Chapter Text
So Zuko had a mental breakdown. We’re not just talking about one of those nights marked by self-medication and a depressive spiral (although there were plenty of those too). We’re talking about the kind of event that divided his life in two, just like the Agni Kai. Everything in his life happened either before the Agni Kai, after the mental breakdown, or in between. And just like the last event that defined him, he would never be the same after it was over.
Before the breakdown, he was deceptively fine. He was the fire lord his friends and allies knew he could be: commanding authority and carrying himself with dignity. He had enemies, yes. Technically, no, he hadn’t partnered with the avatar just to steal his father’s throne, but it certainly looked that way to someone who didn’t know any better. Still, he paid his skeptics no mind, and instead focused his energy on winning the respect of those who hadn’t yet made up their minds about him.
He inherited a council from his father, who in turn, inherited most of it from Fire Lord Azulon. This meant that it comprised mostly traditionalists, who, even if they didn’t outright oppose Zuko’s reign, adhered to convention. The problem was that in the Fire Nation, convention meant upholding the dangerous ideologies that justified the war. But this isn’t about the war. This is about Zuko.
Zuko was never trying to be radical. He never meant to rock the boat so hard. He only wanted to restore the honor of the Fire Nation, to reinstate its reputation as a cultivated people who could exist in polite society without declaring war or committing genocide. As simple as that goal might have sounded, he had one hundred years of history working against him. He needed to be the kind of leader who fit the part.
He grew out his hair, donned the royal headpiece, covered himself in flowing crimson robes, and gave the kinds of speeches that would have made his uncle proud. He talked of peace, justice, and a brighter future in which human life had value. It didn’t really matter what he said. It only mattered what people went away thinking.
In the beginning, he felt a lot like a child playing dress up. The throne felt too wide for his slim teenage frame. The crown felt too heavy for his head. He was just a boy bearing a grown-up title, and everyone knew it. But Zuko was convinced that if he played the part well and bided his time, people would come around. He would get older and more tenured in his position, and all reasons to doubt him would eventually fade away.
All he would need to pull it off was everything he’d ever been denied. Simple, right? He would need a visage both regal and imposing. He practiced his expressions in the mirror before the many important events that demanded his attention. His asymmetrical eyes blinked back at him. He would need the support of the common people, even if he couldn’t win over the stuffy nobles in court. The same common people either didn’t care enough to voice any opinion whatsoever, or else called him a usurper. Maybe this would be harder than he thought.
He tried to claim legitimacy in whatever way he could. He held his chin high as he ignored the whispers that followed him wherever he passed. He greeted his ministers with a friendly face, even when he knew they gossiped and snickered behind his back. He maintained his morals, even when they were repeatedly challenged by every politician he encountered. It wasn’t enough.
That particular day he was in the throne room. But then again, when wasn’t he? Everyday mirrored the last. He awoke before sunrise. He forgot to eat breakfast. He attended the morning council meeting. He took lunch in his office. By lunch, he meant tea. He attended the afternoon council meeting. That’s where he was now, right? Unless it was the morning still. He didn’t know. He couldn’t place if he’d had lunch already, since he never ate lunch anyway. Most pathetic of all was that it didn’t even matter. Everyday was the same and he never made an inch of progress anyway.
The voices around him, all too loud and talking over each other, stopped at once. He couldn’t hear a thing. That wasn’t a poetic way of saying he felt adrift in his own mind. He literally couldn’t hear anything, despite straining himself trying. He saw the lips of those around him moving, their eyes fixed expectantly on him. When they faded in and out of focus, only the glints of firelight against their eyes made them look alive.
