Chapter Text
Anger seized Zuko and carried him away. The face of the royal doctor blurred before him.
One of Zuko's hands snaked out. The doctor’s shirtfront felt rough and crisp as he yanked the man forward, twisting linen until he could feel him start to choke. Then he tightened it a little more. “What did you just say to me?”
“I–I’m sorry.” The man was shaking, suspended a few inches above his leather bedside chair.
“What,” Zuko enunciated, ignoring the way his leg throbbed where he’d been burned in the battle, and ignoring the dizziness and nausea, “did you just say?”
“I think–in my medical opinion–based on my experience–”
“Get to the point.”
“You’re dying.”
Zuko released him and shoved him back into the chair; he fell hard, and almost tipped over. “I’m sorry, Fire Lord.” He rubbed at his throat. “I wouldn’t say it if I did not know it to be true.”
The sake bottle on Zuko’s bedside table had dipped to the halfway mark sometime in the night. In the wan dawn light, he wasn’t sure how that had happened. He snatched the bottle up and drank, then said, “Well, doctor. What am I dying of?”
“Uh–that. Sir.” He pointed at the bottle.
Zuko arched one eyebrow and regarded his injured leg. “Not from the battle?”
“No, sir.” His voice was almost gentle, despite the fact that it rasped a little from the pressure Zuko had applied to his throat.
It made Zuko even more nauseous. Not knowing what else to do about that, he took another drink. “How, exactly, am I dying of this?” The bottle made a telltale swishing, a swishing that non-alcohol drinks never seemed to make, when he gave it a shake.
“You’re 30 years old and you’ve been drinking heavily since you were 16.” His face wrinkled in concern, ugly and old, like he’d spent his whole life in womanish worrying.
Zuko’s hands squeezed into fists, and he had to fight down the impulse to seize the man again. He couldn’t even say exactly why.
It wasn’t as if the man could be persuaded to change his mind.
“Plenty of people drink like me,” Zuko muttered. “Explain this better.”
“Well, first of all”--the doctor’s bushy gray eyebrows knit together in familiar concern–“I don’t know if that’s true. And second of all, uh. Some people die of it earlier than others, when they drink this way. It’s unpredictable.”
Zuko drank. “What if I were to stop?”
“I’m afraid,” the doctor said, “it’s too late.”
He drank again. The need for it, always there, grew fiercer than normal, and he worried about how long it might take the servants to bring him more when he asked. “But we won. We beat back the siege.”
“Warrior Suki is in a cell,” the man confirmed. “She takes the surrender ceremony in the Upper Ring town square tonight at sunset. She’ll be dead by tomorrow morning.”
Zuko rubbed one temple, where a headache was growing. “Agni be praised.” Something was settling down inside of Zuko. As the shock wore off, he was starting to see that things were alright. The anger melted like he’d poured liquor into snow.
Or maybe he was just a little drunk.
He took another drink.
“Yes, the … the war is probably over now,” the doctor put in. “At least–you’ll know that much. When it happens.”
Zuko nodded. He wanted to drink and think of Suki’s official, public surrender tomorrow.
He had won this battle. He commanded the troops, he made the preparations, he fought on the killing field they set up at the western gate.
Before that – years before that – he ended the threat posed to the Fire Nations supremacy by the Air Nomad Avatar. He murdered the unstable Fire Lord Ozai, his father. This victory was his, more than it was his sisters, though she would be the one to accept Suki’s fans.
Really, Suki’s surrender ceremony would kind of be like attending his own funeral.
***
Fourteen years earlier, a banished teenager had wandered away from his navy ship at night, in the cold of the South Pole. Firebending at glaciers wasn’t the worst way he’d ever released the sick pressure of excess energy, but it also wasn’t the best: He weakened the ice beneath him, and fell into the freezing sea.
He would always remember the strange sense that the water was boiling around him. He would remember a flash of light.
He would remember, next, vomiting saltwater onto hard-packed ice, and seeing that the boy before him had extinct Air Nomad clothing. He would remember knowing that this was the Avatar. He would remember recklessly flinging fire in every direction.
He would remember the look of dismay on his Uncle Iroh’s face when he brought the unconscious boy onto the boat, tied him up to keep him from flying away, and then set a course for home.
He would remember wondering for years–maybe even a decade–what the look of dismay on the Turncoat General Iroh’s face had meant that day. He would remember wondering for years what Iron meant when he asked Zuko, just before they crossed into Fire Nation waters with their prisoner in tow, “Are you sure this is really what you want, Prince Zuko?”
