AN: I think my school has a plot bunny infestation... I don't own, you don't sue.
The Fire Nation was never really home to him. He never belonged, not like Azula and Father and even Mother, when she wanted to. He thinks now that if how you're raised is what shapes you, he must be more twisted than even Azula. He saw a piece of metal once, that had been heated unto glowing and dropped in the river. It had been warped and blackened and horribly blistered, and some days Zuko thinks he knows what it feels like.
He hates his birth land, hates it with a passion he has found for nothing else. He hates it for making him the way he is, for not being home, but most of all he hates it because he can't have it. He hates it because he can't stop loving it, the same way he hates and loves his father, who scarred him and cast him out but is still somehow Father. The same way he hates and loves the Avatar , for taunting him with what he cannot touch. Not the boy, Aang—he cannot see how anyone could hate the boy, though neither does he understand how anyone can love him. What he hates is the Avatar, the abstract power. He hates and loves and fears and scorns and wants the Avatar, for giving him hope only to dance it away again. He supposes he hates Aang, too, but that is mostly a matter of honor.
He hates all three of them, two for not knowing what they have and one for knowing he has nothing. He envies the monk, who can still be so happy and so carefree, when everything he loves is a hundred years gone. He envies the two water tribe siblings even more. They love each other, as Azula never loved him, and they have somewhere to go back to when duty lets them go. They have a home to return to, and Zuko hates that most of all.
Sometimes he gets tired of all the hate. Sometimes he is too drained to raise even anger against his enemies or his country. When all the rage is gone, all that remains is a sick sort of feeling that he doesn't put a name to, but kind of thinks might be despair. It isn't the absence of hope—hope makes it worse, like salty sweat in an open, bleeding wound. He thinks perhaps it will get better, if he can only answer the riddle, but he doesn't even know how to phrase the question.
He is at war within himself. Part of him is learning to let go, and that terrifies him. Part of him doesn't care about anything he's supposed to hate, and it feels like the ground has dropped away beneath him and he's still falling, though to what fate he can't say. Part of him is turning into someone he secretly almost kind of likes, but part of him is still the dutiful, arrogant son that Ozai and Ursa created and set loose, and the two pieces will not—can not—coexist. He does not want to kill this newborn side of himself, but he can't quite bring himself to throw away all he once might have been. So he can only watch as the two fight within him, and hope, though the very notion of hope burns the hands that hold onto it, oh-so-tightly.
In the night, when all is dark despair and hatred, and the world seems so very cold, he yearns for home, his mother singing softly as she tucks him into bed. Fire Nation was never really home to him, but it was the closest damn thing he had.
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