Chapter Text
It wasn’t love.
Love was wrong. Love was merciless, it put him on his knees and build him up anew, it tore his heart and left it breathless, teared his eyes and burned him to ashes. Love was passion, the way fire was, and Zuko learnt too well it was how his father chose to show his love, with a voracious fire consuming his flesh, with scars and hard-learned lessons. But for Aang, it couldn’t be love, as for Aang never offered him any scar and never would. Love was wrong, it was wrong, and Aang was everything but wrong, he was the fairest, the most honest man he ever met.
So, it wasn’t, couldn’t be love. It was something else.
It wasn’t friendship.
Katara was his friend, Sokka was just as much, damned he be.
Toph was a kind and blind soul who couldn’t see his scars. Even if she did, could, she never spoke of it. She kept them untold, he kept hers a secret, and it was enough to call her his friend. But Aang, Aang wasn’t his friend. He had been, wasn’t anymore, the same way he was his target before and was no more. He wasn’t his friend but something else, one he couldn’t and wouldn’t put a name on. Aang could read in him like nobody did, better than his mother, better than anyone, and every time he saw him, Zuko thought, swore, he wouldn’t get attached to him. Swore he could handle it, swore that, after defeating his father, they could part their way and never think of each other again.
Truth was, he was bound already. He had always been, in this life or another, met Aang and refused to lose him, oathed to grow old by his sides, to walk with him as an equal.
So, when Aang asked him to teach him his craft, his damned craft, with compassion in his soul and forgiveness in his voice, Zuko couldn’t refuse, taught him, instead, how fire flows around them as a comforting warmth, how to see the lively soul of fire in each flame they summoned.
And for once, fire wasn’t love, wasn’t despair nor destruction. It would be what saved them all, after a hundred years, and Zuko thought, maybe, maybe he could let Aang save him this time.
It was devotion.
Zuko learnt it later. When they were older and wiser, when the world was at peace and they weren’t children anymore. When Aang was known as the world's savior, and he as the heir of the abhorred fire nation.
It was familiarity.
Aang knew it since the moment their soul touched, it struck him like a lightning blot every single time, when Zuko was left to die by the Northern tribes, in Ba Sing Se, every time they fought, Aang knew him, could have sworn he met him decades ago, before this war, before the world was nothing but wasted lands. In the Fire Temple, Aang knew, realized, just as Zuko did, in Pohuai Stronghold, when he freed him dressed as the Blue Spirit, they both knew who they were.
Roku told him, hinted him, many times, when he spoke of his beloved Sozin, about lifetimes and friendship who weren’t only fondness. And then everything made sense, why Kuzon was long gone, why Zuko was here, alive, and Kuzon wasn’t, why Zuko reminded him of his past, why everything they said and done, they already underwent it a thousand times in different lives, why Roku led him to Ran and Shaw, why Zuko accompanied him or why the dragon trusted them.
It all made sense.
It was foolish, certainly, to think his soul could be tied to the fire prince; to the firelord; to imagine Zuko would bring him comfort the way Katara never could, to imagine they lost and found their way back here, at each other’s side, where they belonged, even after a hundred years.
It was foolish.
But Aang gladly accepted it.