His head throbbed. Maybe he should’ve eaten something. Would it be rude if he went to get a bowl of rice right now? Would it be odd to ask a servant to bring it to him in the middle of the meeting? Wait, now there were more people in the room. No, no there weren’t. They were only tricks of the light, ghostly duplications of the people who were actually present. Maybe it wasn’t the light tricking him, maybe it was his own eyes. It hurt to focus on anything for too long. Finally, a sound emerged from the silence. It was a buzzing noise that was somehow both high and low at once. He swore he could see the noise manifested in his blurry vision. It warped everything it touched and made his mind an unbearable place to be. It started faint, barely audible, until it was so loud that he gripped both sides of his head to get it to stop. When he buckled onto his knees, the noiseless crowd rushed toward him. He imagined they emitted a collective gasp, but all he heard was buzzing. He felt hands on his shoulders, prying him upwards. He saw the distorted faces of Minister Hansuke and a servant before he hit the floor.
When he awoke, he was staring at his bedroom ceiling, and he wasn’t surprised. Someone had carried him to his bed and laid him on his back with his hands folded placidly in front of him. It reminded him of his childhood, when he used to fall ill pretty often. Back then it was his mother who usually carried him to his bed, though sometimes it was his nanny Preeda. He used to be embarrassed by it, especially if his father or Azula had been there to witness it. He supposed he should’ve been embarrassed now. After all, he didn’t know who had carried him back to his chambers on this particular day. A palace servant? Minister Hansuke? That latter option was unequivocally shameful, especially since everyone in the throne room had watched, but Zuko couldn’t bring himself to worry about it. In fact, when Zuko paused to take inventory of his emotions, he realized that he felt… good. Really good.
Zuko had every reason to feel ashamed or afraid, didn’t he? The servants who arrived intermittently to check on him seemed to anticipate that he’d feel that way. He thanked them and accepted the tea and soup they brought him, but privately decided they didn’t need to treat him with such delicacy.
His ears had stopped working. His eyes generated false duplicates of his coworkers. His conscious mind had failed him. That was undoubtedly frightening. So why did he feel so invigorated by the experience? Zuko dared to say he even liked it. He liked how real and alive he’d felt while it was happening. He liked having a priority laid out for him so plainly. It was a tangible, immediate problem, one that he could devote his whole attention towards. That was so unlike all of the other problems that plagued him. He felt the clarity that his life had been missing for so long.
For three days no one asked him to leave his chambers, so, for three days he stayed put. He felt well enough to leave, but why should he? The world outside his bedroom was so exhausting; he was reluctant to return until he absolutely had to. Still no one requested his presence on the fourth day, but Zuko decided to venture out on his own.
The sight of his fire lord regalia brought on a wave of nausea so potent Zuko swore it was more than psychosomatic. Still, he couldn’t spend another day in the same undergarments he’d worn for his entire sick leave, so he dressed in a set of his older, simpler clothes. He fixed his topknot, gathered a satchel of personal items, and paused at the doorway when the shining royal headpiece caught his eye. Someone had removed it from his hair when he’d fainted. Presumably that same someone had polished it and placed it neatly on his bedside table. It looked empty without a bundle of hair to prop it up. It looked like it was waiting for him. Feeling self-satisfied and a bit childish, Zuko swept it onto the floor and traipsed across it on his way out.
Minister Qin noticeably gave him a once over when he appeared at the threshold of the throne room. They weren’t used to seeing him this way, Zuko realized. (They also probably had no idea how long his fainting spell would keep him out of commission). Zuko had underestimated the strangeness of his sudden appearance to them. After all, Zuko saw himself at all occasions, at any hour of the day, throughout his life. He was used to himself in various states of disarray. He was realizing now that none of these people did. They only saw Zuko the fire lord, and that was barely him at all.
“Your Majesty?” Qin prompted. He let the silent question behind his question hang in the air.
Zuko didn’t answer. He just surveyed them all, daring them to survey him in return.
“My Lord, we were discussing the standardized curriculum for the Calderan academies. Do you care to weigh in?” Minister Yat-Sen offered, seemingly sincere. Yat-Sen never hated Zuko, he was just too senile to be his ally.
