Work Text:
Long Feng did not sleep much. He had found, over many years, that the city revealed itself most clearly in the hours when its inhabitants believed themselves unwatched. He had been at his desk when the agent entered, moving with the particular silence of a man who had learned that interrupting Long Feng was its own kind of risk.
"The Avatar's bison has been recovered by the Avatar," the agent said. "Six prisoners escaped through a ceiling breach in chamber seven. Four children, the banished prince—" a pause, "—and the asset."
Long Feng stopped writing.
“When?”
“Yesterday afternoon, sir. We have not located them.”
“Is the general still in his tea shop?”
“No, sir.”
He moved to the window. Ba Sing Se lay below him in the grey pre-dawn, its tiers descending in perfect order toward the outer wall. Ba Sing Se was quiet at this hour, its walls stacked like the rings of a great stone tree, each one separate, each one contained.
He had spent twenty years building this city into something manageable. Something legible. A place where information moved only through channels he controlled, where the dangerous and the destabilizing were kept carefully below ground and remade into something new. Something better. Where even a general of the Dragon of the West's caliber could be rendered small and containable by the simple removal of hope.
He had miscalculated the timing.
Not the strategy — the strategy was sound. Iroh in the tea shop, grieving and reduced, was no threat to anyone. Iroh with his son was something else entirely.
"Do we know where they are?"
"Somewhere in the third ring. The earthbender has made it difficult to track."
Long Feng folded his hands behind his back. Below, a lantern swayed on its pole, casting a slow arc of light across the empty street.
He had held the asset for five years. After the Fire Lord had denied ransom, Long Feng kept the prince alive, his mind intact. He’d developed aspirations to use him eventually, another puppet king.
The corners of his mouth twitched into a frown. The Avatar had interrupted his plans.
He had watched the Dragon of the West and his nephew take up residence in his city, in his third ring, and then the second, pouring tea for strangers with the careful patience of a man who had decided to become small.
He had allowed it.
People frequently mistook tolerance for ignorance.
Long Feng had found this useful.
"The asset will need shelter," Long Feng said. "Food. Time to recover."
"Sir?"
"He has been in a cell for five years." Long Feng turned from the window. "He cannot run. He can barely walk. They will go to ground and stay there." He moved to his desk, straightening papers that did not need straightening. "We have time. Look for warehouses; abandoned places large enough to hold a bison and six fugitives.”
Long Feng turned from the window. "The Earth King has a meeting with the Council of Five this morning."
"Yes, sir."
"Ensure it runs long." He moved back to his desk. "I want every gate watched. Nothing leaves the city without my knowledge." He picked up his brush. "And find them. Is the princess in place?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good.”
The agent bowed, gone as silently as he’d come.
Long Feng stood alone in his office. The lantern below had stilled. The city lay quiet and perfectly ordered in the dark, every wall in place, every secret in its proper cell.
He picked up his brush and returned to work.
0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o
The fire was very small.
Iroh had built it with the particular care of a man who needed his routine. Three stones pulled from the alley's edge, dry wood sourced from a broken crate, flame coaxed from a single breath.
The kettle was one he carried always, battered brass gone dark with years of use. He set it above the fire and watched the water begin to move.
The warehouse behind him was quiet. Through the broken wall he could hear the slow rhythm of his nephew's breathing, still uneven, still too fast. Katara had done what she could. The rest was Zuko's to decide.
Iroh had said to her. A crisis of the soul. His fate is in his hands. She had looked at him with the frustrated, frightened expression of a healer confronted with something she could not heal.
He liked her very much.
The water began to simmer. He measured the leaves by habit, by feel, by thirty years of mornings that had always begun this way. Tea was the one constant he had carried through every version of his life. Prince. General. Father. Fugitive. Tea shop keeper. Each role had accumulated around him like stone, and he had shed each one, but the kettle remained.
Lu Ten.
Some things are worth staying up for.
But he hadn’t. He hadn’t even known. He would’ve torn the world apart if he’d known his son was still alive.
He would’ve ended his siege in victory, and pinned the heads of everyone who had been part of his capture onto stakes lining the conquered walls of Ba Sing Se.
The kettle began to whistle, soft and insistent.
He lifted it from the fire.
Behind him, the dragging footsteps of a man left to languish in an Earth Kingdom dungeon.
