He looked just like her, although, it has been a very long time since someone had commented on it. Not many remember what she looked like, anyway. He had her wide nose and shorter stature as well as her ability to have a personality to large for her body. She was wise, even tempered, and was rumoured to make the best tea in all of the Fire Nation.
But for all her kindness and fun-loving nature, she was a woman of the war. Her benevolence was easily lost to traitors and those who spoke ill of her family. In all her compassion there was never another woman who could harden her heart so strongly. She was a fire bending master, military genius and was not afraid to exert her authority.
It was all this and much more that made him honoured to be her namesake. When he was born- on the hottest day of the year- he was almost instantly claimed a prodigy and it was the resemblance between mother and son which lead to his father putting him on a pedestal. 20 years he was an only child; he had won the hearts of his people. He had joined the military, and was to follow in his father's footsteps.
Then, on the night of a great terrible storm, his younger brother was born. It was a painful labour, one he stood beside his mother for much of, but the prince was excited for the boy none the less. A brother, someone to train, to teach everything he knew. Someone he would be looked up to by. A boy, possibly looking just like him, named just as highly, bore from the same amazing woman's womb.
But things are never as they seem. The boy was weak, small and two weeks early. Soon their mother grew ill, they doctors told her, she shouldn't have been having children so late in life. His already thinning mother passed, leaving behinds a 25 year old high ranking solider of a son, as well as a struggling 5 year old one. His father had claimed that the new son wasn't worth her death- "It should have been that child, not her! He should have died in her place!" – but the prince knew that his mother had loved the child.
The boys would grow to be opposites. One, a fun loving prodigy, the other, a harden second son whom his father blamed for his mother's death. The pair of brothers, whom never got along, would soon be thrown off balance even more.
The eldest, who got everything easily and had the world at his feet, witnessed grief beyond measure. Two years after losing his own treasured wife, he loses his beloved son in his own siege, the father who thought the world of him dies, and before he could return home from his mourning, he learns of his younger brother coronation. What would a man have left?
But if it was anything he learned it was when life takes, it will give back. Only a few years later he stood with another boy- who reminded himself so much of his own- with a bandage over his eye. Staring goodbye to the nation that was once their own.
A nation stolen from them by the same man.
He would get his second chance as a father, a mentor to this boy. It would be a struggle, for there are many things he would need to learn alone. Many battles that must be fought, cities reclaimed, journeys planned. But in the end, all his struggles and hardships would be worth it for the eldest brother; whom had fallen from grace and worked his way back to the top.
Yes, everything he went through in his years of life would be worth the moment he is passed a bundle wrapped in dark pink cloth. Bright gold eyes- round and blinking- would stare up at him, while another pair leaned over him arm to try to get a better look at the newborn. His first grandniece – at which when he exclaimed this aloud, his nephew looked at him a promptly stated "Don't insult me uncle that is not your grandniece that is your granddaughter."
His eyes had watered at his nephew's words, but it wasn't until he was told the child's name that his tears began to pour. His whole life he was someone's namesake. But now he was staring into the eyes of his own.