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“No… sssh… hey… ssh.”
Where does the noise come from? Every time, it’s astounding. Where does it all fit? Oh. It doesn’t. Maybe that’s why he’s –
“Alright, alright, come here,” he whispered as he drew his son up from his crib to his chest and started to sway, “listen, just because your mother goes to sleep late doesn’t mean she likes being woken up. Right? Come here.”
He watched her draw into herself and pull the blankets with her. Had he still been in bed, he would have been left with little cover.
Not all of us can just breathe our way into being warm, honey.
Okay, but have you considered I still like blankets?
The child, still perhaps distraught by the fact of his very existence, existence in the world outside the confines of the womb, continued to cry. He continued to cry just over his father’s heart.
“Sssh. Sssh. Sssh.”
I know, who is this strange man who keeps calling himself your father. I know. You’ll get used to it. So will I.
“Come on,” though the past three months had made him a little sturdier he was still just so small, fit perfectly in the crook of his father’s arm, “let’s take a little walk, you and me.”
I still can’t believe I was a tiny thing like you once.
There was a rustle and a groan from the bed as they made their way towards the door.
“Mmm, what’s going on?”
“I’m taking care of it.”
“Okay.”
He slipped out the door and her head hit the pillow with a thud.
At first, holding his son was like holding a ragdoll. The kind his sister would gladly set on fire. He was certain his own son was the first child he’d ever held. At first, it was jarring. Elating. But jarring. This was no doll, no prop, no temporary thing in his arms. The boy was his mother’s; that he could believe. That, he had witnessed. But three months in and on occasion he was still baffled that this child, this human being, this person was as much his flesh and blood as hers.
He had thought he had finally come to understand his uncle. He was grown; he was growing wiser by the hour. Now that he was an adult, he felt confident he had a grasp on why his uncle was the way he was. And then he saw his son. Still bloody, still gasping for air. Then he saw his son being lowered into his mother’s arms, crying, both. Then he felt tears like lightning at the corners of his eyes. And then he held his son to his chest for the first time. Felt him breathing. Felt his heartbeat. Heard his new voice ringing through the air. Then he held his son and realized he had never really understood his uncle at all until that moment.
Three months wasn’t a very long time at all. But time couldn’t be clearer than in the face of his son. His cheeks were growing full and round and his eyes were opening wider every day, like a moon that never waned. They had taken bets as to whose eyes the child would have. Three months later and he still technically owed his wife 5 gold pieces. The little wisps of hair growing in thicker by the day were black like his, but his eyes, those blue eyes sweet, were hers. He had his father’s hair, his mother’s eyes, and the name of a man that was mere memory.
Zuko’s memories of the man, his cousin, lived in his mind fluctuating between scenes from a play and paintings on a wall. He had been ten years older. He had gone before Zuko had even reached his tenth birthday, and he had never come back. What he recalled of his cousin, he found in his cousin’s father. The way they had both laughed clutching their stomachs – laughing the same way they produced flame, from deep within, an extension of the self. The way he was charming and mannered, the way he bowed to his mother even though he was the son of the crown prince and she was still only the wife of Azulon’s second son. Right up until he went off to war, there was always a different girl on his arm, each as beautiful as the last. Zuko wondered how tall his cousin had actually been; from the eyes of a child and from the way he strode through the halls, shoulders squared, chin high, he must have been a giant. A giant who would stoop down to ruffle his little cousin’s hair, stoop down to ask him how his firebending was coming along, when he would start training with swords, ask him when he was going to join them in the war room – how old was he now ten, fifteen, thirty? His mother could get him to smile. His cousin could get him to smile. And they had both gone.
And now another who bore the name of his fallen kin could get him to smile. Ever since becoming a father, he felt he had a grin permanently plastered to his face. He would have to do the calculations, but he felt he must have smiled more in the last three months than perhaps he ever had in the entire collection of his life. He was sure it frightened people. It was inconsequential. Everything his son did made him smile. Every wiggle of a finger, every twitch of the nose, every burp, every cough, every burbling giggle, every faint snore, every time he just sat and widened his eyes as if the bigger they grew the better he could process the world around him – it all made Zuko smile. Even as his son cried, he smiled. He smiled to say, look, look, I’m here, I’m here and I love you, and that will never change.
“I know, hey,” he bounced his son lightly as they sauntered, gave terse nods to the guards as they passed, “being alive is very confusing. And it must be so hard when everything is still so new.”
The kiss on the forehead produced no silence.
“You get used to it. Sort of.”
They turned the corner towards his study.
“I mean, the good thing is, you forget this part. You forget the newness of it all, and then, you know, even if it’s confusing, even if it’s still a big scary world, not that the world is scary, no it’s, well, it is, but not always, you’re still crying, that’s not helping. Okay. The world is scary, and it’s not scary. Most of the time, if we’re lucky it’s just kinda… whatever.”
