Chapter Text
Iroh’s birthday falls on the same day as the conquest of Kam Yoon.
Kam Yoon would likely have remained a poor, nameless village if it hadn’t become the Earth King’s favorite vacation spot. Iroh imagines that, at the height of its glory, it was as festive and luxurious as Ember Island, a refreshing retreat for well-to-do Earth nobles and their children. Because of its natural defenses, flanked by the Si Wong Desert to the east and the steep Ju Ya mountains to the west, only a handful of rank-and-file guards greeted the Fire Nation army when they marched up from the sea.
It was Azulon’s first successful campaign after the death of Sozin.
He has been to the place where Kam Yoon once stood. The ruins of the city stick out of the tough grass like broken teeth, and the wind and rain have eroded the elaborate stone sculptures in the palace gardens, smoothing away the once-intricate details until nothing now remains but a suggestion of life. Here and there, if wild animals haven’t dragged them away, one might find human bones.
Iroh was born at noon on the twelfth day of the seventh month, five hours after Azulon sent word of his victory back to the capital. His name means grand union. It might have been a beautiful sentiment: a wish for the world to recover from its divisions, for all wounds to be healed, and for all people to live as one in peace and harmony. But those who remember Azulon setting whole cities ablaze know better. Iroh is the destiny of the the Fire Nation, to unify the world under the red banner of its Lord.
The I in Iroh comes from his mother’s name, Ilah. She never lets him forget it. Princes should aspire to greatness at all times, even when playing with their little brothers.
“There is another i you should remember from your lessons with Scholar Akito,” she says to him when she finds out, his ear pinched firmly between her fingers. “What are the Five Virtues, Iroh?”
“Mo-ther,” he whines, twelve years old and confident that he doesn’t deserve this treatment just for pushing Ozai into the turtle-duck pond. “He started—”
She lets go of his ear but grabs both of his hands. “Look at me, Iroh. What are they?”
He wiggles uselessly, then sighs and meets Mother’s sharp, golden gaze. “Rei, i, ling, chi, and zong.”
“And what are those?”
“Order, justice, integrity, honor, and loyalty to our nation.” The words come out in a monotone mumble, the result of years of strict schooling. “But what does that have to do with—”
“Iroh.” She is firm and unrelenting. “Scholar Akito taught you what the sages said about i, did he not?”
“Yes, mother.”
“Then you should know that it isn’t simply justice. It is one’s sense of justice – the knowledge of how to act upon the other virtues. And,” she says sharply, “it is the knowledge that one should not act in self-interest at the expense of others. What do you gain from pushing Ozai when he’s being a little bat-monkey?”
He can’t quite hide his laugh, but Mother doesn’t chide him. “I thought it was funny.”
“So funny that your mother had to take time away from her royal duties to calm him down while the servants left their cleaning to change his wet robes. You are the Crown Prince, Iroh. If you do not understand the importance of acting with i, how can you expect your little brother to respect you, much less the people of the Fire Nation? That’s the kind of thing your father has to think about all the time.”
At twelve, Iroh has already seen the kind of respect his father commands. Azulon is unsmiling, as impassive as he is politically competent. It’s hard work. He rarely sees his father outside of the endless meetings he holds in the grand chambers, and not at all when he is out on the battlefield leading yet another campaign. To Iroh, he might as well be a hero in a folktale.
“I’m sorry, Mother,” he says, bowing his head, the perfect picture of a loyal son. “I’ll apologize to Ozai. And I won’t do it again.”
“And you will act,” she supplies.
“And I will act with i.” He peeks up at her. “Can I go down to the kitchens? Yee Ming said I could try his new crackling bun recipe.”
Mother sighs, and takes his face in her soft hands, wiping off some piece of grime from his cheek with the pad of her thumb. “Well, run along. I’d better not hear about any more mischief!”
He’s already halfway across the courtyard.
(The crackling buns are very good. So good, in fact, that he completely forgets to apologize to Ozai for pushing him into the turtle-duck pond.)
At thirty-five, Crown Prince Iroh’s military career is untouchable. Whatever he and his soldiers touch instantly bends to the will of the Fire Nation. Father calls him home after he crushes another garrison of green-clad soldiers at Cheong Oh Pass, and marries him off right away to a noblewoman from a powerful family that has close cousins in the Earth Kingdom.
Her name is Sunghee. They clash, at first, because she has a strong will and he is letting the title of Dragon of the West inflate his ego, but his mother’s lessons are finally cracking through his thick skull. With i, he learns to love the woman she is, and to balance their needs and desires.
