Chapter Text
When he is thirteen, Zuko loses the sight in his left eye.
Zuko eagerly tests his vision once the bandages are removed from his face. For weeks, all he had seen was darkness, the thick layers of dressings blocking any light that might reach his injured eye.
“Don’t push yourself too hard,” Uncle cautions, winding back the last strip of linen from his face. “Healing should not be rushed, nephew.”
But even with the bandages gone, Zuko still can’t see much. Only blackness, an unrelenting void where he had once perceived form and color. The eye had been badly injured, after all; it is a miracle that he hadn’t lost it to the infection that makes his burns weep and causes his body to blaze with fever.
“It may take weeks before you might see any changes in your vision,” Uncle warns, but Zuko stubbornly opens and closes his injured eye, straining to make out some kind of shape.
The darkness persists despite his attempts.
Zuko’s uninjured eye prickles with tears. He angrily shrugs Uncle’s gentle hand off his shoulder.
“Give it time,” Uncle murmurs. He presses a cool cloth to Zuko’s hot forehead, careful not to brush up against the seeping burns that cover his face. "It will take time, Prince Zuko."
He does not know when his sight first begins to return. The days that follow pass in a feverish haze, where Zuko is not entirely sure what is really happening. He lies listlessly in his bed, feeling the warship rolling beneath him and straining his swollen eye open, watching the shadows that gather and collect in his vision. There seems to be no form to the shadows; only darkness that shifts without meaning as Zuko turns his head back and forth in the sunlight, trying in vain to follow the light. But after a few weeks, the darkness clears into definite shapes, and the shapes eventually take on meaning. That wide block of darkness must be Uncle, that taller, broad-shouldered figure must be Lieutenant Jee; Zuko can just make out the portly figure of Cook and the wiry figure of their engineer.
And then the darkness slowly dissipates, leaving behind a clouded gray fog. Zuko waits and waits for the grayness to clear away, but eventually his vision settles, and he is forced to conclude that this is all his injured eye will ever be to perceive.
But there is still light, and shadow.
Beyond the blurred figures of his Uncle and his crew, there are shapes that have no meaning, shapes that linger in the corners of his stateroom and lurk in the corridors of the ship. Zuko has been feverish for so long that coming out of it, he is still not quite sure what is real and what is his imagination. There is not much to do from his sickbed, and the shadowed forms are by far the most interesting thing that Zuko has to look at. He tries to tell Uncle what he sees, but Uncle only shushes his broken explanations and holds a cup of bitter tea to his lips for Zuko to swallow.
By the time he has recovered from the fever, Zuko has learned to accommodate his altered perception and regained his sense of balance, and eventually he stops trying to use his injured eye, relying instead on what he perceives from his right eye. But late at night, while sounds of pipa and flute drift to his stateroom from the deck, Zuko will idly shut his right eye and open his left, and he will observe the shadows once again. Shadowed shapes with glowing light where eyes should be, formless shapes that shift and change and slowly around his room in patterns almost like the court dances Zuko remembers from the days before his grandfather had died, before the new Fire Lord had outlawed all dancing in his court, claiming that the nation must be serious if they intended to win this war.
He tries again to describe the shapes to Uncle, as Uncle heats up water for his tea pot. He does a poor job; Zuko simply does not have the vocabulary to explain what he sees, and fumbles over his words in his nervousness. Still, he tries, and perhaps Uncle even understands something of what he is trying to say, since Uncle listens to him with a seriousness that is not usually present during their cups of tea together.
“Be careful of what you look at with that eye, nephew,” Uncle says simply when Zuko finishes explaining, but he will not elaborate. And soon enough, Zuko stops looking through his injured eye at all. There is more to see and do now, a ship to run; his firebending training that Uncle resumes not long after their conversation.
But sometimes Zuko stands at the helm at the cusp of dusk, when daylight has not quite given to night. And his right eye will drift shut, and he will watch the clouded shapes swirling across the black sea like wild dragons darting across the foaming whitecaps, and there are times when he swears the shapes turn their heads and look right back at him.
Ozai dies during the tenth year of Fire Lord Zuko’s reign.
Zuko is attending a meeting with a delegation from the Northern Water Tribe when a courier slips silently inside the room to pass him a note. Zuko’s eyes slide over the characters inked hastily by the Fire Sage.
Ozai is dead, the Fire Sage writes. Zuko's father has passed away quietly, in his sleep, having suffered earlier in the year from a chest infection he had never quite overcome.
He ought to feel something, Zuko knows he ought to feel something. But there is nothing inside him but a peculiar blank empiness. Zuko nods at the courier, who fades instantly to the background among the other scribes and dignitaries, and tries to turn his attention back to Chief Arnook’s ambassador.
The ambassador drones on. But Zuko’s gaze is drawn out the window, to the flat gray sky outside. A flock of sparrowgulls are passing overhead, their wings outstretched. He absently blinks his right eye shut, keeping his left eye open. Now he cannot make out the birds at all, only streaks of light where they had been traveling, like golden lines gilded across the sky.
This eye has never worked quite right since the Agni Kai. Zuko used to lay on his bedroll on the Wani, working on opening and closing his left eye, trying in vain to strengthen the muscles of his scarred eyelid that never quite managed to open all the way. He has gotten used to the blurriness of his vision over the years, learned to compensate for the lack of clarity. But sometimes he will still catch himself squinting his right eye closed, to see the light and shadow he can only see with his injured eye.
He watches the golden lines for a long moment, mesmorized. Then he opens his right eye again.
Outside the window, the sparrowgulls’ wings beat a steady rhythm. The streaks of gold are still hanging there in the sky, emblazoned across his field of vision, meandering over and around the clouds and stretching far beyond into the horizon, and something Zuko has kept tight inside his chest unfurls.
His father dies, and somehow this is the beginning and the end of everything.