to him and he passes out.
.
.
.
Song stares down at the unconscious, battered boy slumped useless on the ground before her, then forgets about her bad leg for the first time in months and starts dragging him out of the alley. He is limp and filthy and heavy and the ugly burn on his face is sick with infection, but she has moved worse patients—not far, but she has moved them. This is no harder than that, she tells herself, gritting her teeth against the strain in her muscles and the stabbing pains in her burned leg; all she has to do is move him a little at a time. Just a little, just a bit. The sad little apartment they’ve been staying in as Song recovers from her injury is only a few blocks from here. She can make it. They can make it.
They will. She won’t give up.
She knows what it feels like, to get hurt like that.
“It’s okay,” Song whispers to the boy as she puts all she has into dragging him along, because who knows, maybe he’ll hear, and it’s something to concentrate on besides how hard this is. “My mom’ll fix you. And she still makes too much dinner, anyway.”
He is slack and wounded in her arms and so, so close to dead weight that Song cannot keep herself from crying.
She wants her father, and a leg without pains or scars, and, more than anything, for this boy to wake up.