He sighed as the child squirmed and clutched at his neck.
“I’m glad you won’t remember this little speech. Your father is not as good with words as your great uncle.”
A son? Oh, nephew –
Uncle. We’re naming him Lu Ten. I… I hope this brings you honor.
“Sir.”
The guard stationed outside his study gently pushed open the door.
For such small lungs, for such things that shouldn’t have been able to hold that much air, little Lu Ten, prince of the Fire Nation, firstborn son, had inhuman stamina and vocal capacity.
“Kids,” Zuko made a mental note to ask another day if the guard in fact had any, “am I right?”
The door had been closed leaving father and son alone.
He kept one arm around his son as the other, to balance the moonlight, lit a lantern that hung from the wall.
This had more or less been their routine. Lu Ten would be put to sleep with the setting sun and would cry out with the rising moon. And someone would take care of him. What troubled him so about the night? Did he not know that he was sleeping only feet away from the people who loved him most in the world, sleeping only feet away from those who had given him life? Sometimes he wept with hunger, for which Zuko could do little but stay up with Katara, marvel at her tireless nurturing.
Blue eyes and a terrible sleeper. I don’t know.
It’s too early to tell, he could be anything.
He’ll be like you.
Really? You think so? We don’t know for sure –
And he’s going to have the best teacher.
Some nights, he just wept. And Zuko cradled him all the way to his study. On rare nights he would fall asleep and stay asleep on a full stomach. Not tonight. This was their routine.
Zuko pulled back the curtain and peered out the window.
“Full moon,” he gently stroked the back of his son’s head, “you feel it don’t you? Yeah?”
He yawned. He kept petting what little – but rapidly growing – hair his son had. His child had gone from shrieking to whimpering, and Zuko considered this a tactical victory.
“Sssh. Yeah. We’re just going to keep an eye on you in the bath. We are. I mean, we would anyway. Ssh. There, there. You know what I mean. Or maybe you don’t. You’re … a baby.”
He sighed.
His son was a prince. A prince and the oldest son of the Fire Lord. A position he once held, clung to even as it impaled him. A prince. A prince and the only son of the oldest son. A position he shared with his namesake. And yet he was still barely of this world, he had no idea who or what he was beyond tired, hungry, satisfied, or sleeping. For him, it was the middle of the night, he was awake, he was alone, and he had no other way of reaching out than by tearing with reckless abandon through the silence being woven by the night. It was a simple world, his. It was a simple world and it made his father a bit jealous. How lucky to cry out and be taken into someone’s arms so quickly. He held his son a little closer still and hoped that there were forces that would find the silent prayer in his heart, the prayer that his son would always live in a simpler world. Not a simple one. It couldn’t ever be a simple one. The boy was already complicated by his very nature. The boy with his mother’s eyes, his father’s hair, and the name of a man who had died for a cause his own father would come to disavow, who had died for sins his own father would later rectify. Nature didn’t lend itself to simplicity, how much more so of that which humans had created. How much more so when a world that bled and burned for a hundred years would take twice as long to heal. How much more so when even healing left scars.
“You’re getting sleepy, that old moon not keeping you up anymore?”
The boy had whimpered himself into silence and struggled to keep his eyes open.
“Can I sing you something?”
What, he’s going to say no?
Sometimes he hummed little made-up tunes to help Lu Ten fall asleep. Mostly he just rocked him back and forth and talked to him about nothing, and by talking about nothing, about everything.
“My uncle used to sing this sometimes.”
Leaves from the vine
Falling so slow
In the belly of a ship when he was young, half-blind, and thought he would never again see home.
Like fragile tiny shells
Drifting through the foam
In the back of a sweltering kitchen, absent-mindedly, over steaming kettles and sachets of leaves when life was lonesome and beginning to teeter on the edge of ordinary.
Little soldier boy
Come marching home
In a large room with the curtains drawn, at the bedside where now his wife slept, when she was his healer and they both would help to lift his weary head for the sake of a crown, for the sake of peace, when he had finally come home.
Brave soldier boy
Come marching home
And now it was not his uncle’s voice accompanying the words, but his own. And even if his voice carried out the song in scratches barely above a whisper, it was still his own voice softly filling the room like mist. It was his own voice in his own study, his own son in his own arms, his son whose eyes were slowly waning and breath slowly sinking into a rhythm like the roll of the sea.
We’re naming him Lu Ten. I… I hope this brings you honor.
When his uncle held the child who bore his son’s name for the first time, Zuko had watched, one hand in his wife’s, the other clenched tightly at his side in a fist, nails pressed into his palm and sniffing out the blood beneath the surface of his skin. He watched his uncle search for the face of his son in his.
