Chapter Text
Zuko received the worst news of his life when we was 16.
To be fair, there was a lot of competition for the title.
He could have easily said that the worst news he’d ever received was when he’d been 10 and Father had mockingly recounted how he’d nearly been discarded as a child because he’d lacked the spark in most benders’ eyes when they’re born. It was the first time Father had said Azula was born lucky while he was lucky to be born, but it was far from the last.
Another contender might have been when he’d been 11 and Azula had gleefully told him Father was going to kill him, that he’d been ordered to do it. Or the next morning when Grandfather was found dead and his mother had disappeared without a trace.
What most people probably assumed was the worst news he’d ever received was when he was 13 and he’d been banished from the palace, from the whole of the Fire Nation. It was a horrible, suffocating feeling, but he was okay because he had Uncle, and a purpose, and a way to go back home: find and capture the Avatar.
He wasn’t an idiot. He knew that the Avatar hadn’t been seen for over a hundred years. But he knew Father wouldn’t have given him an impossible task. He had poured all of his energy into looking for the Avatar for three long years, but it was okay, because there was always a chance that he’d succeed. There was always a chance that he’d find the Avatar, and he’d defeat him, and he’d come home and Father would be proud of him.
That was, until now. This, Zuko thought, staring down at his hands in betrayal, was officially the worst thing that had ever happened to him in a long line of bad things.
He had only been trying to write a letter. He sent Father occasional updates on where he had searched. It wasn’t like he had anything new to report, but at least he was narrowing the playing field, like when Uncle backed his pieces into a corner in Pai Sho. He’d never gotten a response back, but he had to imagine that Father wouldn’t have disregarded valuable intel. That was why he had to keep writing the letters, even if it felt like he was writing to no one.
What had started as a routine letter-writing process – alone in his room aboard the Wani, thank Agni – had somehow ended up with his parchment and writing supplies swept up in a mini-tornado that seemed to have no cause other than his own two hands.
Zuko was good at denial, or at least that’s what he’d heard certain members of the crew whisper behind his back when they complained about pointless tasks and suicide missions. But even he couldn’t deny that an air current had appeared from seemingly nowhere, in a closed room, and it had only dissipated when he’d startled hard and toppled out of his chair.
In retrospect, it maybe wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. Well, not quite as noticeably, but still. An odd breeze here and there, never anything that had made him think twice at the time but that he was now turning over and over in his head. Denial was becoming less likely by the second.
But he was a firebender. He brought a spark to life in his palms just to confirm it. It should have been reassuring, but it really, really wasn’t. Because if he was still capable of firebending, and what he had just done was by all accounts airbending, there was only one explanation. There was only one kind of person who could bend multiple elements.
And that meant that Zuko’s route back home was now officially, permanently closed off. It meant that he was never going to be able to go back to the Fire Nation – worse, it meant that he was a traitor to his people. It meant that to his father, he really was better off dead.
Even though his hope that he’d ever find the Avatar had been small, he’d pursued it relentlessly. He’d dedicated every waking minute of the last three years to his search, much to Uncle’s chagrin. Had it all really been for nothing? Had the thing he’d been looking for been right under his nose all along, made all the more frustrating by its damning truth?
He’d heard all manner of Earth Kingdom peasants talk about the Avatar in his search. Some had groused about their disappearance. Some had brushed it off as just a myth, a fairy-tale passed down from older generations to fill kids’ heads with silt.
Others had professed that the Avatar was a symbol of hope. But for Zuko, discovering the Avatar meant complete and utter hopelessness.
He was 16, and he’d just learned that he was never going home again.
~~~
This was all Sokka’s fault.
If he hadn’t been so stupid, if he hadn’t kept insisting Katara couldn’t help because she was a woman, she wouldn’t have flipped out like she had. She wouldn’t have cracked the iceberg that had been floating behind her. She wouldn’t be staring at a giant chunk of ice that had someone inside.
It wasn’t that she was unfamiliar with the idea of people falling in the ocean and never returning. She’d been warned to stay away from the water’s edge as a child too many times to forget. But she’d never seen something like that up-close before.
Except, as she found out, she was wrong. The man in the ice wasn’t dead, and he wasn’t a man at all – he was a boy who looked younger than her. She expected him to be rigid, barely hanging on if he was alive at all, but the boy introduced himself as Aang and leaped about with all the spryness of the polar-dog puppies and then some. And then he’d shown them the animal he had with him, which he called a sky bison, and without a second thought he’d leaped a solid ten feet in the air.