Sunghee dies in childbirth. He spends a month at the bottom of an abyss. Sunghee was supposed to give the boy a milk name; Ilah, herself ill and bound to her bed, calls him shoho, little fire, the name all Fire Nation mothers call their children. When the time comes for him to announce the true name of his son to the nation, Iroh can’t remember any of the advice the court astronomers and Fire Sages have been pelting him with for nine months. Only Sunghee paid them any mind, and she is gone, her ashes interred in the royal shrine.
He stares down at the baby crying in his arms, feeling the warmth of Agni’s spark glowing within the little boy, and thinks that the only thing that has kept him from totally falling apart is his love for this shoho. His son has kept the sky from crashing down on his head. Iroh gives him the name Lu Ten.
For a long time, all is well. Lu Ten is the perfect, loyal son that Iroh always pretended to be. He’s an excellent student, a good friend to his playmates, and a loving cousin to Ozai’s firstborn, when the time comes. When he and his brother watch their sons play together, Zuko stumbling after Lu Ten, they exchange proud remarks. It’s almost like they haven’t spent their lives fighting with each other. His family feels whole.
As a boy, he’d had a vision: standing at the peak of Ba Sing Se, and claiming it by searing the royal crest into the walls of the Earth Kingdom’s most impenetrable fortress. Once the conquest was complete, Fire Lord Azulon, approaching his hundredth year, would have no choice but to let the throne pass to him.
So when the order comes in to lay siege to the city of legend, he feels only a sense of calm. Iroh knows he is going to meet his destiny.
His troops, on the other hand, begin to mutter amongst themselves about curses and bad luck.
Those walls are full of the bones of soldiers, they say. A thousand years ago, the earthbenders entombed their greatest warriors inside to ensure that they would defend the kingdom even in death.
It’s all chicken-hogwash, of course. Two years into the siege, he has broken through the outer wall, and there are no earthbender bones to be found, only layers upon layers of shaped earth and stone, layered with uniform brick. But that doesn’t stop the news of Lu Ten’s death from feeling like a curse spit straight from the flaming tongue of Agni.
What sort of father is so absorbed in his own dreams that he cannot keep his own son safe? Lu Ten’s regiment is decimated. No one is left alive except for the man who gives the report, clearly shaken, and their lieutenant, who was taken by the Dai Li.
The world stops spinning. He wakes up night after night to a room full of burnt wood and broken glass, head pounding, an ever-present cavity rotting away in his chest.
He thought he’d learned. He counts on his fingers, over and over again, the Five Virtues, the number of days since his son was laid on the pyre.
He orders the Fire Nation troops to stand down, much to the consternation of his advisors and fellow generals. But even those who disobey him seem to be dumbstruck by his grief, and the Earth Kingdom manages to push them back, bit by bit. By the time he lets them prepare Lu Ten’s body for cremation, the Dai Li and the Earth Kingdom army have retaken Ba Sing Se.
His father is unhappy, to say the least, and passes the throne to Ozai, then dies. It’s like the gods have begun to stamp out the fire at the heart of the world.
Iroh’s life shatters like fine porcelain. His wife, his son, his mother, and now his father are gone, ash carried off by a sudden wind. He has lost his crown and his reputation in the same blow, and now the sun is shining on his little brother, who demands virtue in his subjects but has never acted out of anything but selfishness and a lust for power.
He reflects, at the bottom of a bottle, that they aren’t so different after all.
The Dragon of the West fades quickly into legend. A few years out of the public eye – there is no hurry to reveal that the former Crown Prince is a drunkard and a philanderer – and Ozai has begun to eclipse his legacy, rising higher toward Sozin with each passing day.
Agni grants him another son in Zuko. He was Lu Ten’s favorite, and though he is timid and clumsy, he has his mother’s heart and his grandmother’s tenacity, Roku’s love for the world and Sozin’s determination. Whenever he returns from long trips abroad, the thing that brings him the most joy is seeing his nephew growing from a child into a young man. He spoils him, as he always has, and takes him on secret adventures, listening to him as he traces the outlines of his frustration with his studies, his firebending, his loneliness. Ozai never liked him. The moose-lion’s portion of his attention goes to Azula, who shares, with Azulon, the name of a goddess.
He tries to be kind to them both, to give them things that little boys and girls might like, but whenever he has to leave them, the feeling that he isn’t doing enough for the little ones nips at his heels like a persistent mouse-dog.
Grief has changed him, physically. It has wrinkled his face, turned his hair gray, and rounded his stomach and chin. He finds that simply going by a different name when he travels is enough to grant him the anonymity he seeks. And the more time he spends at places like Kam Yoon, the more he realizes the extent of his failure.
Iroh passes through towns where military outposts suck the townspeople dry, through rivers polluted by armament factories and forests razed for firewood, and into the other nations of the world, where the title of the Fire Lord commands fear and hatred, but never respect. Firebending is as reviled as the back-breaking tariffs that Ozai and Azulon before him levied on their trading partners. The young and old alike bear the scars of fire and starvation and imprisonment and injustice. It is as much his doing as it was his father’s and Sozin’s and the Fire Lords before them.
