Archive of Our Own ^beta

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He knew he had a nephew. The people who had brought him back to his room had talked about him. And Mushi didn’t question why he only had fractured slivers of memories about him, sensations, the sound of a voice, the feeling of a washcloth in his hand dabbing at the metallic-scented fluid seeping from a burn.

He didn’t remember the boy’s name, and something at the back of his mind told him this should bother him. It didn’t. And later, when the boy, Zuko, Zuko was his name tried to tell him his own name was something else, he figured maybe that was normal. Maybe the names of people close to them were something everyone forgot.

And love him the boy did. It was plain in every spoonful of porridge Zuko held to his mouth, every sad, frightened look, and Mushi had no idea what he had ever done to deserve such care. Such a nice boy.

And then Zuko was crying on the floor, sobbing like a broken thing close enough to touch, and Mushi knew there was something he should be doing to fix this, to make him feel better. Such a shame he didn’t remember what.

Chapter Text

The cell door was never locked. The Dai Li relied on things a lot stronger than locks and stone walls to keep him where he was. And they were used to him coming and going, rushing around for Long Feng or Agent Jiaynu, or one of the captains, and all of this made it very very easy (frighteningly easy, too easy, the kind of easy that made his palms wet with sweat as he waited for a trap to be sprung) to slip out of the headquarters behind a pack of agents and into the upper ring. He watched the Avatar’s former companions leave the house they had been given, walked inside, sat down on the floor, and waited.

o0O0o

He had closed his eyes, against the sunlight, too bright, too yellow and red, too much, much too much, tears pouring down his face against his will. He hadn’t meant to sleep. But when the door opened, he jerked awake.

“What…” the Water Tribe boy said.

“How did you get in here?” his sister demanded, but there was something other than suspicion at the back of her eyes, and Zuko couldn’t help but take that as a positive sign.

Zuko stared. He had planned this, so painstakingly, so desperately, hoping beyond hope that it would work, that he could just get here, and but suddenly all the words he knew he needed to say to make this work, to make them understand, had dried up, and he just stared.

Then the one with the hooked swords had him by the arms, hoisting him into the air, and everybody was yelling.

It took Zuko a minute to realize only the guy with the hooked swords was yelling at him, that everybody else was yelling at the guy with the hooked swords. His feet swung in the air as he summoned the effort to speak. “I know where the bison is.” But nobody heard him, so he tried again, louder, almost yelling, his voice cracking with disuse. “I know where the bison is!”

Everybody stopped yelling.

“Yeah, then where is he?” the guy with the hooked swords hissed, punctuating each word with a shake, until Zuko felt his teeth rattle.

“Put him down, Jet!” the waterbender snapped.

He knew he’d been dropped, because he felt his body hit the floor. He levered himself up onto his arms, eyes flicking warily between their faces.

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Cool.

It was the first thing he really registered in what felt like… In what felt like forever. There was a coolness on his temples, and he felt as if he were swimming in it, and as if it were carrying him away from the fog.

He opened his eyes. The Water Tribe girl who traveled with the young Avatar was there, her hands around his head, wreathed in water. And when he turned his head…

Sitting there, tense and cautious, wearing green, and with hair long enough to fall into his eyes was…

Iroh’s hands might not have worked anymore, but his arms did, and there was nothing that was going to make him let go of his nephew, or to give up the feeling of him pressed against his chest, where he could feel every heartbeat, and every breath Zuko took, reassuring him that everything was real again.

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Iroh drank his cup of tea, eying his nephew with something that was almost, but not quite wariness. It wasn’t that he was frightened of Zuko, or even really worried for him, except in the way he always was, it was just… It was unsettling. In that hazy time when he had not been himself, when the Dai Li had scooped him out and replaced him with someone else, Zuko too had become someone else. And the person who Zuko had been could not so easily be brought back. The Zuko he had known was gone and a stranger stood in his place.

A stranger who knew how to make tea.

Iroh set his cup down to wave his nephew over. “Come sit with me, Prince Zuko.”

Zuko flinched at his own name, but he came over and knelt down next to him, wordless and watchful.

Unsettling.

If Iroh used both hands, he could grip the cup between them and hold it steady, curving his fingers around it as much as they would now. It kept him from resting a hand on Zuko’s head, as he hand when his nephew was a boy, back when he would have allowed it.