“You’re an airbender!” Katara couldn’t believe her eyes. She’d heard the stories of airbenders, sure, but seeing one in person was unbelievable. No one had seen one for a hundred years, and yet this young boy – Aang – had just moved the air as easily as she did the water.
Well, maybe a little more easily. Katara was still getting the hang of waterbending, after all.
“Sure am!” Aang grinned wide, giving his staff a few spins before planting it in the ice at his side.
From somewhere behind her, Sokka gave a soft groan. “Katara, I think we’ve finally given in to ocean madness.”
Katara rolled her eyes. “Ignore him,” she said with a little smile, but Aang didn’t look too bothered by Sokka’s rude interjection. “It’s… it’s amazing to meet an airbender after all this time.” Aang look a little confused at that, but she didn’t want him to get upset – it was probably a touchy subject, she figured, maybe she shouldn’t have stumbled into it so carelessly - so she continued, “Say, do you want to go penguin sledding now?”
That was enough to cheer Aang right back up at least. Katara breathed a sigh of relief, ignoring Sokka’s grumbles about not being able to trust him. He was an airbender, a peaceful monk. What did they have to fear?
~~~
Zuko stood at the helm of the Wani as it cut a path through the ice flows. He stared down at the water, watching the waves crash against the hull. What was he going to do?
He’d only come down to the South Pole because it was one of the few times he could get any privacy on the ship somewhere other than his own room. The colder temperatures were enough to drive most of the men inside, more used to the temperate climate of the Fire Nation. Honestly, the only one who paid much attention to him when he wasn’t giving orders was Uncle, and he’d never had much tolerance for the cold. Down here, he could spend time trying to get the water to do something without arousing that much suspicion. Not that he really wanted it to, of course, because that would only confirm what he feared, but…
He groaned under his breath. The whole situation was a disaster. Who would have thought that the Fire Lord’s son…
Well, he hadn’t exactly told the crew why they’d come, of course. He’d come to the South Pole on the pretense of searching for the Avatar, but what were the chances they’d find him in this frozen wasteland of all places?
Well, Zuko knew the chances better than most. He knew because he…
He shied away from the thought. While he’d used the isolation above-deck to try to test out some of his theories, admitting it to himself still felt wrong. He’d seen the evidence with his own eyes – only about a week ago – but he still found it hard to believe.
It had gotten even less believable when that beam of light had lit up the sky. Because by all accounts, the only thing powerful enough to have sent up that kind of disturbance should have been the Avatar. It was what he’d told his crew, and it was what he wanted to believe himself. Except he knew it couldn’t really be the Avatar, because…
Because he was the Avatar.
Zuko grimaced. He’d tried to deny it, but it was hard to say he couldn’t bend more than one element when he’d watched himself do it. He hadn’t been meaning to do it, of course – he never would have even thought to try it, he was a firebender and loyal to the Fire Nation, and yet it had happened almost of its own accord.
Despite his best attempts, he hadn’t been able to replicate it. Or any other bending, for that matter. But he still knew what he saw. Which made it even more confusing that there might be some sort of second Avatar running around in the South Pole somewhere.
What would he be like? Would he be over a hundred years old? Had he spent all this time training? How could there even be two Avatars? …And why had Zuko been so certain that the beam of light had been from the Avatar in the first place? If it was some sort of Avatar sense, he’d been sorely missing it before now.
As much as he didn’t want to find out the answer to any of these questions, he’d directed his crew to follow that light. It would have looked suspicious if he hadn’t. He was supposed to be hunting the Avatar, and he had been, for the last three years before his own condition had made itself known. But he couldn’t tell anyone about that, not even Uncle. The Avatar was the enemy of the Fire Nation. If they knew it was one of their own people, their own Prince… if Father found out… He didn’t want to know what he’d decide to do about it. So he hadn’t told anyone, and he wasn’t going to. Not until he figured out why in Agni’s name the spirits had chosen him.
Which left him here, staring into the sea and trying to predict what in the world would happen once he finally caught up to… whoever this was.
He sighed, thankful at least for the momentary calm before they landed and he’d have to go right back to pretending.
~~~
The South Pole wasn’t exactly teeming with potential Avatars. Present company excluded, of course.
There were a handful of kids – and one particularly pathetic “warrior” who Zuko had easily disarmed – who mostly just shied away when Zuko and his crew got closer. There were some old people, one of whom he gestured to while trying to indicate the likely age of the Avatar who’d sent up that beam of light. The motion had drawn a shocked gasp from a nearby girl, but she made no move to stop him. Nobody else moved either, all watching him like frightened robin-mice in a hawk’s next.