He knows now that he failed twice at Ba Sing Se. He failed to protect Lu Ten, and he failed to recognize that his conquests were helping to destroy the world for his own satisfaction.
When rice wine loosens his tongue enough for these thoughts to slip out of his head and onto Piandao’s dining table, everything begins to change. He leaves the mansion with a pai sho tile in hand.
Iroh meets personally with every member who will see him. His youthful encounters with the last living dragons and the Spirit World serve him well here – he is matched in experience with many of the people in the Order, and with his princely training, he shows that he can play the political game better than any of them. Slowly, slowly, he turns from a dangerous adversary into one of their most valued operatives.
Out of the mud of despair, the White Lotus begins to bloom.
When Ozai brands his firstborn in front of every noble in Capital City, Iroh finds that he has still learned nothing. He is too selfish even to bear witness to his nephew’s pain, and as he closes his eyes, he counts: order, justice, integrity, honor, loyalty. Ozai has broken the filial order, made a mockery of justice, humiliated his son, stripped away his honor, and denounced his loyalty.
Iroh does nothing to stop it. He only arranges for Zuko to be brought aboard his ship, the elderly Wani, to begin the term of his exile. Ozai will be happy to get rid of two birds with one stone. It is oh-so-easy to justify his inaction. He can’t risk open conflict with Ozai and endangering his lines of information within the Fire Nation. He can’t get the Grand Lotus killed during the preparations for the arrival of Sozin’s Comet. He cannot give the nobles any reason to distrust him, to think he is lucid enough to know when they are being unjust and cruel. Trying to interrupt the Agni Kai might well destroy everything they have been working for.
Every justification, no matter how well-reasoned it is, crumbles into dust when he looks at his nephew’s face and remembers what he sounds like when he begs for mercy.
He doesn’t leave Zuko’s side for two weeks. The boy, barely of age at thirteen, burns hot with fever. Iroh cannot look away from the shape of Ozai’s hand in the open wound that covers half of his face. He held that hand many times, when he was small. They used to run through the palace grounds together, and when Ozai got tired, Iroh would carry him on his back until they reached the shade of his favorite willow tree.
Choo, the physician attending the Wani, does his best to keep the burn clean and minimize the chances of infection. Towards the end of the first week, when they are docked in a colonial port, it begins to weep a clear fluid that isn’t water; Choo sighs in relief, saying that the prince’s body is beginning to triumph over the infection and push the impurities out.
He wonders, brushing the Zuko’s hair back from his sweaty forehead, how they’ll keep his tears from irritating the wound when he wakes up. Zuko was always a sensitive boy, and salt water will sting worse than burn salve. It’s not the most important thing to be thinking about, of course, but he cups the back of his nephew’s head in his hand, feels the steady pulse of Ashura in his crown chakra, and can’t help but remember his own son in his arms, a small fire, shoho; in his arms, cold and broken, a corpse, just another boy lost to a selfish war.
When Zuko finally wakes up, disoriented and scared and very much still feverish, Iroh thinks he understands the whole of i.
Ilah was right. It isn’t simply justice. But neither is it mere compassion, or a sense of responsibility for others, or the impulse to do what is right. And just as the breath of fire is not only the flame itself, i is not simply what he does.
What it might also be, and what his nephew needs from him, is the knowledge of what he will not do.
Zuko needs to know that a man who acts like his father has tainted his moral standing, has stooped to petty actions beneath him as a king and as a mortal man. He needs to know that his uncle is not the sort of wretch who would raise his hand against a child out of anger. He needs to know that being Ozai’s loyal son will not make him a good man, capable of making his own way in the world.
I means understanding what to guard himself against. I is the way he can tell when a young firebender will lose control of his flame: when he moves hesitantly, when his feet drag, when he breaks the pattern of his breath, when he lets his concentration slip.
After three and a half weeks, Zuko emerges onto the deck completely lucid, head shaved save for a high queue, a massive bandage taped over the left side of his face. He doesn’t say a word to anyone. Iroh is worried, of course, but he lets the boy roam the ship under his watchful eye.
Eventually, Zuko speaks. What comes out of his mouth is pure poison, infection and rot pushed out in a torrent of hatred and anger and pain. Iroh doesn’t raise his voice, doesn’t rush to discipline him.
He just pours himself some tea, and waits.
It takes four years for Zuko to return. He nearly loses his way, time and again, but when he finally understands the path, he takes to it with both feet, and Iroh knows he will never let it out of his sight.
In his tent at the White Lotus encampment, both of their faces wet with tears, he lets himself feel like a proud father for the first time since Ba Sing Se.