Iroh remembered Lu Ten’s first steps; remembered the excitement and pride when his son had toddled to him with outstretched arms. He remembered the fear; that his son now had the whole world before him. Dangers Iroh had never considered lurked around every corner. When Lu Ten had fallen on the stone steps when he was two, splitting his forehead open, Iroh had felt his heart broken in two.
When his son had died, his heart had shattered. It was only through Zuko that it had ever started to be repaired at all.
Iroh did not turn; afraid the spirits were playing tricks with him. That he too was in a fire fever and that his son was not behind him.
He had not found his son in the Spirit World. He’d thought he wasn’t ready. He never stopped to think that his son was alive–
That he had abandoned him in his grief.
"You should be resting," he said, pouring a cup for his son first. He had done it a thousand times, an offering to a shrine. But that tea had fallen cold.
This one was picked up.
"Couldn't sleep." Lu Ten lowered himself to the ground beside him, the movement careful and slow, like an old man. "The earthbender snores."
"Toph." Iroh poured water over the leaves. "Yes. I imagine she does."
They sat with the small fire between them and the dark city beyond.
"Tea?”
“Please.”
Iroh poured the kettle, ignoring the shaking of his hands. His vision was blurry from tears. He blinked them away, but more took their place until a stream ran down his cheeks. His chest heaved.
Lu Ten exhaled slowly. "Dad—"
"I am trying," Iroh said carefully, "to hold two things at once. That you are here. And that you were not." He turned the cup in his hands. "I have not yet managed it."
Lu Ten nodded. He understood, Iroh thought. He had always been perceptive that way, even as a boy.
"Uncle Ozai knew," Lu Ten said.
Iroh closed his eyes, unable to stop his sorrow. He had dreamed of Lu Ten a hundred times–of coming home to see him in the palace, as if he’d always been there.
As if he had never died.
Once, he had had a dream. He had come to the palace and his son was crowned Fire Lord.
“Oh, my son, I dreamed you had died,” he had told Fire Lord Lu Ten, grief replaced with pride.
And Lu Ten had smiled. “It was a nightmare, but you are awake, and I am here.”
But then Iroh had awoken, and his son was still gone, and it was as if he’d lost him again.
It had taken weeks to pull himself from the shadows of the dream.
He had never imagined his brother was so evil that he’d let Lu Ten waste away in an Earth Kingdom prison to fulfill his own ambitions.
He should’ve considered it, after the Agni Kai.
“Dad, what happened? Why aren’t you the Fire Lord?”
Lu Ten turned to look at him. In the firelight his face was all hollows, his eyes too large, but they were his eyes. The same eyes Iroh had looked into on the day he was born and understood, for the first time, what it meant to love something more than his own life.
To love something that lived outside of you.
"When you died—" Iroh caught himself. Steadied his voice. "When I believed you had died, something in me decided the throne was ash. That the empire was ash. I had watched what the war cost and I had paid the highest price I knew how to pay, and I could not find it in myself to want any of it anymore." He paused. "Ozai knew that. He understood my grief better than I did, perhaps. He knew I would not fight him."
"So Zuko has been out here for three years," Lu Ten said. "Chasing the Avatar. Believing he could earn his way home." His voice had gone very quiet. "And it was never possible."
"No," Iroh said. "It was not."
“Does he know that?”
“No,” Iroh said.
"Were you there? At the Agni Kai?”
Iroh opened his eyes. He looked at his son — gaunt and hollow-eyed and watching him with an expression that was not accusation, but was close enough that it cost him something to meet it.
"Yes."
Lu Ten nodded slowly. He picked up his cup, found it empty, set it back down.
“So what now?”
“We wait,” Iroh said. “For three years, your cousin has only had one focus: find the Avatar. He did not expect to find you. If he survives, I don’t know what he’ll wake up to.” Iroh took a shuddering breath.
The bell finished its count. The silence that followed was very large.
“He is–he’s my son, too.” Iroh broke, burying his head in his hands. “I have failed you both.”
Lu Ten sat beside him, a ghost, or a sentinel.
Or just an abandoned son.
"I have made many mistakes," Iroh said. "With Zuko. With you. With all of it." He looked down at his hands — old hands, a general's hands, a tea shop keeper's hands. "I thought I was becoming wise. I think now that I was only hiding."
Lu Ten sighed. He knocked his shoulder against Iroh’s. An old, familiar thing.
“I love you, Dad.”