Zuko was just starting to think his search was fruitless and he’d been lead down another dead end (and of course he had, what did he think, that there’d be a second Avatar in the South Pole) when the little bald kid had shown up.
At first he’d been remarkable only in that his outfit looked completely outlandish for the frigid temperatures, but then he’d snapped open some staff-looking thing into a kind of glider and literally flew, and apparently there was an airbender in the Southern Water Tribe.
The airbenders had been gone for ages. If this kid was one, then that could only mean… “Are you the Avatar?”
The kid looked sad for some reason, which totally threw Zuko off. “No,” he said, looking down and away, “I… I’m just an airbender.”
Right, that figured. Zuko didn’t know what he’d been hoping for. Maybe he’d thought, for a second, that if the airbender was also an Avatar, then he could bring him back to his father and it would be fine, it wouldn’t matter what Zuko could or couldn’t bend because he’d be home in the Fire Nation where he belonged. But an airbender, while nothing to scoff at nearly 100 years after they’d been wiped out, didn’t fulfill the terms of the agreement. He was out of luck again. He really was the only Avatar, and he… he had no idea what to do with the knowledge.
And it was then that Zuko had an idea. Because, well, this kid was an airbender. And Zuko was, he had accepted, capable of bending too – usually not of his own accord. And that was the problem, wasn’t it? He had no control. It was the first thing taught to new firebenders, and for good reason. An out of control fire could do a lot of damage. He figured airbending as a firebender was the same way. If he didn’t learn to control it, he’d inevitably slip up.
He needed, as much as it rankled him to admit it, to practice. To learn. He had no intention of revealing his abilities or really using them at all, but it was for exactly that reason that he really could benefit from a teacher. Once he knew what he was doing, he could quietly stick airbending in a neat little mental box and never touch it again.
And, well, it wasn’t like airbenders were everywhere these days. Better to not look a gift ostrich-horse in the beak.
But he couldn’t just say as much in front of all of these observers. He needed to get the airbender on his ship, and he needed to speak to him alone. So he widened his stance, pitched his voice into something he hoped was believable, and said, “You can’t lie to me, Avatar, I know who you are.”
“I’m not!” the boy protested.
“So you’re just an airbender who happens to be at the Southern Water Tribe? A likely story. Seems to me like you’re here to learn waterbending. But I’m afraid I can’t let that happen, so I’ll make you a deal: board my ship and allow me to take you captive, and I’ll leave this village alone.”
The girl from before gasped, saying something to the airbender, but the kid shook his head. “If you’ll really leave everyone here alone, then I’ll… I’ll go with you.”
Zuko blinked. Had it really been that easy? Immediately two of his men moved forward to take the airbender by the arms, guiding him back up onto the ship. Well, nothing about the current situation was going exactly as planned, but Zuko couldn’t help but pat himself on the back a bit. Things had gone better than expected, everything considered.
“I know I agreed to go with you, but I’m really not the Avatar,” the kid said, squirming a little in his men’s grasp. “I’m just Aang the airbender!”
Yes, Zuko wanted to say, I know, but I need your cooperation and this is the only way to get it. He didn’t say that, because he was standing within hearing range of half the crew, and they’d hardly even pulled away from Water Tribe shores. Instead, he said, “Your lies won’t work on me. Take him away.”
He let the airbender – Aang - be led off. He’d have to keep up the appearance of keeping him in the brig, but he was sure that as soon as he explained himself the kid would understand. He only had to wait for his men to get Aang settled and for them to leave.
It figured that as soon as he was getting ready to go talk to him, then, everything went sideways. Between one blink and the next, the empty hallways that led to the brig was suddenly full of whipping winds. Zuko brought his arms up to brace against it, so he nearly missed when Aang came around the corner, spun his arms like pinwheels, and shot a gust of air so hard at Zuko that he was flung clear off his feet and into the wall behind him.
By the time he got back up, rubbing at the sore spot on the back of his head, the boy was long gone. He scrambled back to the deck only to see Aang tossing his crewmates about in the same way. Zuko groaned under his breath. What was he trying to achieve? Nothing but freezing cold ocean awaited Aang’s escape, even if he managed to fend everyone off.
Or at least, that’s all that had been there until a ten ton pile of fur landed on the deck right out of the sky. Zuko couldn’t help it; he stumbled to a stop and just gaped at it. Was that… a sky bison?! …And those two children on top of it looked familiar.
Hesitating was the wrong move. Though he fought with everything he had to keep Aang on the ship, trying to keep an airbender grounded was an exercise in futility. By the end of it, he’d nearly been launched off into the ocean, half of his crew was encased in ice from the waist down, and Aang and those other kids had taken off, all before Zuko had exchanged a single meaningful word with the kid.
