Of Tea and Sympathy
By xannychan
Disclaimer: Characters are not mine.
Short A/N: The season finale RUINED MY DAY. In this awesome, oh-my-god-I-hope-Zuko-crawls-into-a-ditch-and-DIES, I-am-so-in-love-with-this-show sort of way. Anyways, a bittersweet ending and some angst like always.
Warnings: Character death, slight spoilers for the FINALE.
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Iroh was just a simple old man, and old men can get away with a lot of things. Once, when he was being absent-minded and fairly senile—which wasn't often, he'll say, but he can't say it with absolute certainty—he called Zuko "son". And Zuko had not said anything, just lifted the corner of his lip in a way that said he was amused and not in the slightest uncomfortable with the term. So when Iroh wept in the metal prison of Ba Sing Se, he did not realize what he wailed.
My boy, my love, my child…
My son.
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Oceans apart, Zuko stared for a moment at his sister's hands, transfixed by blue electricity and the way her eyes glowed in its heat. "I'm sorry, father," he says aloud, but he isn't sure who he meant.
A moment later, in blinding pain and in the darkness that seeped into his vision after, he imagined a face. He wondered, as he drifted away, if they served tea in hell.
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As Azula killed her older brother, she wondered if there would come a day when the electricity in her blood would end up killing her. But when she got a good look at her brother's ashen face with dry eyes and no regrets, she realized, with startling lucidity, that she had died long ago. She was never Azula, but an Ozai with the power of the world at her fingertips at the cost of the world itself.
Irony, she also realized, was cruel.
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In the Fire Nation, as Ozai lay sleeping, the fire he had sent up into the heavens at the beginning of the generation came raining down. As the Nation went up into flames, Ozai slept and when he woke up, the Fire Nation was nothing more than a Fire Desert—his reward from Agni for Ozai's divine creation of Hell on earth. A year and a half later, he was overthrown and sentenced to death by the sword. In his last moments, he wondered why the scent of burning metal tasted like blood.
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In the end, life comes from death and creation from destruction. And in the many twists of life, an old man who turned down the position years before became a leader in the repairing of the world, hand in hand with a couple of ragtag, jaded teenagers who saw and knew too much, much like the old man himself. He still loved tea, and when he looked at Azula's ashes, he wondered what may have become of her if she had drank tea with him a little more often. And as he rebuilt the world with his bare, aging hands, he imagines that Zuko stands beside him, that small quirk of his lip that said "Father, I am always here" there, just as he remembers it.As for his brother—well, Ozai was getting old, and while old men can get away with a lot of things, there are simply times when fire must burn itself out, before water can douse it or earth can smother it or air can blow it out.
This time, Iroh died before his children instead of they before him.