Scar or No Scar
Disclaimer: I do not own Avatar: the Last Airbender, or any of its characters.
"My offer still stands, you know."
"What?" Zuko, Fire Lord, spun from his quiet contemplation. Concealed in one hand he called up a palmful of fire, ready to hurl, but then checked it when he saw who the unexpected intruder was. Standing at the entrance to what had once been the Fire Nation Royal Family's private garden was Katara.
The young woman was dressed in her usual shades of blue, as befit a waterbender, but as a nod to the new peace between the nations her clothing was in the elaborate style of the Fire Nation. She stood out like a sore thumb among all the browns, reds and golds of the Fire Palace, but Zuko privately thought the vivid contrast was welcome.
He closed his fist hastily over the fire, hoping that in his long-sleeved robe Katara hadn't seen it.
She crossed her arms. "You weren't really going to burn me, were you? Even after all this time?"
"You caught me," Zuko sighed. "It's been weeks since the peace was signed, and my reflexes still say 'burn first, apologize later.'" He paused. "I'm apologizing."
"You didn't actually burn me, but apology still accepted."
There was a silence as Katara came up beside him to admire the quiet pond in the center of the garden. Finally, Zuko prompted, "What offer?"
Katara turned. The look in her blue eyes was now unreadable. "Remember when we were in Ba Sing Se?"
"Last week? When we all met at Uncle's tea shop?" He racked his brain, trying to think if she had offered him anything more consequential than a snack.
"No." She drew a slow breath, kneeling to trail a finger in the pond. "When we were in the crystal prison."
Zuko's hand immediately flew to the scar that covered most of the left side of his face. Now he knew exactly what she meant. They had been tossed into the same cell, captured and imprisoned for trying to warn the Earth King of the Fire Nation's coup. "You said my face was the face you pictured when you saw the enemy."
Katara winced. He could see it in the way her shoulders tightened, even though her back was to him. Even through the layers of embroidered cloth.
"You also offered to use your water to heal my scar," Zuko added hastily, before either of them could start to get angry at the memories of the hatred and contempt they'd held for each other. He rubbed the pitted edge of the scar, about midway down his cheek. "Is that the offer you meant?"
She nodded. She stayed kneeling, one finger still tracing designs in the pond's water.
"I thought you used that special water healing Aang after Azula attacked." Zuko clenched his fists against the rising anger at himself. His foolishness had brought that hurt on his friend—in his desire to return home and regain his rightful place at home in the Fire Nation, he had betrayed the Avatar and his friends. Including Katara. It had taken her a long time to forgive him for that.
Now Katara did turn, and stand to face him. "Don't misunderstand. I don't see you as the enemy anymore. Not even with the scar." She clenched her own fists. "I still get angry when I think about that day. But I've been thinking. I owe you more than I can ever repay for taking Azula's lightning for me. So I thought I'd offer you a chance at a clean slate. I used that bottle of water on Aang, that's true, but I'm sure I could get more if I returned to visit the Northern Water Tribe. What I want to know is, do you want me to try?"
It was Zuko's turn to look away, trying to hide the emotions battling within him. Katara seemed to instinctively understand. She did not demand an answer, but waited with the quiet patience of the pool behind her. A change from her usually tempestuous encounters with the young Fire Lord.
Still dazed, Zuko walked over to a bench set nearby for admiring the garden. Normally he rarely touched the blemished part of his face, but now he could feel his fingers still absently running up and down the line that separated burned flesh from normal.
What would it be like to be free of it? To look in the mirror and have his face whole again?
He glanced up to find Katara still standing where he had left her. She was watching him, her expression now troubled. She looked like she was about to speak. To forestall it, Zuko patted the bench beside him in an invitation. Katara crossed the space between them in a few steps. She sat beside him.
"Zuko, I'm sorry. If I've—"
He waved a hand. She bit her lip, but she still looked worried. That she was so concerned she'd offended him with her offer touched him in a place he rarely acknowledged. Normally she had no qualms about insulting him.