He’d had him right there and he’d let him slip away. His one chance at learning airbending. What was he supposed to do now?
For Agni’s sake. What was he going to have to do, chase these people all across the world?
No, that was ridiculous. Except…
Except, it was exactly what his crew was expecting him to do. Except, he had been banished and instructed to find the Avatar so he could come home. Except, it made perfect sense for him to keep pursuing the airbender with single-minded determination for as long as he could.
And he’d just had an idea. It was a wild plan, but… well, what other choice did he have?
When the last of his crew had been defrosted, he barked out some orders for them to follow the path of the bison and retreated to his room. No one stopped him; they probably assumed he was ready to snap at them for letting “the Avatar” escape, but Zuko wanted to be alone for an entirely different reason.
When he’d shut the door behind him and made sure no one was coming in, he took a deep breath, tried to recall what Aang had done right before he’d sent Zuko flying, and replicated the movements.
It wasn’t exactly the same powerful gust he’d felt, but it was there nonetheless. A clear, directed stream of air that rippled the edges of the Fire Nation flag that hung damningly over his bed.
Twin feelings of pleasant surprise and dread twisted in his gut like two dragons battling over the last scrap of sheep-pig meat. Pleasant surprise, because he’d actually done it, he’d actually airbended and he could do it just by replicating the motion. Dread because he’d actually done it, he’d actually airbended and that meant that the last tiny part of him that had been desperately denying him being the Avatar had been crushed.
He… he wasn’t going home. Maybe ever. And he wasn't just the Avatar but the son of the Fire Lord, and he didn’t know which one mattered more to his father, except that he thought, maybe, he did. And he really didn’t know what he was supposed to do about it now that he knew.
He’d never been one for long deliberations. He usually acted on his gut. But right now, his gut was being pulled in all different directions by those aforementioned angry dragons, and if he thought about his current situation for too long he just might have been sick.
Maybe Uncle would have known what to do, but it wasn’t like he could just tell him, “Hey, Zuko here, you know the Avatar, the one person in the whole world that could pose a threat to the Fire Nation? Yeah, that’s me. Want to help me commit high treason?” and expect him to stick around, let alone give him the slightest idea of what he should do.
Which meant he had to come up with a solution on his own. And his thoughts kept drifting back to the idea he’d had on the deck; if he kept chasing after Aang, he’d have more opportunities to see his airbending up close and personal. He’d be able to do a lot more than a simple gust of wind.
Zuko needed to learn better control over his bending if he wanted to keep it a secret. And in order to do that, he needed to actually learn to bend all the elements. If he thought of things that way, his very life didn’t feel so much like treason. It felt more like… like training. He was well versed in firebending training – now he just had to do it for the other elements.
And, he admitted to himself, maybe firebending too. He’d never been the best bender, and it hadn’t mattered that much when he could just accept that Azula would always beat him, but wasn’t the Avatar supposed to be a master bender? As much as Uncle’s demands to focus on his basics got under his skin before, they were even worse now. How was he supposed to master four elements when he couldn’t even master one?
Well, one thing at a time. He could always work on firebending - he needed to find that airbender again. No matter where he’d run off to.
Even if he had to hunt him down to the ends of the earth.
~~~
“So, what you told Zuko when you agreed to go with him… was it true? Are you really the Avatar?”
Aang tangled one hand in Appa’s long fur, absently scratching at a spot on the sky bison’s head. “No. I’m not the Avatar, but I knew him.” He grinned. “His name was Tenzin. He studied under Monk Gyatso with me, and we used to get up to all kinds of pranks. We learned airbending together and everything.”
Aang’s smile slowly faded. “We were friends. I thought Tenzin and I would always have each other, but that was before… well, before a hundred years passed, I guess.”
“I’m so sorry, Aang.” Katara knew how unlikely it was that Tenzin was still out there. Especially with the way they’d found Aang.
“Thanks, Katara. But if it’s all the same with you… I really would like to find out what happened to my friend. Even if he’s not… if he’s not around anymore. The Avatar reincarnates. They still have to be out there somewhere. I know it.”
Katara opened her mouth, then paused to glance back at Sokka, but to her surprise he was already nodding along. “Sure, find a guy the whole world’s been looking for the last 100 years, how hard could it be?” he said, but he wasn’t exactly demanding they turn around.
Katara smiled. “We’re going to find the Avatar, Aang. We’ll come with you, wherever you go.”
Aang’s responding smile was a little worn, but it looked genuine all the same. “Thank you guys.”