The Thin but Opaque Facade
Zuko was sure that his uncle would be utterly impossible to live with if the old man ever found out about this. He and Aang had just finished their ordeal with the dragons and Aang was blissfully ignorant of what exactly that meant. Sure it meant that he would be learning fire-bending and that was really all the boy cared about but it had also awakened a thing long dormant in his teenaged teacher. Iroh had always told Zuko that he would need to embrace everything about himself to truly master fire-bending and now that the dragons had confirmed it his uncle would be unbearably smug.
Zuko felt his reawakened power shift inside him as it tried to resettle itself inside him. It wasn't happening easily accompanied once more as it was by a power he'd long denied himself.
The group the Avatar traveled with was under the naïve belief that the fire nation was anything other than a country ruled by a warlord. Despite how their stay in the fire nation had shown them a very organized and happy group of people, the ruling class with the generals turned nobles only respected strength and those shown to not posses it were quickly gotten rid of. Zuko had been banished for talking back to the Fire Lord; he had been degraded as weak and unskilled only after his departure.
Zuko was degraded for being weak because he refused to accept his strength. Hundreds of years of marrying the strongest fire benders together had resulted in very powerful fire benders among the ruling class but it had also generated some very strange traits. In his sister it had gifted her the ability to focus her bending into lightning at a very young age, something previous fire benders took decades to master. He, however, had gotten the lion's share of the power not his sister as so many assumed.
When he was young his ability had manifested unexpectedly and he'd badly burned a servant girl who'd thrown herself in front of his mother to take the blast meant for her. The event had scarred him for life and in fear of hurting his beloved mother again he had repressed his strength. Her caring had left an impression on him. She deeply loved him and he strove, for the rest of the time he'd had her around and even still, to be worthy of her love.
Years later some clever bending tutor realized that despite his prodigious aptitude for bending that Zuko was still holding something back and an investigation led back to his mother. Too young to know what not to say, he had accidentally led them to the reason for his holding back and thereby to his mother. She was banished, or executed he never found out, and his teachers began pushing him ever harder to unleash the power inside him.
What they had failed to do in years of consecutive beatings labeled training the Avatar had managed in an hour by accident. Zuko had to smirk a little at how irritated they would be about that.
The smirk died a quick death as he felt the power shift inside him again. He recalled the dragon's words spoken directly into his mind, kept secret from Aang [privately Zuko thought Aang had heard them but didn't consciously understand them], about what to do about the power. He would need to do something soon but he was afraid. He knew that it would have to be done before they got back so he wouldn't hurt anyone. He hoped he would be okay.
--
He'd been successful, which was a good thing he supposed, but it came with a great many things he thought he could have gone his entire life without knowing or using.
His sister had inherited prodigious natural talent and a precise control over fire that living beings weren't meant to hold. He had been born as dragon-fire given human shape. Along with the inhuman power it gave his fire-bending it also came with dragon-like traits and an utterly inhuman subconscious.
In truth he was more like a dragon stuck in a human body than he was a human with a dragon's talents.
If that was the case, and he thought it was, he'd somehow found himself totally by accident in the absolute best company for someone like him. He was surrounded by people who weren't people at all. He actually imagined that Toph and Katara had been laughing a little at him before he'd unleashed his inner-self. It now took more effort to see them in their human guises than to see their self-images projected superimposed on themselves in each other's mind's eye.
Toph was one of the moles trapped in a tiny human body; he thought that would be incredibly disconcerting. She must know that she should be five times her current size and 20 or 30 times her current weight. He had some issues with his own instincts about what size he should be [never mind that he could swear he was missing three limbs]. He also thought that her roughened and callused [but still magnitudes smaller] hands and dirty, chipped, and broken fingernails were a very poor substitute for the two-and-a-half meter long digging claws that should be there. Even the fact that the animals were normally blind had almost no impact due to having already previously lost that particular advantage in her human guise.
Katara was an icicle fish. A relatively human-sized fish thought to be extinct that had existed in two varieties around the water tribes. It looked like a bizarre cross between a swordfish, narwhal, and walrus: It was scaled like a typical fish. It was colored pure snow white with blue iridescent edges to the scales. It had a sail-like dorsal fin that could raise or lower on curved bone-like spines, two sets of pectoral fins likewise appearing as webbed spines that it used for water-bending delicate or precise corrections in course, a caudal fin that laid horizontal and resembled a wale's fluke more than a typical vertical fish's fin that it used for extreme [though inexact] power assisted by water-bending. It had three spikes on its head: the longest pointed directly forward, and extension of the skull like a swordfish and unlike the common ice structure it had been named for it was actually quite smooth with no ripples or bumps, the other two spikes were mirrored across the dorsal plane and were protrusions from the lower jaw that extended down, out, and back; they looked like walrus tusks in profile but were actually sharp like blades. It was a rather vicious looking fish and had long been heralded as the fastest fish ever known to exist. Zuko had been understandably surprised to learn that the mild-mannered girl was the human incarnation of a perfected and uncontested hunter of the seas. He reflected that her mild disposition stemmed from the instinctual feeling of superiority; she didn't need to flaunt her power and the best hunters knew to keep their prey unafraid of them and even to shepherd them to ensure a future food supply. Not that she thought of her friends as food but being the uncontested predator for millennia had worn away the instinct to prove dominant to other predators. This made her very easy to understand for Zuko who experienced a similar feeling as a dragon but he wondered at how she stayed sane when her instincts had to be screaming at her that she was in the wrong environment. He didn't even want to contemplate what it might feel like for her to wake up confused and think she was suffocating because she wasn't underwater.
