Chapter Text
Zuko falls into the waves with barely a cry, water rushing to cover his mouth and fill his lungs and drag him down to the depths.
He struggles, because he's a fool and a coward and he still, still wants to live even though his very existence brings nothing but agony to all who know him.
His uncle is dead. Zuko feels that pain burn harder, fiercer, hotter than the ice surrounding him. It's like a shard in his chest, lodged beneath his ribcage and pulsing, throbbing with an ache that is almost overwhelming.
He can't breathe. His lungs seize, panic scrabbling at his throat as he thrashes in the water, fighting against the thing, the inexorable thing pulling him down, further into the inky blackness below him where the sea delves deep.
His inner flame sputters, useless, in his chest. It gasps for air in time with his futile struggling, dying and dying and still fighting, still flickering even though Zuko knows he won't come back from this.
He's nearly died twice before; once when he was born, and once when his father took his fire to Zuko's face and held him down while he burned.
Zuko doesn't want to die; he didn't then and he doesn't now, but when has anyone ever listened to what Zuko wanted.
His head pounds, throbbing with the aching pressure on his skull, almost bursting. He can't breathe. He can't breathe. He can't, he can't, he won't survive, he won't live to prove himself, he’ll never regain his honour, he’ll die here in the cold sea with no one to care because he was lucky to be born and the sea is reclaiming its bounty.
His pale hair floats around his face like a shroud. Zuko hopes the Moon Spirit isn't angry at him for wasting her gift.
He closes his eyes, and opens his mouth, and breathes in water.
*
When Prince Zuko was born, the sea rose up and flooded the city.
It broke through the walls, crashed in towering waves through the streets, frothed in furious whirlpools around the Palace.
Fire Lord Ozai knew it was his son’s doing; an heir, born at midnight on the Winter Solstice, inauspicious and foolish and deadly.
His son was ruining the Fire Nation with his very existence, and Ozai knew what must be done.
Ursa protested; Ursa screamed and cried and begged, on her knees, for him to spare their son’s life; well, Ozai was merciful. Ozai was generous and bountiful and magnanimous, rewarding his wife's disobedience with a single day more, before he killed the boy.
Ursa took that single day and took Zuko and she prayed, to Agni, to Tui, to La, to every spirit she had ever heard tale of, that they would grant her child mercy.
She took him to the steps of the Palace, to the angry sea lapping at the very stone, and she placed him in the water and pleaded for his life.
The Moon Spirit heard her plea. The Moon Spirit shone down upon her, and upon the prince. His hair changed, melting from the deep, dark black he'd been born with to pale, gleaming white, and Ursa knew he'd been spared.
That night the sea retreated, and the prince began his life in debt to the world.
*
Zuko wakes to a world of white.
Gleaming, sparkling white, all around, as far as he could see.
He looks up at the sky, at the blinding white of the clouds that meld seamlessly into the snow, and wonders idly if he's dead.
He isn't cold; he doesn't know why. His inner flame feels sluggish and slow in his chest, burning dully, and Zuko doesn't know how he survived the water; how he ended up here.
He drags himself up, slowly, until he's sitting upright, leaning heavily on his arms. His breath comes in short, hard gasps, dissipating in puffs of vapour into the freezing air.
‘Are you okay?’
Zuko whips his head round, scanning the icy landscape.
A boy drops down next to him, seemingly out of nowhere, his bright grey eyes wide in concern. He's young, younger than Zuko, and he has a blue tattoo on his head.
He's wearing orange. Zuko's mind refuses to make the connection.
‘Hi, I'm Aang,’ the boy tells him, offering a small smile. ‘Are you okay? You don't look too good.’
‘Thanks,’ Zuko says drily. He rolls onto his knees, pushing himself up with his hands until he can rise stiffly to his feet. The boy darts forward to help him, getting a hand under his arm to lift him up.
Zuko nods awkwardly, pulling his arm away. He doesn't know how to do this. Any of this.
The boy smiles again, seemingly unfazed by Zuko's lack of manners, and steps back, clasping his hands in front of himself.
‘What's your name?’ He asks.
Zuko supposes it's polite to tell him, considering.
‘My name is Zuko,’ he says, passing a hand over his face to swipe his pale hair out of his eyes. The rough skin of his scar aches in the cold, and Aang’s eyes linger on it as he looks at Zuko.
‘Nice to meet you, Zuko,’ he says, smiling again. Zuko has never met anyone who smiles this much. ‘Can I give you a lift?’
‘A lift?’
‘My sky bison, Appa, is over there - just past that rise,’ Aang tells him, apparently unaware of how unusual that is. ‘I can get us someplace warmer, unless you have somewhere to be.’
Zuko shakes his head. ‘No. No, there's nowhere I need to be.’
‘Great!’ Aang beams, skipping away.
Zuko trudges after him.
*
They fly across the desert of ice, snow sparkling invitingly below them, deadly and beautiful and fatal.
Zuko knows not to fall for beauty; not anymore.
Aang chatters away beside him, strange and utterly incongruous in this white wilderness, and Zuko remembers enough of his etiquette lessons not to give into the urge to ask what the hell is a monk doing with a sky bison in the middle of the South Pole? Something tells him it wouldn't be well received.
‘I think I was in some kind of coma for a while,’ Aang volunteers cheerfully, thereby cutting through Zuko's manners - fueled crisis. ‘I got caught in a storm.’
Zuko frowns. There haven't been any storms recently; only the avalanche in the strait, where Uncle had -
He shuts that thought down, locks it away.
Uncle is dead.
They fly on.
*
‘Why is your hair white?’ Aang asks, because Aang doesn't seem to have any qualms about asking personal questions like that.
Zuko is not jealous. He's not.
(He kind of is.)
They're flying over the ocean, leaving the perfect treacherous white of the ice behind them. Zuko's inner flame is still burning sluggishly. He uses it to warm the air around them; he doesn't know if Aang notices, but he hopes not. Not many people would take kindly to a firebender sharing their space.
‘My mother asked the Moon Spirit to save my life,’ Zuko tells him. Honesty seems to be the best thing, here, although it has never, once, been the best thing in any other situation, but still.
Aang stares for a second. ‘Cool,’ he says, and that's - it?
Most people ask a whole lot more questions when that particular topic comes up; Zuko doesn't know what to do with this easy acceptance. Is it some kind of monk thing?
Whatever it is, it's very confusing.
*
They fly across the sea, across cliffs and past islands, over mountains that stretch up into the sky and valleys that strike through the earth. They fly through the night and then the next, and the next, and then -
On the morning of the eighth day, they reach the Northern Water Tribe.