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Zuko’s soulmark appears on his tenth birthday. It’s an innocuous enough thing, small and easily hidden by a wristband, but because he doesn’t know better yet he goes to show his father.
“A boomerang?” The Firelord scowls, his grip on Zuko’s arm so tight that it feels like he’s being crushed. “What kind of self-respecting Fire Nation prince has a boomerang for his soulmark?”
“It’s not my fault,” Zuko starts to say, but his father is already shoving his arm away like it’s wronged him.
“Get out of my sight,” he snarls. Zuko stumbles out of the room, clutching his bruised wrist.
Ursa finds him a wristband.
-
When Zuko is banished from the Fire Nation, he has a lot of time to think in between following leads on the Avatar. Most of the time he is angry, still raw and broken from the shame of what his father did to him. But there are a handful of quiet nights where Zuko stands alone on the deck of the ship and lets himself be mesmerized by the millions of stars twinkling far above him, lets himself forget about all of the pain and rage that plagues him if only for a moment.
On those nights, he takes off his wristband and wonders about his soulmate.
Who are they? Are they looking up at the stars like he is? Do they feel the same sense of infinite loneliness as he does?
Do they ever wonder about him?
Zuko had never imagined that he would be able to meet his soulmate. Boomerangs aren’t exactly common weapons in the Fire Nation, and besides, Zuko would have been expected to marry a noble regardless of whether they were his soulmate or not. But now that he is banished and his honor is already lost, and he is travelling the world--
Just for a moment, he lets himself imagine.
-
Zuko does, in fact, meet his soulmate while searching for the Avatar. He knows as soon as the boy hurls his boomerang at him and Zuko watches it go flying past.
This is my soulmate , he thinks, looking at the boy. He glares right back at Zuko, his eyes full of a burning hatred. Zuko takes a moment to commit his face to memory; the smudged face paint, the dark hair pulled back to expose the shaved sides of his head, the eyes so bright and blue against the monochrome paint.
The boy attacks him again, this time with a spear. Zuko blocks each advance with hardly a thought, easily destroying the boy’s flimsy weapon and throwing him to the ground. They come to an impasse, the boy out of weapons and Zuko hesitant to hurt him, and there is a brief moment where their gazes meet and hold there.
And then the boomerang comes back and slams into Zuko’s helmet, and the Avatar crashes into Zuko’s legs on an otter penguin, and everything goes to hell after that.
When Zuko watches the bison fly away, all he can think is that’s my soulmate and he doesn’t even know .
-
Zuko keeps hunting the Avatar. He tells himself that regaining his honor is more important than his soulmate.
He hates you, says a snide little voice in the back of his head. He never could have been your soulmate anyway.
The voice is right, but it still hurts every time they clash and the boy looks at him with the same expression of furydisgusthatred as that day in the South Pole.
-
He gets word of escaped earthbender prisoners and his gut tells him the Avatar is involved. When he gets there his suspicions are confirmed, and although the Avatar and his friends-- his soulmate , his brain unhelpfully supplies--are already long gone, the girl’s necklace was left behind.
It’s obviously of some cultural significance to the Water Tribe, if the insignia is anything to go by. Logically Zuko knows that he shouldn’t go down this route, that any more knowledge will only hurt him, but now that he has a lead, the constant, selfish need for more knowledge about his soulmate has become a roaring flame where before it was only hot coals.
Zuko gives in and goes to his uncle’s quarters on the ship. To his relief, when he opens the door the room is empty. One less thing to worry about .
His uncle always keeps scrolls in his quarters. It’s one of the things Zuko uses as fuel for his anger, insisting that they don’t need all that garbage and they’ll just end up getting burnt anyway. Now, his lips quirk at the bitter irony of his situation; reduced to digging through the very items that he had once so adamantly demanded to be gotten rid of.
Zuko shakes off his musings and begins rifling through the scrolls. They’re neatly organized in metal racks along the wall, sorted by genre and alphabetically; there’s a whole section dedicated to Pai Sho, which makes Zuko shake his head in amusement and exasperation. He grabs everything he can find on the Water Tribe and retreats back to his quarters, dumping the scrolls on a low table. Making sure to lock the door behind him, he sits down and begins a more in-depth search of the scrolls.
It’s not a religious thing, there were two scrolls on that and it wasn’t mentioned once. Not related to social status, either. Shit, I’m almost out of scrolls--wait, what’s this?
The scroll in question is titled Cultural Traditions of the Northern and Southern Water Tribes . Zuko places his palms flat against the table in an attempt to steady their trembling before opening the scroll. It’s illustrated with several carefully-inked drawings, and Zuko recognizes the first one as the face paint the boy wore at their first meeting. The scroll says that it signifies a warrior and is applied before going into battle.
Zuko remembers that the boy had been the only one with the face paint and feels faintly sick to his stomach.
Rubbing a hand over his face, he moves on down the scroll, learning about ice dodging and several other traditions before finally stopping at a drawing of a necklace.
This is it, he thinks, gripping the scroll with white-knuckled hands as he reads.
A betrothal necklace is a hand-carved piece of jewelry given by young men of the Northern Water Tribe to the women they intend to marry. According to the tribe's customs, when a young woman turns sixteen her marriage is arranged and her future husband is to carve a unique design from stone and fasten it to a choker, thus creating a necklace. The engagement becomes official once the necklace is worn, and thus the jewelry signifies to other prospective suitors that the woman is spoken for.
Zuko puts down the scroll and looks at the necklace lying on the table. A betrothal necklace . Obviously the girl is not sixteen and is too young to be betrothed, so it must be a family heirloom of some kind, but the cultural significance is not lost on him. He traces the stone’s carving with one hand, lost in thought. Would his soulmate one day carve a necklace like this for someone else? Would he spend hours creating a unique design to fit his lover?
No, Zuko reminds himself. The boy is from the Southern Water Tribe, and this tradition is of the North . But still, he can’t help but wonder--
-- what would it be like if he were to make one for me?
Zuko picks up the necklace and with slow, halting movements holds it up to his neck. It’s awkward with the collar of his armor, but he manages to get it to where one of his hands is holding the necklace closed at the back of his neck. Feeling as though he’s in a dream, he stands and walks over to the mirror that hangs on the wall by his bed. It’s cracked from where Zuko hit it years ago at the beginning of his banishment, but it still works well enough that he can see how the necklace looks lying against his skin. It’s jarring, seeing the deep blues when he is so used to nothing but red. Something ugly claws at the inside of his chest at the sight, and Zuko can’t tell whether it feels right or wrong or somehow both at once.
Still holding the necklace closed with one hand, Zuko brings his other hand up to his face and uses his teeth to pull off the wristband that covers his soulmark. The wristband falls to the ground, and he looks between the necklace in the mirror and the boomerang outlined in white on his skin. He reaches up, having half a mind to tie the necklace closed, but is interrupted by a harsh knock in the door.
Zuko almost burns the necklace in his haste to get it off. He yanks his wristband back on and stomps over to the door, his mood suddenly turned foul.
“What?” he snaps at the guard, who flinches back slightly at the venom in his tone.
“You asked for daily reports on our search for the Avatar, sir.”
“Well? What’s the news?”
The guard hangs his head. “There, uh, is none, sir.”
“Then get out of my sight,” Zuko snarls, slamming the door closed.
He walks back over to the table and gathers up the scrolls, cursing his moment of weakness. It’s easy enough to put the scrolls back in his uncle’s quarters.
He only wishes it were that easy to forget what he had seen.
-
That night, Zuko dreams of blue eyes, boomerangs, and a boy who never could have been his.