Work Text:
Mrs Jamison knew all of the students who walked past her office. She kept track of every absence, every failing grade, every request to see the nurse. From sixth grade up, she watched them as they went about their days. It was a trying time in their lives, after all, the bridge between childhood and adulthood.
There was no one she watched more closely than Zuko Sozin.
She barely noticed him the first few weeks of sixth grade. He was a little quiet, and much too shy for her liking, but he’d been gentle, and sweet. Even if he was a little odd. She saw referrals to educational psychologists cross her desk on the way to his parents, but never saw any responses.
His mother arrived promptly every day to pick him up after the elementary school released his sister, and he went eagerly to her.
She stopped coming around Christmas.
After that, it seemed that the boy walked to school. Which wasn’t unusual, but he lived almost forty minutes away, and when she spoke to Mrs Peters at his sister’s school, she conveyed that the sister was dropped off and picked up every day as usual, except by her father, rather than her mother.
The boy started to come in to school with injuries.
They weren’t overly suspicious injuries, and they were easily explained. He did run a lot, and climb things, and got into scuffles with the other children. A bruise here, an arm braced across ribs there hardly built into a case worth raising to the nurse or the principal.
After a few months of his mother not dropping him into school, Mrs Jamison concluded that she was gone.
Zuko’s father started to pick him up at lunch time for doctors appointments, and she quietly hoped he was getting the help he clearly desperately needed. He’d always come back to school afterwards with a confused, slightly haunted look in his eyes, and she found it hard to cling to that hope.
She watched him withdraw.
She watched as his sensory issues seemed to worsen along with his social skills. As he came into school every day with deeper bags under his eyes, with more random abrasions and tiny bruises, as he seemed to shrink before her eyes.
Half way through eighth grade, just as she’d decided to go and ask some pointed questions to the school nurse, he stopped showing up to school entirely.
The younger sister was under her jurisdiction now, and she came in every day, without fail, excelling in every class and activity, wreaking silent damage on the others in a way that was simultaneously achingly familiar as schoolyard bullying and disturbingly calculated to increase her power and social standing.
A doctor’s note arrived excusing Zuko from school until after the winter break. A whole month. The note didn’t specify what was wrong.
The next note was a change of address form, updating the emergency contact information for Zuko but not for Azula.
The change of guardian form came next, naming Zuko’s uncle as a temporary guardian. The addresses matched.
No one came to ask her questions about the exhausted, sad little boy she saw each day.
Then he came back.
With a huge burn across half his face, and a flash of agonized determination in his eye whenever he forced himself to make eye contact, or dug his nails deep into his skin to keep his hands still.
He shouted instead of speaking, face constantly contorted into a scowl. When she asked him why one morning, he looked so shocked at the question that she quickly reclassified the yelling from anger to partial deafness, perhaps accompanied by tinnitus.
The scowl was easily explained too. The burned side of his face could barely move, and the undamaged side seemed to fight against pulling the skin.
She wondered just how stupid everyone thought she was. There was no possible way that boy had tripped into a fire. The burn was all wrong.
No. Someone had put something scorchingly hot against his face and held it there.
She had bets on the angry father who’d stopped driving him to school after his mother suddenly vanished from his life.
Her anger only grew when her complaint to the school went ignored. When she saw him on the playground at recess clenching and unclenching his fists relentlessly, looking around for someone to try and talk to. When she watched him rebuffed, again and again, by kids who couldn’t get past his awkwardness, his shouting, and his scar.
It was a slow process, watching him relax slightly. Fresh off the burn, he’d been trying desperately to suppress anything that made him act or look differently to the other children.
A few months shy of his sixteenth birthday, he started smiling at her when he walked into school. There was a new, unfamiliar contentment around him. Like he’d stopped worrying so much about appearing normal.
And then came report card season, towards the end of his sophomore year.
He’d always been bright, hitting the low end of As and the high end of Bs. But this report card was a straight set of A+s, along with an excellent, and early, SAT score.
She handed it to him and he looked at her, his good eye wide with shock, his bad eye narrowed in confusion.
She grinned at him, and he smiled softly back without a word.
He didn’t come back for the last two weeks of school.
A new set of forms crossed her desk. Another change of address, back to his father’s house. A change of emergency contact back to the man she would bet burned off half his face. Her heart sank.
He came back after the summer at the start of junior year limping.
He wore long sleeves and pants, despite the September heat.
He stopped smiling.
His sister, who had obstinately ignored him ever since the burn, suddenly stuck to him like glue, never leaving his side for a moment. Zuko even signed up for the same classes as her, a sudden switch from advanced literature and history into math classes above his level.
His grades plummeted, and he never smiled.
Their father picked them both up after school for Thanksgiving weekend, and only Azula came back.
More paperwork crossed her desk. Another change of guardian and address. She sighed in relief.
Weeks later, he came back. He was limping again. But not like he was injured. More like he was too weak to walk properly.
More paperwork across her desk, excusing him from physical activity due to a massive heart failure that happened to coincide with the change of address papers.
She raged.
Sixteen year olds with burns and bruises don’t have unprompted heart attacks and then leave home.
The siblings didn’t speak anymore. Zuko requested a full schedule change, and she arranged it instantly.
The boy shied away from his sister in corridors, and the girl laughed.
Three weeks after that, Azula disappeared from school.
More paperwork across her desk. Azula had been withdrawn entirely, and her academic records needed to be sent to a residential psychiatric hospital.
Her eyes widened dramatically over that paperwork.
Zuko stopped going outside during breaks. Stopped eating lunch alone in the cafeteria. Slowly, like he was trying to befriend a predator, he started sitting closer and closer to her desk.
The first day she offered him a handful of grapes from her lunch, wishing she’d been brave enough to do it in the months before the burn, when he’d been shrinking before her eyes.
The second day, she told a joke, and he smiled.
The third day, he made a brutally sarcastic comment about the principal, and she howled with accidental laughter.
By the end of a week, he was sitting in the chair beside her desk, sheltered from the rest of the school.
On Monday, she implemented her plan.
She’d chosen the little group of friends very carefully. She needed people who could carry a conversation, who were sweet, who were accepting. She needed kids with a bit of backbone, who wouldn’t put up with anything they didn’t want to put up with. She needed kids who’d had rough patches, and who were coping with their issues in sensible ways.
The four kids who met her criteria were all students who had cried in her office. Katara when her mother had died. Sokka almost a year later, exhausted from trying to take care of everyone when they’d suddenly been left with their grandmother when their dad was deployed. Aang, when his last foster placement had fallen through, and he’d gone back to the group home, where he adored the monks who cared for them, but knew it wasn’t family like other kids got. Toph, when her parents had found out she was on the judo team, and had shouted at the principal for an hour about how fragile she was, even though she’d won every match.
Mrs Jamison chose them carefully. She managed to corner Sokka after school one day, and it only took a couple of barely subtle hints that Zuko could use a new friend before he grinned like he’d come up with an amazing idea on his own, and ran to plot with the others.
Zuko stopped hanging out at her desk.
The next time she looked into the cafeteria, he was sitting with the others.
She hadn’t realized how hard it would hit her. How quickly tears would well up in her eyes when she saw something she hadn’t seen since the first semester of his sixth grade, before his mother vanished.
He was laughing.