Chapter Text
There is not exactly a definitive moment of change, when someone goes from one emotion to the next or one belief to another.
It’s something that takes time and it moulds into a new shape, it doesn’t snap into place. Not suddenly. By the time the person realises this, their new shape has already been made, has already been carved out and remade.
It’s a critical moment then - whether the person chooses to embrace their new life, their new way of experiencing the world, a new way of touching it, of living it, or whether they break that precious new fragile mould, still wet and fall into familiar habits.
The thing is, the unknown is terrifying. It’s cold and different in the hands of those who have not felt it before. Even when it’s wrong, it’s easiest to fall back into the familiar embrace of something that is known, at least then it is something that you can expect and you can handle.
Familiarity means it’s something that can be expected, that it can be survived.
The unknown means that every step taken is another step through a forest on a moonless night and any step could send you falling, could send your foot through a poison thorn, could send you to your death. No one knows what’s hiding in those woods, least of all the person walking through it.
As he’s grown, he’s come to understand that familiarity is just hiding in a brightly lit box. You can see everything around you, there is no unknown, nothing hiding in the dark, nothing that can hurt. But that isn’t living.
Living and living are two different worlds away, and maybe sometimes they overlap because sometimes to live is to survive and sometimes surviving is living because surviving is the only thing you can do.
He’s becoming too much like his uncle.
Still, the point stands.
He’s not sure what this is - if he’s leaning into a new mould, a new carving, a new view or if that new world that he’s on the brink of discovering is cracking under his old ways, old habits, old thoughts just to go back to the ones that used to make sense.
He’s not sure if he’s living or just breathing or if that’s okay because if he’s just surviving is he in denial? Just taking life a day at a time and falling apart like everyone in this city, or if this is a necessity, and this is enough.
Nothing is quite like it used to look. Nothing sits right in his hands, the clothes don’t feel right hanging off his shoulders.
The light shines into his room in the mornings, dusting his face with the presence of fire and even that, even the one thing that is ingrained into his being feels different. It works its way under his skin and rests there.
A part of him wants it to feel bad, but it doesn't.
The moment when someone realises they were wrong may be sudden, but the process isn’t.
He reaches for that old anger, what made him get up each morning, what made him get dressed and bathe and live, and he cannot find it.
His chest is not empty, but it is not full.
He is different, and he is changing, but he is not sure if it is right or wrong. The person he is turning into breathes in the air of Ba Sing Se, and he is not happy, not yet, but for the first time in his entire life he feels like he could be.
Ba Sing Se breathes like it’s an organism itself. The gears twist in the same rotation every day. The same people set up the same stalls at the same times. People walk around, eyeing every stall with a critical thought, counting the coin in their pockets.
The Lower Ring is the underbelly of a better world right around the corner that refuses to acknowledge it.
The thought of being there, being a noble, sitting in luxury with more food than he could ever eat, with people to dress him and bathe him and wait on his hand and foot once was something he longed for. The new him, the new person he is trying to get to know feels sick.
He doesn’t know if he could ever live like that again without thinking of this, without guilt. He thinks about the times he’s gone hungry, eating the almost rotten soup on the ferry because that’s the only thing they had, and he can’t stand it. He thinks about Song and her hands on his, how she showed him her scars and loved him more in that moment then his own nation ever had. He thinks about almost starving to death in the desert, he thinks about spending hours hunting for food and coming out with nothing. He remembers the raft in the middle of the ocean, stranded and the feeling of increasing hopelessness as they drifted, and he can’t go back.
He thinks of the captain on the ferry, eating like a king while the refugees starve, tremble and die on the deck of a stupid fucking boat, and he hates it.
He never thought about these people before. Never considered what life outside that little bubble he was living in looked like.
He looks down at the basket clasped tightly in his hands, a range of vegetables of varying degrees of viability, looks at the young man that sold the potatoes to him, and he takes a breath. The boy’s arm is missing.
He’s not sure - not sure where he sits, what skin he’s crawling out of and especially not the one he’s crawling into, but he knows that he’s not going back.