"Do you know how I got it?" he asked. He kept his eyes on the rippling surface of the pond, though he could still see her out of the very corner of his eye. He knew he'd never told the story. Not to anyone. Before his encounters with the Avatar, anyone who mattered already knew. If someone else had informed Aang, Katara, and the others of their little group since then, then that was something he couldn't control. He couldn't exactly muzzle the whole Fire Nation to keep the tale of their leader's past humiliation quiet.
To his surprise, Katara shook her head. "No. I think Aang might have asked your uncle, but if he did, he didn't tell me about it." She paused. "I always assumed it was an accident of some kind. Something you picked up in firebending training. You did once mention that fire is dangerous and wild."
"Give me credit for a little skill," Zuko snorted, his usual black humor returning unbidden. "I was never that clumsy."
"Then it wasn't an accident?" He could hear her horror. "Who would do such a thing?" Now there was a note of anger in her voice. Oddly, it brought Zuko ever so slightly out of his dark mood. Her indignation was on his behalf. It was sort of nice to know she cared that much.
"You should count yourself lucky you didn't grow up in a family like mine."
"Azula?" she guessed. He shook his head.
"The Fire Lord?" she gasped. "Your own father? Oh, Zuko!" She put a hand on his shoulder.
He shook her off to stand up, clasping his hands behind his back. "Why did you think I was banished to a pointless search for the Avatar in the first place?" he demanded, though his anger wasn't with her. "Fire Lord Ozai tolerated no disrespect. Not even from his own heir."
"What did you do?"
"I was thirteen, and stupid. I spoke when I shouldn't have. And I was punished for it."
She was quiet for a moment. Then she came to stand beside him, again just at the edge of his vision. He sensed a shift of blue cloth that meant she'd turned to face him. "I think there's more to it than that."
"There's not."
"What did you say? What could you possibly have said that would make your father hurt and disinherit his own flesh and blood?"
"You won't let it go, will you? All right, fine," he spat. He spun to face her, and he could feel the stormclouds on the good part of his face as he remembered that day. "I had begged Uncle to let me into the war chamber. He made me promise to keep quiet. One of the older generals was discussing a new strategy—sending brand-new recruits to the front lines as a distraction to Earth Kingdom warriors. I—I couldn't—" He faltered and looked away. "I couldn't stop myself. In front of everyone I shouted at him, that he couldn't use our own men that way.
"He challenged me for insult. Agni Kai. I accepted—even at thirteen I knew I could beat a decrepit old fossil like him. But on the day of the fight, when I turned around, it was…it was…" He trailed away.
Katara said nothing. She was going to make him say it.
"It was my f—Fire Lord Ozai," he finally said, and the words were like poison between his teeth. "When I saw it was him, I begged his forgiveness for the insult. But he kept insisting I fight him. I refused. I knew if I did he wouldn't hold back—I saw it in his face. He was ready to kill me. But I wasn't ready to kill him. All that flashed through my mind at that moment was that I wasn't ready to be Fire Lord."
He laughed, surprised at the almost choking noise that escaped him. "Pretty stupid, huh? As if I could win. So I wouldn't fight, and he called me weak. And then he put his hand—" He brought his own hand up to cover the scar, as if feeling its pitted surface now could wash away the lingering sensation of his own flesh melting.
"I—I don't remember much after that. Except the pain. The next thing I knew, I was waking up in the infirmary. Uncle Iroh was there. He never left my side, but he refused to tell me my fate until he judged I was strong enough to hear it. Banishment was almost as bad as being burned again. Knowing I wasn't welcome in my own home, that I'd never take up the task I believed was my birthright, realizing my father didn't want me, seeing the hideous distortion in the mirror that was now my face…I'd lost everything. Everything."
It was only then he realized that there were tears on his face. His bad eye was leaking all over the rippled lava field that was his left cheek. He tried vainly to brush the wetness away before Katara noticed, and thought him as weak as Ozai had once claimed.
"Recently, I've come to suspect Uncle might have gotten a Water Tribe healer to save my eye," he commented, trying to bring the topic around to something less painful. "It never occurred to me to wonder how, despite the fact that the scarring is worst around my eye, I can still see out of it. And I never realized until this final battle of the war how far Uncle's reach of allies stretched. I wouldn't put it past him to have a Water Tribe friend smuggled into the Fire Nation palace itself to heal the disgraced Prince."