Iroh sobbed, leaning into his son’s arms.
They sat together in the dark, father and son, drinking tea while the city slept around them and inside the warehouse a feverish boy mumbled apologies to an empty room.
0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o
Toph felt the Fire Nation prince stir. It had been two days of fever. Sometimes, the prince’s heart had become so erratic, she wasn’t sure if it would just forget how to beat and stop entirely.
Toph couldn’t see the light change as the sky turned gray and the clouds tinged pink, but she knew the sounds of morning birds and the grind of a city waking up; the smell of baking bread as distant voices stirred and kettles whistled over fires.
Zuko surfaced slowly.
“Welcome back, Sparky.”
Zuko groaned.
“Sugar Queen’s been babysitting you,” she said. “She’s mad about it. But she’d be madder if she didn’t. So maybe don’t be a jerk.”
“Are you—are you a spirit? Are we in the Spirit World?"
The girl tipped her head back and laughed.
“I’m Toph! The greatest Earthbender in the world!”
This did not, Zuko felt, answer his question.
His stomach lurched.
“I don’t—” He didn’t finish. He turned and retched hard against the floor.
“Wow,” Toph said. “Again? Rough.”
Zuko sunk back to the floor.
He woke later, when the warehouse was heating with the late afternoon sun and the voices of bartering and the peals of children’s laughter filtered through an air laden by dust.
Toph was still there.
“I dreamed I saw my dead cousin,” Zuko told the spirit.
“He’s not dead. I made him and Uncle a room below. The Dai Li are poking around.”
“Oh,” Zuko said, and fell back asleep.
The next morning, Zuko awoke with the dawn. For the first time in days, his head was clear. The earth bending girl was there–not a spirit, Zuko remembered. He'd seen her before--she'd shown up out of nowhere in that collapsed village and fought Azula like she was an inconvenience. Her head lifted as he blinked. She raised a finger to her lips and tilted her head. Zuko rolled his head over to see the Avatar and the water tribe children hunched in a circle.
“We can’t stay here,” Katara whispered loudly.
“We can’t leave Zuko,” Aang said hesitantly.
“His cousin and uncle are here. They can take care of him. He’s not dead–we’ve done our part.”
“The Dai Li are looking for them. We can’t leave two hurt fire benders and an old man in Ba Sing Se alone,” Aang argued.
“It’s Zuko,” Katara hissed. “I know he helped you, but it doesn’t undo all the bad things he’s done!”
“Katara, you’ve been healing him for three straight days,” Sokka said. “I don’t like the guy, but leaving him is pretty much murder. Anyway, Lu Ten and Uncle seem pretty nice.”
“They’ve been through a lot,” Aang said. “I don’t think Zuko is a bad guy. He’s just—he just wants to be loved by his father. I don’t know what I would do if Gyatso had banished me and told me I had to do something to come home. Anything, I think.”
Zuko closed his eyes, ignoring the tears that gathered in the corners and fell to the earthen floor.
“Gyatso wouldn’t have done that because he loved you. Our dad loves us. Love doesn’t come with conditions!” Katara hissed.
There was a long silence.
“We’d do the same, Katara,” Sokka said dully. “If Dad said the only we could ever go back home was to steal something–to take something–we’d do it. We can’t pretend we wouldn’t.”
“And the Earth Kingdom kidnapped Lu Ten and told everyone he was dead!” Aang added.
Katara fell silent for a moment.
“But his dad doesn’t love him. If he did; he wouldn’t have banished him! He tried to kill him!” Katara hissed. “And if he doesn’t see that and would capture Aang, then we can’t side with him!” She argued.
Zuko sat up. His head was woozy and his lips were dry. The other kids started, looking guilty. The same expression he was sure he’d worn when he was caught stealing mochi from the galley on the Wani six months after his baishment. “You’re right. My father doesn’t love me. He never has.”
The kids stared at him. Across from him, Toph grinned.
“That’s–that’s probably not true, Zuko,” Aang said. “He’s your dad.”
“No, unfortunately,” Iroh said, coming up from the subterranean room Toph had made. Lu Ten was close behind him, already drifting to a sunbeam from a slatted beam. “My nephew speaks the truth.” His eyes met Zuko’s.
Zuko held his gaze a moment before looking away, his eyes watery.
“It is good to see you well, Zuko.” Iroh produced his tea pot. “Now that you have recovered, I believe it wise to discuss our next step.”