He would always remember trying to forget how angry the question made him. How it made him want to spit defenses of himself at looming shadows, and how explaining himself to Iroh never seemed to help him burn that anger out.
He would always remember coming home. Watching Ozai publicly strip the child of his staff, in a forced surrender ceremony. Watching Ozai burn the boy to a pile of greasy-smelling bones. Knowing this was happening in the same room where Ozai had burned Zuko, on the same high platform, with the same fire. Knowing that this meant Zuko had redeemed himself in the most perfect way. That he had regained his honor, in a way that not even his father could ever take away from him again. That he had become himself.
These were his favorite memories.
***
The hairs on Soza’s arms stood on end, and he kept getting angry little jolts like vertigo in the pit of his stomach. He was having trouble swallowing, and his mouth tasted precisely as unpleasant as it always tasted when he hadn’t slept or eaten.
He stood on the high platform behind Fire Lord Azula, hands folded and eyes appropriately serious for the surrender ceremony. Five other high-ranking advisers and commanders stood back along with Soza. All eight-hundred seats had been filled in the Upper Ring town square arena. Fire Nation pennants waved on high poles at every corner of the platform. The sun sank toward the horizon, over the hulking Fire Nation palace at the heart of Ba Sing Se.
Soza was trying to remember exactly how old he’d been, when he left home with a forged Fire Nation birth certificate and tested in a prestigious university. Was it thirteen, or fourteen? He was trying to remember what his childhood idglu had looked like, exactly. He was trying to remember which parts of that memory were true, and which parts were overlays his brain had made after fifteen years of pretending to be Soza.
He was trying to remember the last time anyone had called him Sokka.
He was trying to figure out why, the day before yesterday, when the United Resistance he had still believed himself loyal to had fallen during its own siege of Ba Sing Se, he hadn’t taken the ruby-hilted official dagger that always hung from the red sash tied around his waist and plunged it into Fire Lord Azula’s heart.
He was trying to decide where his loyalty really even lay: With the United Resistance, or with ending the war?
The war would end if the Fire Nation became supreme. He could only dimly recall why this had, years ago, seemed so terrible an outcome.
It was academic, though, he thought, and the thought felt like falling off a ledge. Suki proceeded down the aisle between the chairs, chained and escorted by eight Fire Guards. Ceremonial paper fans had been folded for her, and she gripped them with white knuckles, head down.
With Suki dead at the end of this ceremony, the United Resistance would collapse. Warrior Suki had led it from the beginning, and while there were other well-known leaders in the disorganized confederation of upstart groups across the world that called themselves the UR, Suki was the flashpoint. The war was all but over. A few smaller battles, a few thousand more dead – that was all that remained, between this ceremony and the start of peace.
… But if Soza believed that, if he really endorsed his own choice during the battle not to exploit the position he engineered specifically to exploit–then why did he feel this way?
Mai caught his eye from the front row. He jerked his gaze away. If there was one person in his life right now he might break down in front of given half a chance, it was her. So he wouldn’t give himself half a chance. He couldn’t take the risk. Not if he wanted to live out his days as the apparently loyal and committed Fire Nation adviser he had–somewhere along the way–become.
Suki reached the steps leading up to the platform. Her shoulders had curled in on themselves, and her hair hung in her eyes. Soza had never met the woman in person–he wasn’t a warrior, he hadn’t been near a battlefield since he left the Water Tribe–but he felt like he knew her. She had loomed over his mental landscape for years, half foe and half salvation.
In retrospect, though, maybe she had only ever been a foe.
“I am Fire Lord Azula,” his commander began. The guards forced Suki to her knees. “Earth King, Tribal Leader of the North Pole and the South Pole. Surrender to me, and I will release the prisoners. Refuse me your fans, and they all die with you.”
Suki raised her head, moving like it hurt. Her teeth ground together, and Soza’s own jaw hurt looking at it.
Oh, no, Soza thought. She’s beautiful.
“I surrender, Fire Lord Azula,” she said. “I give you my fans.”
From the corner of one eye, Soza saw the lesser Fire Lord sway where he stood behind his sister. It was a strange kind of swaying. It seemed almost like he was having trouble staying on his feet.
Probably, he was drunk out of his mind. Soza hoped he wouldn’t vomit on anyone.
Suki raised the fans above her bowed head. Azula extended one hand to accept them.
***
Zuko watched Suki proceed down the aisle. He watched her say the words of surrender.
He saw the ripple in the crowd, the whispers and the gasps. He knew something was wrong. He could barely see straight, both drunk and hungover, but he’d spent his life on battlefields. He knew danger when it brushed by him.