"I wouldn't put it past him, either," Katara said, speaking at last. "I can check, if you want." Her hand came up to very gently touch what remained of his eyelid. Zuko did not protest. Instead, he bowed his head slightly to her care and closed his eyes. Her fingers were cool, like the water of the pond she had been dipping them in earlier. He could feel that slight chill of her waterbending reach beyond the lid to brush his eye.
"You're right," she said after a moment. "I don't think there's any other way you could still use that eye. Everything around it is badly scarred, but the eye itself is hardly damaged, and most of that is from straining to move within the scar tissue. I can fix that so it won't build up over time. Hold still." Her voice was commanding now, that of healer to patient.
This time the feeling of coolness circled his eye completely. It was like pouring water on slightly smoldering ashes—the dull burning that constantly surrounded that eye vanished in an instant.
He could feel when she was finished. Instead of taking her hand away, however, she brushed her fingertips down his cheek.
Zuko's eyes flew open. He ignored for the moment the sensation of being able to use his left eye far better than ever before in the past four years. Instead he focused on Katara, who was examining the slight sparkle of water on her fingertips.
His tears.
"I'm glad you can produce water," she commented before he could say anything. "I sometimes wondered if you were made of nothing but fire."
"I am a firebender," he pointed out, trying to hide his shame.
"But you're tempered in a way most firebenders aren't," she said sagely. "Most firebenders don't know what it is to feel helpless."
She'd struck him dumb. He stared at her, mouth slightly agape. "How—" he whispered. He'd fought constant helplessness, and despair, and rage, for nearly three years before the Avatar appeared in the world again.
"How else could you feel, after you were banished for something you couldn't help?" asked Katara. She smiled, a little wryly, and crossed her arms over her chest. "Zuko, I never really realized until just now how much you care about other people. Not just your friends, either. You bury it well, but you do."
"I—"
"You got banished for speaking for your people, and refusing to use them as if they meant nothing," Katara continued. "From what I know of Ozai, he was all about treating people like pawns in a chess game, right? He couldn't have his heir, the one who would someday replace him as Fire Lord, thinking of people as people, now could he?
"Zuko, whether you realize it or not, you were dangerous to him. Better to banish or kill you, and call you weak, than risk an empathetic Fire Lord who might not see the people under him, or worse, his enemies, as faceless. Safer to make Azula the heir; she thinks just like him."
Zuko's mind whirled. Could what Katara was saying possibly be true? Could Ozai have banished and maimed him not because he was disappointed with his son's weakness, but because Zuko at thirteen had become a threat?
"But you can't help but see people as fellow human beings, with lives and thoughts of their own, can you? That's something you have in common with Aang. He values everyone individually, and it doesn't matter who they are or what nation they belong to. As long as they're not actively trying to kill him or hurt his friends, he'll fight for anyone."
Zuko recalled waking up once to Aang's voice. Some of my friends were from the Fire Nation… And how many times in the first few months after Aang's return had the Avatar saved Zuko's life, even though Zuko had been planning on capturing him for his own selfish ends?
Then something else occurred to him.
"If what you say is true, then why would Ozai accept me back, then? After Ba Sing Se…" Then he answered his own question. "I had learned to be selfish in the three years I was gone. I had learned to be ruthless, to do whatever was necessary to reach my goals. I could stab people in the back, even my uncle, the person who cared about me most in the world. Ozai knew that. I was useful to him then, wasn't I?" Zuko's lip curled. "That's what he meant when he said he was proud of me."
"You showed every sign of being his true son." Katara's voice was cold, though it was still tinged with sympathy. She wasn't letting him off the hook.
Zuko shuddered. His hand went up to touch his scar again. How close he had come to becoming the spitting image of his father. Once, that had been his greatest goal. Now he found the idea repugnant.
"Why don't you hate me?" he asked miserably.