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The ground swayed under him, which was very strange, because he was lying on it, and ground didn’t usually do that unless he was standing up. He opened his eyes.

Red was above him, with sky on all sides, which was how he knew he had to be dreaming, because dreams could ignore rules like the sky being above, and the world being below, and-

“You’re awake.”

Aang turned his head to the voice and instantly wished he hadn’t as his stomach flipped over and bile rose in his throat. Thin, wiry arms wrapped around him, lifting him to his feet and holding him steady as he vomited over the side of the strange metal basket they were hanging in. He looked up at Zuko. “You have hair.”

“Yeah,” he grunted. “How are you feeling? Other than the whole…” He waved his hand vaguely.

“Ugh,” Aang told him. His head was pounding, and his stomach threatened to revolt a second time. “Are we flying?”

“You’ve got to be pretty drugged still,” Zuko murmured, crouching down next to him. “Go back to sleep. Hopefully you won’t remember this when you wake up.”

o0O0o

When Aang woke the second time, he pulled himself up to vomit the last of his stomach contents over the side of whatever this thing was supposed to be that he was in. Zuko passed him a water flask. “Drink. You’re dehydrated. They’ve been having trouble getting enough water into you. Your head will stop hurting.”

Aang took the flask. His mouth tasted like vomit, and he choked down the mouthful of water. “I’m still dreaming.”

“You’re not,” Zuko told him. “You’re about a quarter of the way to the Earth Kingdom coast from the Fire Nation capital. I’m glad you’re awake. I need to teach you to push fire so we can take turns piloting the war balloon and I can get some sleep. It’s going to take a couple of days to cross the ocean.”

“Why would I help you?” Aang asked, dazed. “You’re just trying to capture me again… Wait, wasn’t I already…” There was a strong possibility he was still a little drugged.

Zuko nodded. “I’m helping you escape.”

Aang sat down heavily. “Oh, okay, I’m definitely dreaming.”

“You’re not.” Zuko insisted. “I’m helping you escape, and then we’re going to find your friends and my uncle. And I’m going to teach you a little firebending to get you started, but my uncle will be your real teacher.”

Aang closed his eyes against the sunlight, headache suddenly worse. “Wow, just how long was I out?”

Zuko shrugged. “About six months. Sozin’s Comet’s coming soon, and my father plans to use it to burn the Earth Kingdom to ash, so you need to be ready to stop him.”

“What?” Aang yelled in shock. “That’s crazy, that’s evil, that’s…”

Zuko nodded. “I know. That’s why I need you to stop him.”

When Aang lurched to his feet to throw up again, Zuko held him upright so he didn’t pitch over the side. Wiping his mouth, Aang leaned heavily against Zuko’s side. “Hey, why do you have hair anyway?”

Zuko’s brow furrowed. “The same reason you do, I guess.”

“I have hair?” He brought his hand up to his head. His fingers met a dirty, tangled clump of hair. All at once, his head started to itch He could feel it lying against his scalp, suddenly heavy and too hot, and couldn’t figure out how he hadn’t noticed it before. “Oh, okay I do.”

Zuko rose to his feet and walked over to small furnace in the middle of the metal basket. He sent a burst of fire into it. Aang felt the balloon above them rise, tugging them upward. “So this thing is like a giant floating lantern.”

“Basically,” Zuko said.

Without Zuko there to hold him up, the world spun precariously, and Aang sat back down again, trying to ignore the way his head felt like it was full of burning sand. “I have a friend who would think this thing was just the coolest. Sokka.”

Zuko closed the furnace door, apparently satisfied. “Well when we catch up to them, you can show it to him.”

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The war balloon gondola thumped against the ground, jolting the arms Aang used to brace himself. Zuko only grimaced and leapt out to tie the balloon to a tree and start the long, tedious process of deflating the silk balloon sack and packing it away. Off in the distance, the smoke from Aang’s friends’ campfire rose high in the air, curling in brown gray swirls. Clambering out of the gondola, he glanced at Zuko. “Not bad. We’re pretty close to them.”

Zuko shrugged. “I could’ve gotten us closer, but they would have seen us.”

“Why shouldn’t they see us?” Aang asked. “We’re going to meet up with them anyway. That’s kind of the point.”