Zuko saw himself as a golden dragon with red tinting. He looked like a serpent had grown four short clawed legs almost unreasonably far behind his head. Added to this were the two wings that had sprouted just behind and above the forelegs looking very bat-like being structured of bone finger-like spines with very thin hide webbing between them. His tail tip had somehow sprouted black hair the black hair continued up along his spine to his head and had additionally sprouted out of the elbows on his forelegs and in a line along the calf of his rear legs. The hair covered his eye ridges like some ultra-thick eyebrows and filled out over the back of his head and even followed the line of his jaw down until just after where it curved sharply forward. He knew that his image would eventually develop a chin beard with age but for now he only had the thick fleshy whiskers that curved over his nostrils and flowed back along his head to wave freely in the wind like flexible catfish whiskers. His mouth was full of teeth and he was privately especially proud of his tusks that extended surprisingly far for one so young.
His animal self was the thing that was capable of seeing the truth of someone and he assumed that it allowed Katara and Toph something similar, or whatever passed for sight in Toph. It was therefore noticeable to both Aang and Sokka when he suddenly couldn't look at them for very long and tended to have conversations with them with his eyes averted.
Sokka was not a bender but that didn't mean he wasn't just as much a façade in appearance as the others. Worse, because he hadn't accepted or didn't know his true nature yet, his image fluctuated and flickered randomly. From what Zuko could tell, Sokka was something very, very angry. Had he known what they were he might have described the animal as a hellish combination of grizzly bear, wolverine, saber-tooth tiger and porcupine. It was big and seemed to be composed entirely of teeth, claws, spines and armor. It had gotten much more clear after he'd had sword training and Zuko knew it would only be a matter of time before Sokka found and accepted the bear in his meditations.
Aang he decided was just painful to look at. The boy knew what he was and that really didn't help. He formed, dissipated and reformed to take the appearance of all his past incarnations and when those weren't quite sufficient to give Zuko a headache the twelve-year-old started expressing the appearance of all the elements in their most pure forms. Aang was constructed in opposites and contradictions. He was both twelve and eternal; fire and water and air and earth, all at the same time; ignorant and wise; adult and child. The only thing that appeared constant were the eyes. Zuko fully believed now that a person's eyes were the windows to their soul. Even the things that did not naturally have eyes still possessed Aang's eyes when he was expressing them. All these contradictions explained to Zuko perfectly how Aang could miss the obvious, not have a clue, willfully deny the truth, and then turn around and comment on something so hidden that the person had hid it from themselves.
With people like these around, Zuko nearly pitied the Fire Lord… nearly.
AN: this isn't really supposed to be good it was just a plot bunny that burrowed into my head and became cancerous. I couldn't concentrate on any of my other stuff and it needed to get out. So... that means I don't really need any feedback [if you want to comment please be my guest] and any comments about timeline or other inaccuracies will be totally disregarded as I don't intend to ever revisit either this story or this fandom.
I was watching Avatar episodes online and it irritated me that Zuko is portrayed as weak. This strikes me as wrong because he ended up with Iroh training him and I don't believe a former general of his power would bother with someone untalented. It also struck me that with the oddness of the character personalities that it could only be fate pushing them together as otherwise this group would probably explode. So, because it is ordained by fate there must be a reason and I refuse to accept that the reason is 'just because'.
thankfully the bunny was exorcised with just this much instead of demanding to be finished but in synopsis this was going to follow some events that would have 1. Sokka accept his true nature 2. Aang give up his childish antics and start acting like the Avatar [god only knows how old he is cumulatively and if he can talk to former avatars he should be able to remember his past lives] 3. have a suitably dramatic final battle sequence where Aang would take on what amounts to most of the fire nation army while Toph, Sokka, and Katara back him up/ take out the rest. all of this would cumulate in Zuko transforming into a dragon and destroying the commet. 4. it would conclude that the power of the avatar was to bring out the best of people. i would probably do this by having Aang work the rest of his friends through their transformations. There was tentatively going to be an epilogue about how the Avatar evolved from a physical person into a concept and Aang would fade from the physical world. his friends would gather the remainder of their respective species and also fade into legend as symbols of their prevailing ideal character traits [taking the good as opposed to the bad: passion for Zuko instead of rage]. Appa would gather the sky bison and also fade and with their departure bending would slowly decrease and finally there would be no more benders implying that the world of the avatar was just a fictional past for Asia.
all in all this was wanted to explore the possibility that the avatar isn't the direct hero. everyone else has him fighting and solving this personally but what if he just inspires people to help themselves?
there was of course the usual pairing issues that cropped up when the bunny demanded romance and while I'm normally a fan of Zuko/Katara Toph/Aang and Suki/Sokka i thought that making them different species of animals representing the individual bending elements would pretty effectively kill any possible romance. most people wouldn't fall in love with another species so it stands to sense that other species don't fall in love with different species.
Well there you have it for what it's worth [i'm guessing not much] but like I said the bunny was cancerous and I had to operate