"You said it yourself, once: you're not that person anymore. Oh, you can still be plenty selfish, and pretty ruthless if you get pushed, but underneath, you still care. Ozai wasn't able to burn that out of you." She swallowed, and smiled at him a little shyly. "You've more than proved that."
The way she said it reminded him of his other scar; the more recently acquired one. He touched his chest, knowing what was underneath. Because of Katara's quick healing, the mark of Azula's lightning was just a shiny pink patch of hairless skin, nothing like the red rippled and bubbled flesh of his face.
"You saved me, Zuko. Now I want to do something for you. If you want me to heal your scar and get rid of the daily reminder of what the Fire Lord did to you, I'll do whatever it takes. I promise."
Something about what she said struck Zuko. The daily reminder… He bent over slightly to peer into the quiet water of the pond. His own face stared back at him. One side smooth and pale, able to smile and frown and express all range of emotion. The other side twisted and red, fixed in a permanent scowl. When he had first seen the scar while still dizzy and groggy with the pain of it, he had nearly passed out. It had taken him at least a year to face a mirror without his stomach lurching. Then, he would have done anything to have his old face back, and his old life with it. But now?
He shook his head. "No, Katara."
She raised an eyebrow. "Why not?"
"I used to believe this scar was the symbol of my disgrace. That everyone in the Fire Nation would look at it, and know what Ozai did to me. But you've given me cause to think it might be the opposite: this face is a symbol of my honor. I want to keep it, to remind me that the reason I got it was because I care, deeply, about what happens to our world." He grinned fiercely. "And that that caring was something my father just might have found threatening. That's enough reason for me to keep it the way it is."
"Not to mention you're really scary when you smile like that," Katara commented.
He frowned and turned to her. "Am I that scary?"
"No," she said playfully. "Not to anyone who knows you well, anyway. To us, you're just Zuko, scar or no scar. Someone who's had his butt kicked by all of us, on several occasions. Not scary at all."
Zuko drew himself up to his tallest. "Are you implying the Fire Lord concedes defeat to anyone?"
"Of course. How many times have we fought and I won? Let's see…" She started counting on her fingers.
"That's too many," he protested the moment she put up the first finger.
"Selective memory apparently comes with being Fire Lord," she teased, still counting.
"OK, really, that's way too many," he said when she reached five and showed no signs of stopping. "I don't specifically remember more than four. And that's being generous."
"I was counting the one you're going to get the next time we fight."
"Is that a challenge, Katara of the Southern Water Tribe?"
"Maybe, Fire Lord Zuko."
He grinned at her, feeling the scar on his face twist as it tried to respond. "The practice courts. Fifteen minutes to change."
"You're on." Katara was already starting for the garden entrance. "It will be good to get out of these things. I don't know how you people put up with all the layers."
He let her get ahead of him, stealing one last glance at his face in the pond before he left to take off his heavy Fire Lord garb and change into battle clothes. He smiled a little at his reflection, then glanced at Katara's retreating back. Her simple, honest words still echoed a little in his head.
To us, you're just Zuko. Scar or no scar.
"I'll try and remember that, Katara."
Author's Note: This is my first Last Airbender fic. It's not my usual fandom, but something about the relationship between Zuko and Katara caught my attention and has been nagging at me for awhile. I like them as a couple, but feel free to interpret this story as just a powerful friendship, too. The characters are uncertain about it, so that uncertainty came through. I deliberately left it ambiguous.
Zuko surprised me as a character from the beginning of the series. You rarely see someone so conflicted in an animated series-usually the characters are black and white. I liked watching him grow from a whiny teenager into an adult who's ready to take responsibility. And he has likable qualities almost from the beginning, even when he's billed as the Season 1 villain. It struck me after watching "The Storm" that his banishment came about because he cared too much about others, and he learned from his banishment that caring so deeply was a bad thing. It takes him some time to grow up and sort out his real priorities, but I think his experiences will make him a way better Fire Lord than even he expects. He'll still need that ruthlessness and tenacity to bring his country under control. And as Katara points out, it doesn't hurt that he looks pretty scary to people that don't know him well.
Hope you enjoyed,
SamoaPhoenix9