Katara had later assured him that he must have found it. He went to bed that first night, for what little sleep they would get, humming something familiar in her ear as his arms wrapped around her and his eyes fell shut.
“What are the odds you sleep through til morning?”
He brushed a thumb lightly over his son’s forehead. Katara had told him once, long before he ever dreamed he would be feeling the weight of their child in his arms, of Water Tribe markings. Upon completion of a rite of passage, she had said, one receives a symbolic mark across the forehead. Katara herself had once been bestowed the Mark of the Brave, a crescent of blue ink between the eyes for her unwavering courage. If, he wondered, his thumb was coated in ink, what mark had he just given their son?
A little hand reached out and held on to Zuko’s thumb. There must have been something in his dreams to make him do it. Or perhaps, even asleep, he simply wanted to hold on to the man who had so graciously rocked and swayed and whispered and sang him to sleep, the man who called himself father.
“You’ll be like her. I hope you’ll be like her. I wasn’t always so nice.”
His son squeezed tighter.
“And maybe you’ll be like him too,” he sighed as he extinguished the lamplight leaving only the moon, “you’ll stand tall, proud of whoever you turn out to be, you’ll help me be a little kinder I think.”
The boy let go of his father’s thumb and nudged his head gently inward.
“And I’ll help you too.”
He lingered a moment pressing his back to the study door, stopping to breathe in the silence in tandem with his child.
“I’ll try to.”
He felt his lip twitch. With his blue eyes closed, the boy must have looked just like his father. How many faces would be sought in the face of this one boy? This clear face, this gentle face. This face that had known no and would, please, know no cruelty.
“I promise.”
He pushed the door open and gave a tired, triumphant smile to the guards who simply nodded. He retraced his steps through the hall back to their chambers. There was much that could change in a lifetime. At only seventeen he had entered those chambers as an unexpected hero, a boy king, alone with those he loved on the other side of the doors. At twenty-seven he had swept his bride over the threshold. At thirty he had held the door as his wife carried in their son. On his side of those doors, he now had a family, his family, their family all together within the chambers that had once drowned him in his own mortal limitations. When he awoke in the mornings he found more than his own reflection. Beside him was the woman he loved, the woman who had given life to their son, the woman who had given him life several times over – a debt to which he had no idea how to ultimately repay. A debt that she would insist was no debt at all. And there was his son.
If it’s a girl –
After your mother. No doubt.
Good. Glad we’re on the same page.
“I guess I don’t really know who you’ll be.”
And if it’s a boy –
Katara, I actually… I actually have something in mind.
“But, well…”
He was a good man, like his father. He could have been. But, but I won’t pretend history was something it wasn’t. He was, we were… I don’t have to tell you how many second chances my uncle has given me. I want to give him one back. Try to. Anyway. Even if it’s something small, I … Look I’m not naming him after my father! Argh! I understand if –
Lu Ten. Hmm. Little Lu Ten. Okay.
“Lu Ten, little Lu Ten, I’m so glad you’re here.”
I… I hope this brings you honor.
More than you know, my dear Zuko. More than you know.
Once he had slipped inside the chamber doors, he hovered over the crib. His wife was still curled up, most of the blankets engulfing her. So he would sleep without a blanket. He’d been through worse. He had a bed. He had a person to curl up to himself, and his person deserved far more than blankets. She could have them tonight.
It wasn’t that he was scared his son would wake up if he put him down. He was scared that he would put his son down and before he could pick him back up again he would be grown. He would be a young man, a person of his own accord, striding down the halls, laugh echoing from the inside out. Would it be so bad never to set his son down, to keep him always at his heart, in his arms, on his side. Like the moon, things would wane. The chamber that was full now would wane as his son would grow. Should there be more children, and if it was the will of the universe let there be more children, the cycle would be the same. First, they would leave for their own chambers, still under the same roof, then they would grow and grow and find their places in the world. In a time of peace, they would go, and should they have done their jobs as parents and leaders right, there would be no fear of them being unable to return. Yet the moon could not stay full forever. It cared not for war nor for peace, it only followed what nature had dictated. That it should come and go like the tide over which it held control. Yet if he held on to his son forever, or if not forever but for a moment longer, maybe the impossible could be possible. Maybe the moon could always hang full in the sky above.
But with his own eyes drooping, he felt inevitability guide him, move his arms and his son soft and down into his crib.
Why get so sentimental, he’ll be back in your arms in two hours.
He crawled back into bed unceremoniously. Didn’t even bother with the blankets. He wrapped his arms around his wife, sleeping soundly, unflinching at the sensation of his touch. He wrapped his arms around his wife and fell asleep humming an old familiar tune in her ear.