This new world, he will hold it in his hands until the cold turns to warm and until the darkness of the forest no longer frightens him.
He hands the boy an extra coin and tells him to keep it.
“I don’t need pity,” the boy bites back, his face twists unpleasantly, and he’s struck by the familiarity of it, something of his past latches onto his leg, reminding him. He shakes it off.
“It’s not pity,” he replies. It’s not. He means it. “Thank you for the food,” he says.
It’s not enough.
Right and wrong for him is the dirty pond out the back of the tiny library at the back of the east end of the Lower Ring. The water is dirty and undrinkable, crusted with old algae on its banks and the water tinged green with sickness but there is a family of possum-ducks that visit whenever he takes a moment to go, and so he wonders if it has hope. He is decorated in wrongs. They dance in his dreams and lick his skin in permanent marks that will be there until he dies, whenever that may be. But the possum-ducks let him pet them, they let him run his hands over their feathers, and the mother lets him hold her tiny babies in his arms. He hopes he can add some right to his life.
If the ducks will accept the pond, then maybe the pond has a fighting chance.
The library isn’t open after sunset, but he goes anyway. He knows no one will be there and he settles down into the corner, a book clasped in his hands, a candle flickering next to him and he reads. He reads until his eyes hurt and his back is cramped from how he’s leaning over the pages, studying each one in careful detail.
It’s a love story he reads tonight, about two people who are in love but cannot marry because they are not of equal station.
He thinks of how he used to be prince, he thinks of Jin - and it’s ridiculous to devalue someone because they were not fortunate enough to be born into a family of high standing.
A lot of things seem ridiculous now.
Uncle knows he is here, and lets him go every night, even if he thinks he should just go during the day like a regular person, but the books in his hands feel heavy, like if someone was in the room with him, they’d lose their meaning.
The couple dies in the end.
Tea is hot in his palms, and he has gentle burns on his fingers from spilled water, but for once it doesn’t feel like it’s something that’s wrong.
Steam swirls around him, brushing his forehead and making a tiny sheen of sweat glisten there.
He breathes deeply, Jasmine filling his senses, and he’s sure, he’s sure that this is something that is right. Jin is there, she loiters at the table closest to the register, and they sneak glances as often as they can.
Her eyes glisten, glowing in the brightly lit shop and it’s the most perfect thing he’s ever seen in his life.
His cheeks redden in anticipation of their date later tonight, as they have been doing for weeks now and maybe this part is a little selfish, but he thinks of Jin, thinks of Jin in his hands, of him in hers, and he knows that this is something that they both enjoy.
It can’t be wrong.
Maybe the pond has hope.
Sometimes, he and Jin just sit. Her hands are clasped in his as she leans back into his chest, and he points out as many constellations as he can remember from his time on his ship. Jin tells him the stories she knows of Ba Sing Se - from ones that make the hairs on his neck stand on end to the ones that leave him smiling until his cheeks hurt.
One night, Jin asks him to teach her to fight.
Jin is quick on her feet, and she takes to fighting like a fish takes to water.
He watches her hold his knife in her hand, and watches her wide smile as she slashes with little form and far too much fanfare. The boy in the desert village was the same he remembers.
He wants it to last, he wants that smile to last.
“When did you learn to fight?” She asks later, when they’re wrapped in a blanket on a mat that’s too small to fit them both in Jin’s bedroom. The moon illuminates her in a soft, blue glow. Jin’s face is perfect, he thinks. Her smile is uneven, and Zuko hasn’t seen her brush her hair once and for all her strength, she still makes room for kindness. She’s perfect.
“Since I could walk,” he says.
She nods against his collarbone, her nose is pink and soft. He runs his hands through her matted hair.
“Well,” she says, her voice is slurred from sleep as it drags her under. “You have backup now. Me and Mushi aren’t going to let anything hurt you.”
She’s asleep before she’s finished the sentence.
He wants to believe her.
He buys Jin a knife for her birthday. It’s engraved with a soft pattern of vines that dance across the hilt and leave the metal shining and untouched.
