= The Dragon in Winter =
"Are they to your liking, sir?"
Iroh wrinkles his nose, and the pince-nez perched precariously there tumbles off. Behind him, hovering (as she does) Jin giggles.
Iroh rubs his broad nose ruefully. A peasants nose, his brother had sometimes called it. "I am afraid," he says, mock-regretfully, "that this face is not suited for the latest styles, no matter how they may flatter the Earth King."
Jin says, "Oh, I'm sure that once you get them fitted, they'll stay on just fine..."
With a chuckle, Iroh waves away the crouching attendant bearing a silk pillow loaded with ten varieties of the damnable nose-pinchers. "Just show me some ordinary spectacles, if you please," he says to the glass-seller, who inclines his head. To Jin, he continues, "No, my dear. I'm sure they would look quite flattering, but my days of worrying about style are well behind me." The girl opens her mouth to say something, then pauses and closes it with a strange look on her face.
Soon, Iroh has selected a pair of suitably conservative spectacles; his one concession to fashion is allowing himself to be talked into wire frames, but no matter how well-constructed any pair of glasses will always look a little out of place and awkward; its just the shape of his head.
"Do I really look so terrible in them?" He asks, his lips quirked in a smile, as they wait for the lenses to be ground and fitted for him.
"No, it's just..." Jin pauses, and won't meet his eyes. "You look older in them is all," she says quietly.
* * *
He is not, he knows, so old as all that. He turned sixty-four half a year ago, alone in the wastes of the central Earth Kingdom, following his nephew; the only celebration, spending his last coin on a tiny stone teapot. This is not terribly ancient, not in his family. His father and grandfather lived near enough to a century as made no nevermind.
But Iroh is not them.
Iroh steps out into rain, at once pleased and displeased; pleased because with his new spectacles, he can see clearly for the first time in weeks. Months, truthfully, but it is only recently he could allow his eyes to weaken. Displeased because it is a mean, wet, gray day, full of chill fog and wetness, not lovely to behold. Late Autumn in Ba Sing Se.
When he comments on this, Jin says guilelessly, "If we hadn't known the weather would keep our custom inside, I would never have been able to get you out of the shop, General." She carries the case with the three spare glasses tucked safely inside her green robes as she helps him up into the carriage.
* * *
He would like Jin to stop calling him that, even in jest, but he doesn't SAY it. He doesn't know what he'd do without her, now.
Iroh had expected to find the Jasmine Dragon long gone; the building was valuable real estate, surrounded by the other premiere eateries and drinkeries of the upper ring, and his erstwhile patron had not struck him as the type to allow his investments to lie fallow.
So he had been surprised when, the day after the comet (the smell of soot still clining to his lotus robes) he had hauled his stiffening limbs across the threshold and found his favorite cup, the paper-thin bone china with just a little blue around the rim and a chip in the base, waiting there steaming.
He had taken it from Jin's hands, and after a small sip, had told her, "It's good." And from the kitchen window Pao, who had been paying attention after all, visibly relaxed at the praise.
* * *
The first thing he does after they return is bustle into his kitchen, as best as he's able, and he learns that lots of steam and a pair of spectacles don't mix well, and that setting them aside is a good way for Pao to (almost) place a heavy tray directly atop them.
"You should cut a silk cord for them, Mushi," he says, hurriedly moving from pot to pot, making careful adjustments. "So you can wear them around your neck like scribes and scholars do."
"Ah, a good idea, my friend. I think we have- AH!" Iroh starts for the cabinet where they keep the odds and ends before remembering, no, they have a bolt in the back room, he can cut from THAT, but he'll need scissors, and confused by trying to change directions three times in under a second his feet betray themselves and throw him first onto a table in a clatter of crockery and thence to the floor.
Iroh bites his lip to keep from crying out, and then feels suddenly foolish; is he a five-year-old, attmpting to be brave in front of his father? Nobody else is in the room but Pao.
Pao, who looks at him with the same strange look as Jin had, and does not help him to his feet; instead, he reaches into the shadow behind the kitchen door, and pulls out the ivory-headed, elegantly understated cane propped there.
When Iroh regains his balance, Pao proffers it wordlessly. Iroh stares at it for a heartbeat, two, four... then sighs and takes it.
"Pay attention to your brewing, Pao," he says sternly, leaning on the carved length of old oak. "I will be on the veranda."
"Yes, Mushi," Pao says, obediently.
* * *
Jin had had it carved to fit his hand...
And other things besides. The cane had come after the fifth or sixth stumble or hesitation in as many days.