“How long was I out?”
“Three days,” Toph said.
“Have those people found us?” Zuko asked, running a hand through his mussed hair. He felt worn out, like he’d walked a thousand miles.
Like he’d spent three years on a hopeless mission, adrift in the ocean.
His father didn’t love him, but his crew had, in their way. And they were gone now; lost to Zhao’s insane mission. Zuko’s heart crumpled with old grief.
Iroh refilled his nephew's cup without being asked. Zuko clasped his hands around it, an old, familiar habit.
“The Dai Li,” Lu Ten said, falling to his knees beside Iroh. “If they’d found us, we’d know.” He looked grim, glancing at his father.
“We wanted to tell the Earth King about the war–” Aang began.
“There’s no use,” Lu Ten said. “I don’t know if he’s brain washed the way they do the Ju Dee’s, but Long Feng said he’s a puppet. He doesn’t even know there’s a war.”
“How do you know?” Aang asked, looking slightly horrified.
“Because he told me. Long Feng controls the city. He said that when the timing was right, he was going to do the same thing to me and help take over the Fire Nation.”
The group fell silent as Iroh poured tea, his mouth drawn into an unhappy line.
“How do we save him? The Earth King?”
“By leaving.” Lu Ten’s face was tight.
“We can’t—we can’t just leave!” Aang said. “We have to save them. We could take Appa straight to the palace and maybe show the king! Then he’d believe us!”
“Even if we got there, and even if we did, what’s to say he’d fight for us? Long Feng can brainwash anybody. Anybody. He could brainwash all of us. Then you’d be fighting for him and you wouldn’t even know.”
“Then why didn’t he brainwash you?” Sokka said. “How do we know you aren’t?”
Lu Ten shrugged miserably. “I think he enjoyed having me there, ignorant of what had happened in the world. Hoping.”
Iroh’s eyes were hooded as he poured tea into the cups. He’d not had enough for the group, so Toph had made some more from the floor.
Toph had her hand on the floor, feeling the heartbeats of her companions. She stiffened.
“Toph?” Aang said.
“There’s company,” She said, hushed.
Lu Ten went very still. Iroh carefully set down the kettle, his eyes watching the earthbender. “How many?”
“At least one. No–two. They move weird.”
Zuko clambered to his feet unsteadily after three days of fever. He leaned against the slatted structure of the old warehouse, peering out.
“No, Zuko,” Lu Ten, his voice tight. “Stay away from the walls. They can move through them like water.”
Zuko paused, turning a wide golden eye to Lu Ten. The other one remained in a scowl. Lu Ten's heart lurched. Zuko had been so young. And he still was, underneath all of it.
“Can they feel the ground like you do, Toph?” Lu Ten asked.
Toph shrugged. “I dunno. Probably not. Most seeing people don’t listen to the earth that way. But a third person just joined them. They’re talking, but I can’t hear what they’re saying.”
“We have to get out of here,” Lu Ten said, his gaunt face pale. His hands were shaking as he climbed to his feet.
Iroh caught his elbow. "Steady."
"Dad—"
"I know." Iroh's voice was very quiet. He looked around the room — all of them children trying to be brave. No, he thought, they were brave. His eyes settled on Toph. "Are they moving?"
"No," Toph said, her brow furrowed. "Just — waiting."
"Then we have a moment." Iroh released Lu Ten's arm and picked up the kettle with the particular unhurried deliberateness of a man who had learned that panic was the first thing that got you killed. "Sit down, Lu Ten."
"We don't have time—"
"We have exactly as much time as Long Feng decides to give us," Iroh said. "Which means running now tells him everything he needs to know about where we are going." He looked at Zuko. "Can you fight?"
Zuko straightened. "Yes."
"Can you actually fight," Iroh said, "or are you telling me what I want to hear?"
Zuko paused, responding to the steel in his uncle’s voice.
"I can fight," Zuko said, less certainly. "I can stand," he added finally.
Toph snorted. "Points for honesty."
"Appa," Sokka said suddenly. Everyone looked at him. "They know we have Appa. But they haven't moved because—" He frowned. "Because they want to see where we go."
Lu Ten looked at his father. Iroh looked back at him with an expression Lu Ten recognized from childhood — the Pai Sho face. Three moves ahead, showing nothing.
"Then we must give them something to follow," Iroh said quietly. "That is not us."