Zuko passed his gaze over all of them, one at a time. His eyes passed over each face, lingering on it to the point that its owner became visibly uneasy. Good.
“No. No, I don’t. I don’t care at all.”
And then he left. No one tried to stop him.
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Anyone who knew Zuko before his coronation knew he could be volatile. That’s why none of them had been worried at first. He’d come back, they all assumed. This was just one of his phases, the little rebellions he needed to commit every so often in order to feel properly heard. Well, they heard him, alright. They just didn’t care.
His ministers and staff congregated in the halls, imagining where he might have gone and what he might’ve been doing.
“Probably went to stay with his uncle for a while,” Qin hypothesized.
“I bet he thinks we’re all worried about him. No! Even better: I bet he thinks we actually miss him,” Hansuke jested the absent Zuko who couldn’t defend himself. A chorus of laughter echoed up the throne room’s vaulted ceiling.
But making jokes at the expense of their moody young leader could only offer so much entertainment, and when that ran dry, they returned to business as usual. Their meetings were remarkably unchanged. Their duties never required much of Zuko’s input either. Sometimes they caught themselves picturing Zuko still hiding up in his bedroom, as he had been before his melodramatic exit. Maybe he was. Everyone assumed that someone else had already checked.
On the fourth day of Zuko’s absence, when most of the palace staff had exhausted their conjectures on his whereabouts, heedless old Yat-Sen asked if anyone else had noticed that the fire lord had gone missing.
“He might actually be dead,” Hansuke proclaimed several weeks into Zuko’s disappearance. Hardly anyone had spoken of Zuko since the initial few days after he left. They hadn’t thought about him very much either. But no one had to ask Hansuke who he was talking about.
What if he was dead? They all wondered. The only person in the palace who might actually miss him was Preeda, but still, that didn’t mean that the rest of them wanted Zuko to die.
After an extended lull, the gossip sparked up again, this time about Zuko’s alleged death. If he was dead, how had it happened? Everyone offered up a different theory. Some suspected he’d done it himself, and his strange behavior before his disappearance was the final warning that he’d snapped. Others speculated that something he encountered on his travels had killed him. Whether that something was human or beast, they didn’t know.
“If someone murdered him, we would have heard about it by now,” Preeda assured them, and also possibly herself, while chewing gingerly on her thumbnail.
“He’s not exactly street smart. A highwayman could have robbed and killed him without realizing who it was,” Jong, the palace chef, considered.
“He’s got more street smarts than you think,” Jee, a member of the palace guard, countered. He leaned back in his chair and spoke with more authority than the rest, who were simply peddling rumors. Everyone took a moment to remind themselves that Jee had been the lieutenant on Zuko’s ship during his banishment.
A hush fell over the group. One of the scullery maids finally broke it. “And we’ve all seen what his face looks like. Even if he was murdered, someone would find and recognize the body. The news would break eventually.”
So he probably wasn’t dead in a ditch somewhere. That didn’t mean he hadn’t died by some other means. And it certainly didn’t mean he was coming back. But where would he go? How could someone so famous and so recognizable ever hope to begin anew? There had to be someone who knew more than they let on.
Letters were sent to everyone with even the most tenuous connection to Zuko’s social circle. All of the connections were tenuous, in fact. When the palace staff put their brains together to compile a list, they realized Zuko didn’t associate with anyone. He had old friends, yes, dating back to the end of the war, namely the avatar and the friends they shared. He had even older friends, people he’d known as children. There was Mai, Ty Lee, and several others he’d known from the royal academy. The only family he had left was his uncle.
Iroh didn’t know anything. Upon receipt of his letter, he was so concerned that he put his assistant manager in charge of the teashop and returned to the palace at once. Not that it helped.
The avatar didn’t know anything either. He passed along the word to the mutual friends he shared with Zuko, but that, too, amounted to nothing. Neither of the Water Tribe siblings had a clue, and apparently no one had heard from the blind earthbender since before Zuko vanished. Mai and Ty Lee were both dead ends.