The ground shook subtly under his feet and he knew. “Azula,” he called. He threw a flame at his sister, trusting her to block the effects of the heat as he knocked her out of harm’s way.
She did. A tower of earth projected up from beneath the platform like a fist, shredding the wooden platform where Azula had stood.
“Stay light on the ground,” Zuko called to anyone who might still have their wits about them. “If it’s Toph the Builder’s crew they’ll want to imprison you in stone. Don’t let them.”
Chaos quickly descended. Earth bucked and reformed, bodies flying further than they could be expected to survive, other bodies being swallowed up.
It was definitely Toph the Builder’s crew. Other earth benders didn’t fight like this.
“Zuko!” Azula called, blue flame in each hand. It gave her face a ghostly glow. “Suki.” She jerked her head westward. “I’ll root out the builders.”
Setting his jaw against the pain in his leg, Zuko leapt after her.
She was jumping lightly from earth platform to earth platform as they rose up beneath her. Her athleticism impressed Zuko, and he found himself having to firebend just to propel himself fast enough to keep up with her.
She can’t get away, he thought, but the thought rolled against him in the form of pure feeling, nameless and divorced from cause and effect. She can’t, she can’t, she can’t.
This was his ceremony.
He fired hot white-orange flame, the kind he only found within himself in moments of pure pursuit. He felt sick with the thrill of it.
She dodged, and another rocky landing pad formed itself just for her.
But–unexpectedly–she used it to launch backward. Right at Zuko. Her foot flew blade first toward his face.
The next few seconds would not stick precisely in his memory. He blocked, he knew that. Suki had to struggle to regain her balance when she glanced off his defensive arm of flame, pant legs smoking.
Zuko thought he’d tried to send a follow up blow into her before she’d got her footing. But he wasn’t sure why it didn’t work.
Then there was a thumping sound, and it all went black.
***
Zuko awoke with a gasp in the darkness. His skin felt slick where it tangled in the stifling silken bed clothes, and the salty smell of blood and piss chased him from his dreams. His left leg pulsed with pain and his stomach churned. His head felt the way it had in Caldera City years ago, when he’d been concussed.
Within a fraction of a second of waking, he knew he was not alone in the room.
“Easy,” said a voice, a fraction of a second after Zuko registered the presence. “You’re okay.”
It was the voice of Soza. Azula’s political adviser. “What happened?” Zuko asked. He hated that he had missed the conclusion of two battles in three days.
He wished he could remember how he had gone down.
He … might have been drunker at the ceremony than he’d known. He realized this only now. His tongue was swollen with at least twelve hours of sobriety. He must have been unconscious for about that long.
“Suki got away,” Soza answered. His words beat a staccato beat, no tone. “Azula captured eleven builders. Toph herself isn’t one of them. They left a United Resistance flat over the gate to the Upper Ring, and set the pennant on the gate to the city on fire.”
“It’s not flammable,” Zuko said, irrelevant. He couldn’t have chosen the appropriate thing to say if he had tried.
“There are ways you can make anything flammable.”
Zuko dimly remembered that Soza had started his career as some kind of scientist or engineer. “The prisoners of war? The ones Suki was surrendering for the release of?”
There was a beat of silence. Then Soza said, “Dead.”
Zuko’s exhale shook in his chest. “ Agni . What did they think would happen?”
“I’ve been wondering the same thing.” Soza’s voice finally registered a tone, and it was unexpected.
Regret.
Zuko looked the man over. He rarely spared a thought for Azula’s advisers. They were hers. But something in the chaotic pattern of Zuko’s energy in the room, right then, felt itself reflected in Soza.
Zuko didn’t want to think too much about how.
“Why are you in my bedroom?”
“Azula wanted to be sure she was informed as soon as you woke.”
Zuko levered himself to sitting, fighting black spots each time his pulse beat in his head. “Get me a bottle of sake,” he said. “Then bring her to me. I have a plan she needs to hear about.”
Soza had the political savvy to simply nod.
***
Zuko’s second favorite set of memories was the night he and Azula finally destroyed the man who had tried to make Zuko believe he was weak, and Azula believe she was a weapon.
He would always remember the surprise on Ozai’s face when a female adviser’s ceremonial dagger woke him by piercing his throat.
The matching surprise on the adviser’s face when Zuko grabbed her while Azula did the same to her.
They left the room that way. Iroh was long gone by then and so no one challenged them. By the next night, they were crowned.
Then Zuko holed up in his room and celebrated alone with a case of sake. He didn’t leave until it was gone.