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Zuko is twenty-five years old when the man dies, consumed by despair and by a burning fury that no longer has any fire into which or young princes onto which to release it.
There is no fanfare, no memorializing—there can’t be. The man may have been locked away in prison for nine years, but people still loyal to an ousted monarch have long memories, and Zuko’s rule remains precarious. The last thing he needs is to make a martyr out of his predecessor.
There is no fanfare, no memorializing, but Iroh comes anyway when Zuko writes to inform him, bringing, for once, sake instead of tea. They sit and consume it silently together, Zuko staring contemplatively into his cup.
“Do you think,” he asks suddenly. “That when he looked at me, his first-born son, he thought of you, and that’s why he hated me so much? Why he wanted me to suffer? That he did everything to me that he wished he could have done to you? While Azula reminded him of himself—and how he molded and warped her…maybe he thought it was love.”
“Perhaps.” Iroh sips his sake. “Or perhaps he thought only of himself, and saw Azula as a tool for him to gain power such as he could not envision you. I am not sure we will ever know. I am not sure he knew himself.”
“I guess not.” Zuko fingers his scar absently-mindedly.
“But he is gone now, Fire Lord Zuko.”
“Is he?”
Iroh had, Zuko knows, said the words to reassure him, to remind him, to give him this sentiment to cling to: that no matter how much pain the man has caused, he is gone now and cannot cause any more. But Zuko is not certain. True, the man is dead, and Zuko hasn’t seen him more than half a dozen times in the years since he was locked away. But there are indelible marks he has made on his life, on the person Zuko has become, the literal scar being the least of them. There is a part of him, still, that wishes he were sitting here drinking sake with Azula, raising their glasses in toasts of joyous memory to the man their father was—the way that he imagines Sokka and Katara will when their father eventually passes on.
But thanks to that man, Azula is in no state to share sake with anyone, the way she stares into space and occasionally produces fiery outbursts of pain and grief and rage. Zuko wonders if she knows he’s gone. He wonders what she’s thinking, what she’s feeling, if she does. If her feelings are as jumbled and confused as his are. If there’s anything he could say to her that would be of any comfort or consolation.
He sets his cup down, sighs. When he looks up and makes eye-contact with his uncle, Iroh senses something in his eyes, reaches for him and wraps him in a tight embrace. Zuko sits, still and silent, in the man’s arms. He doesn’t cry.
He almost wishes that he could.