After fruitlessly searching Zuko’s social network, the conversations surrounding him changed their tone. It was no longer any fun to imagine Zuko escaping to some tropical island somewhere, or starting a new life as a chicken pig farmer. With all the search efforts having failed, speculating Zuko’s whereabouts had become depressing. People stopped asking if he was dead or how it might’ve happened. They simply accepted it and moved on. The fire lord was gone. The whys and hows no longer mattered.
From that point on the questions grew less fanciful and more practical. Zuko had died, or well, disappeared , unmarried and childless. In the absence of any clear heir, who was to take his place on the throne? The fire sages grumbled and lamented their dilemma. They’d urged him to get married for years. They pushed him to hurry up and have children. He didn’t listen, but it hadn’t seemed like such an insurmountable problem then. He was young, and mostly healthy, and so it seemed unlikely that anything would happen to him. And then something did.
For the time being, Iroh served as interim fire lord. With each new day that came and went sans Zuko, the fire sages begged Iroh to allow himself to be properly crowned. What was he waiting for?
“There’s no sense saving your seat for a dead man!” the sages hissed at him. Iroh averted his eyes and deepened his frown.
The fire sages wanted to officially declare him dead. The entire palace agreed it was for the best. Only Iroh gave them any resistance, and after a while, even he couldn’t deny what seemed obvious.
“You let him leave! You watched it happen!” Iroh howled, jabbing an accusatory finger at Zuko’s ministers who had been present on the day he vanished.
“Your Majesty, how could we have known? He was a grown man. We had no right to stop him!” Minister Qin argued. Deep down, Iroh knew he was right. He just wanted someone to blame.
The announcement was made to the public six months after Zuko had last been seen. The fire lord was presumed dead in the eighth year of his reign. He was only twenty-five years old.
“We have no ashes to fill the urn,” Iroh noted somberly when funeral arrangements were underway.
“We could burn a collection of his personal belongings and fill the urn with those instead,” Preeda offered. It was what they had done for the late Prince Lu Ten, but she didn’t point this out. She didn’t need to.
Iroh didn’t reply. She took his silence to be more or less affirmative.
There was a ceremony. The people weren’t quite shocked. While palace staff had been upholding a vague and flimsy explanation for their leader’s complete lack of public appearances, the people hung onto their suspicions.
Rumors abounded all over again, and this time no one had to relegate their theories to hushed, late-night conversations with their close friends and family. Any given market, restaurant, or shop in the Fire Nation buzzed with its patrons' theories on what might’ve been the young fire lord’s final fate. The most popular theory, which was non-coincidentally also the most sordid, was that he’d been murdered by one of his most trusted cohorts.
“It was that Hansuke guy, I just know it! Thought he could grab the throne for himself!”
“Why would Minister Hansuke murder the fire lord? General Iroh just took the throne anyway.”
“You don’t think the old general did it, do you?”
“No, but he better watch his back. With Hansuke still around, who knows what could happen…”
Others thought it was Minister Qin. Some of the more insane theories accused Toph, based only on the fact that she knew Zuko and also hadn’t been seen in a while. Her name was mostly cleared when her parents confirmed that she made a habit of wandering off without telling anyone, and there was nothing suspicious about it. A lesser-known theory pinned the blame on Governor Ukano.
“The governor’s own daughter was the fire lord's wife once. He hoped he could make a claim based on that!”
“That’s absurd!”
It was absurd, and palace security must have agreed, because no arrests were made. Iroh, more than anyone, thought it was absurd. To him, this whole situation was utterly ridiculous, and that was because he believed with all his heart that Zuko wasn’t dead.
As the royal headpiece slid into Iroh’s topknot and he gazed out at the crowd gathered outside the palace, he offered a silent plea.
Come home, nephew.
Zuko, miles away and very much alive, couldn’t hear him.