The shoes with the special supports, carved with holy characters which would, the cobbler had assured Jin (and Jin had sincerely assured him) ensure that his passage over the land would be blessed by the earth spirits.
When the stiffness brought on by the comet had still failed to fade months later, he had woken to find jars of liniment with instructions for their use in her sprawling, freewheeling hand. He had sighed, and thanked her, and then immediatly hired a calligraphy tutor. That had, later on, led somewhat indirectly to the current days outing... ('This is not the character for tea.' 'Well, I mean, if you sort of squint at it...' 'I squint enough as it is.' 'You're ABSOLUTELY right, General. I've got a list of fine glassmakers shops here somewhere...').
* * *
Iroh eases himself down onto his favorite chair, the wicker one with the extra cushions, and sighs contentedly, watching the rain spatter dirtily on the paving stones of the square and his customers come and go. Some minutes later, Jin appears with a blanket, and slides the warming pan underneath his chair; then she sits in her own chair, a slim and arcing construction of feathery iron, and begins quietly doing the accounts, occasionally asking a question about what latest frivolity Iroh has spent their petty cash on THIS month.
Iroh smiles. "You didn't complain so much when it was your turn," he chides gently, and Jin blushes and fingers her braids, now with strings of pearls threaded through them.
Jin pouts. "I wish you wouldn't make me wear them all the time," she says. "You let PAO keep that enormous, tacky hat you bought him in the closet for special occasions. These are-"
"-an appropriate daily decoration for a modest young woman of means," he says firmly. "And they make me happy."
"Well then, by all means, General."
Iroh leans back and smiles his genial, pleased smile, and resumes his people-watching.
Occasionally he coughs discreetly into a red square of silk.
* * *
The days grow shorter, colder, and wetter; and joints and muscles that less than a year earlier accomodated the icy wastes with no complaint suddenly swell painfully.
Sometimes, when Pao is in the kitchen and Jin is at the market and he just needs to... just needs to get off his feet for a few minutes, just needs to REST... 'Zuko', a small voice inside him says, at those moments. 'HE did this to you.' And it is not wrong. Iroh made of his life a burnt offering to his nephew; the fuel of years, decades maybe, all going forth in a matter of months. A raft in the northern ice oceans, cooking fish in his bare hands; the grinding poverty of a war refugee, sleeping rough and counting himself lucky if he ate once a day; the prison, where he forced his body into a condition it hadn't been in for a quarter of a century and which it had no business being in now.
And the final last, desperate flameout; sucking deep of the comet, a drunk on one last bender, feeling it crisping his soul from the inside out even as he rode it to his last triumph. It had been good, so good, the way he'd remembered it from the old days, when young Prince Iroh had known in his SOUL what was right, had SEARED with it, and made that flame REAL... he'd been sick afterwards, bent over and retching in a small alcove just across the threshold of the palace; Bumi had pretended not to notice.
Iroh has fulfilled his destiny, and now one of the two inevitable things is reminding him that payments deferred are coming due.
* * *
Jin urges him to return to the Fire Nation. His physicians say the same thing. "Winter is coming," they caution him, "and your fiery blood may not find Ba Sing Se so congenial when you have to break the ice in your washbasin every morning. The air and sun of your homeland are good for harmonious living."
But his old home is gone now. Some when they burned his mother, more when they burned his wife, his son, his father, when his brother stole his throne ('When you LET him take it,' he hears Prince Iroh whisper to him, but Prince Iroh turned to ash long ago as well) and the last burning, when Ozai laid hands on Zuko.
He allows the physicians to adjust his diet; he recalls his father, who had subsisted for the last twenty years of his life on a precise regimen of water, rice, and greens, with fish once every moon's turn, and feels that he can emulate him, honor him, in this small way. He will not be preforming the rites at Azulons ancestor shrine in the manner prescribed, after all.
Iroh knows that he will never go back to the Fire Nation. Could not bear it, truly. Ba Sing Se is where he built the only life that he could ever call truly his, and though he still answers to the name, he knows that after the comet, General Iroh walked to join Prince Iroh on the pyre as well, and Mushi lit it.
Perhaps he will see if he can weather a winter in this city, and see the cherry blossoms in the spring; his nephew and his nephews friends will visit him, and he will continue to play pai sho every day. In time there will be grand-nephews, and god-children, as well. If the spirits are truly kind... his brother and his niece yet live, and maybe... well. Leave it at the maybe.
Or perhaps one day in the bleak gray months after the solstice Jin will have to write Zuko a letter.