Zuko hunched his shoulders and didn’t answer.

o0O0o

The sun hung low over the water by the time Aang and Zuko made it to the edge the forest. They might have made better time if Zuko hadn’t slowed down with every step, until he was nearly dragging his feet, radiating reluctance. If Aang hadn’t kept stopping to let him catch up, they might have lost each other, and Aang couldn’t help wondering if that hadn’t been Zuko’s plan, if the Fire Prince hadn’t meant to simply disappear now that he had brought the Avatar back. “Aren’t you looking forward to seeing your uncle again?”

Zuko looked away, back to the forest.

“I wouldn’t be so scared if I were you.” Trying to reassure him, Aang gave him a smile. “He seemed like a pretty forgiving guy to me.”

“You barely met him,” Zuko pointed out.

“I’m just saying.” It seemed to him like Iroh would have to be to put up with what Zuko was like before. “Also you’re with me. Sokka and Katara won’t try to kill you if you’re with me.”

“I betrayed them,” he whispered so softly Aang had to strain to hear him. “They helped me rescue my uncle, and I told my father about their plans.”

“Yeah, they’re probably going to be pretty mad,” Aang said frankly. “But you brought me with you. Like I said, they won’t kill you.”

“I thought I was doing the right thing.”

Aang laughed, trying not to sound too mean. “You can try explaining that to Katara if you want to.”

Zuko winced. “No, I don’t think I’m going to do that.”

o0O0o

Three things happened when Aang got close enough to the campsite to yell. The first was that Katara and Sokka ran to him, kicking up sand in their wake, and that both of them grabbed him around the middle and squeezed all of the air out of him. The second was that Zuko dropped to his knees in the sand as his uncle crossed the beach as fast as his much shorter legs could carry him. The third thing that happened was that Iroh ignored every one of his nephew’s stammered apologies in favor of hauling him to his feet and wrapping his arms around him like he never wanted to let him go again.

Chapter Text

The kid was shaking. Jianyu put his hand on his head, and when Zuko didn’t shrug it off, he ruffled his hair. “How did it go?”

“They didn’t even notice me until Long Feng called me by name,” he said, visibly fighting to keep his voice steady. It wasn’t working.

“Perfect.” He cupped the side of the kid’s head and pulled him against his chest. For a split second, Zuko started to relax, before he remembered himself and tensed back up again. Jianyu didn’t smile, but it was a near thing. “You did just right.”

Zuko didn’t say anything. Jianyu didn’t expect him to. But he didn’t try to fight Jianyu’s hold either. He brought his other hand up to rub gentle circles into his back, rolling his palm over the knobs of Zuko’s shoulder blades. Slowly the trembling subsided and Zuko went limp against him, less relaxed and more too tired to fight. But it was a step in the right direction, and that was all that mattered.

The kid wasn’t stupid, no matter how many times the Grand Secretariat tried to insinuate otherwise during his briefings Jianyu. He never listened when Jianyu tried to explain he was wrong, but it was true. Zuko was a smart kid. He knew the game they were playing. He knew what Jianyu was doing, what he was there for. But it didn’t matter. He could know what was happening and fight it every step of the way, but it was still going to work. He would have to reach out for Jianyu’s kindness just to keep himself together.

It wasn’t fair. The Dai Li didn’t play fair. It made Jianyu wonder though. Zuko picked up on their games awfully fast. Almost as if he had some of them played on him before. When he tried telling the Grand Secretariat that, he’d gotten the same reaction as when he tried to tell him Zuko was so much smarter than he gave him credit for: amusement. It amused him that Jianyu would say such things, because it didn’t matter. If he felt sorry for Zuko, and didn’t think he deserved this, it didn’t matter.

Sometimes when he looked at Zuko, he could see what Zuko would soon become painted over him, a quiet, withdrawn, anxious young man, compliant and deferential, everything but his face and hands hidden behind green robes, probably with a braid down his back. And then when he looked again, that vision would dissipate, and all that was left was the boy in his arms, desperate for something to hold onto.

“Come on,” he said softly. “He made his point to the generals. You’ll want to be there waiting when they bring your uncle back to your room. You both had a hard day. He’ll need you.”

Zuko broke away and nodded, swallowing shakily. “Yes, Agent Jianyu,” he whispered obediently, and without another word, he followed him back to the cell he shared with his uncle, hands folded behind his back.