She twists the knife in her hands carefully, the sunlight glints off the metal, striking her eyes until the brown looks as bright as a forest in the early morning.
He holds her hands in his tea-stained ones, and she kisses him senseless.
The tea shop is a home he supposes. It’s full of light and his uncle is there, a gentle hand on his shoulder, a soft smile whenever he feels his mind wander to a darker corner.
“I don’t want to be who I was,” he says only later. The shop is closed, and he wipes down the tables one at a time, running his hands over-familiar tea stains that are too ingrained to get rid of.
Uncle smiles, rough and tired and loud in the silence of the shop. “Do you think that's a bad thing?” Uncle asks. He doesn’t step closer to him, doesn’t make this more of a deal than his nephew will make it.
He wipes the table down again and runs his thumb over a new dent in the table that definitely wasn’t there yesterday.
“I hope not,” he says in the end.
He can tell uncle is making them a pot of tea without looking. He hears those noises every day.
“It’s only a bad thing if you make it.”
He looks up from the table and Uncle is watching him, a ghost of a smile on his lips, but he has never seen him happier than when he's in this shop, making tea, and he thinks - Iroh hasn’t been Iroh for a long time.
“Can I be Li?” He hates how that comes out, stifled and choked and quiet but Uncle just looks up at him, the light washes over his face in shadows but it does nothing to dampen the smile that washes over his face as he closes the gap between them.
“You can be whoever you want, you’ll always be my nephew,” he presses him to his chest and really he - Li - thinks that's all that really matters.
There’s nothing that’s really changed between that night and the next morning when he wakes up. Everything is where he left it when he fell asleep and everything is normal, except there is something different. The cold new world he grips in his hands feels a little warmer. The skin he fits into isn’t as much of a suit and maybe it’s not his yet, but he feels like he fits into it a little better.
He lets his name roll off his tongue to himself, and he doesn’t hate how it feels. It’s not a bandaid any more, it's a new chapter.
He lets Agni wash over his face, and hopes, hopes that this might last.
The library is in darkness, the candle next to him is out, but he doesn’t relight it, not with his Firebending or with the spark rocks tucked into his pocket. There is no moon tonight, hidden behind swaths of clouds, casting the city streets into an oppressive sort of dark that not even the lamps can fend off.
The book, finished, lies in his lap. It was about a family this time, a man and a boy who find each other and fit like a father and son should.
They don’t die in the end, but Li is sure that they wished they had.
Li holds a lady’s hand as she steps out the door of the tea shop onto the street. She’s not young and not old, but she is hurting. Her leg limps along like a dead weight, and she looks at his face and squeezes his hand in hers.
It doesn’t matter where you're from, she tells him one day. We have the same scars, we were hurt by the same people. She doesn’t know about Li, about his past, but her grey eyes gaze into his like she’s laying his soul out in front of the city itself.
We’re all victims, even you.
She grips his hand tighter as she makes sure to not trip over the lip of the doorway and glances up at him. Her smile is strained, but it’s genuine.
“You’re a good person,” she says softly.
Li takes a deep breath and tries to believe her.
The night is not something someone of Fire blood should thrive in, but he’s always been drawn to it, like a moth to a flame. The rooftops of the lower ring are asymmetrical at its finest, bustling in its individuality, as different as each person inside he reminds himself. It’s easy to get lost in the rush of it - the cool air brushes against his skin, the stars in the sky looking down at him, the soft noise of night workers.
The Lower Ring never sleeps, there’s never a silent moment and there is always a job that someone needs to do and there is always someone desperate enough to do it.
He makes it a mission, if this is his new home, if he’s going to lean into this new mould, into this new life, he’s going to learn about it, understand it for what it is, not for what people say it is.
He likes it here, he likes the people that he has around him, and he wants to protect them and he will. No matter what.
He wants to keep working in the tea shop with uncle and watch him smile and laugh and be happy, and he wants to keep visiting Jin, and he wants to keep the house they have, and he wants this feeling he has, something warm and good to last.
He breathes in the night air, and he knows where to start - the beginning.