Zuko had been with the GAang for almost two weeks now, and they were all finally getting to the point where they could eat around the same fire without going for each other's jugulars. Even though Zuko had done everything that he could think of to make Katara like him more (Or hate him less) his efforts had been in vain; she still glared at him from across the fire and still gave him the most burnt of the food that she could scrap from the bottom of the pan.

Zuko sighed as he looked down on his half-curdled soup, finishing it off in one gulp as to avoid prolonging the flavor. He took a large drink of his water, and as though he had been waiting for it, Sokka took that moment to ask the question that Zuko had been dreading since he started staying with them; "So Zuko," the water tribe boy said, "How'd you get that ugly scar on your face?"

Toph smacked him harder than Zuko had ever thought possible, but the boy didn't look abashed in the least, and the others around the fire didn't bother to hide their interest either, and stared at the sixteen year old that they barely knew.

Zuko sighed, having anticipated their curiosity, but still feeling bitter for the attention, "I got it when I was thirteen, in an Agni Kai; a fire duel."

They kept staring at him, and Zuko gave a heavy sigh, knowing that they wouldn't give up until he had shared the whole thing. "I had just turned thirteen, and my Father was having a meeting in the Fire Chamber. I wanted to go, since I was the crown prince, and I was finally considered a man, but the guards wouldn't let me in. My Uncle tried to convince me that it wasn't all that great in there; that it was just a bunch of old men discussing war tactics, but I begged him to let me in, to let me start to learn to be King."

Zuko laughed bitterly at himself, his hand rubbing viciously at the scar covering the left side of his face. "I should have listened to him and gone and done something else, but I begged him to take me in there; as a birthday present. He complied, of course, having always liked me, but he warned me to keep quiet, no matter what I heard. I went into the war chamber, and I sat through their plans. I hated it, the thought of war and the death of our people, but I did as my uncle said; I kept quiet. It wasn't until the very end of the meeting, when an older general proposed a plan that would send a whole battalion of inexperienced warriors into a skirmish with a group of rebel Earth Benders that my word was tested. They would have had no chance; they had just been trained, and some of them not even that much."

Katara, forgetting for a moment that she hated Zuko asked, "Why would they do that? If they were fire nation soldiers, why risk them dying?"

Zuko sighed, "They were bait. Pawns to help draw out the rebels into a field that they couldn't hide in. It was a well thought out plan; the ground beneath the site was solid rock, and after fighting the battalion, they wouldn't have been able to bend it quickly enough to fend off the second wave of soldiers."

Before Katara could interrupt him again, he continued, "They would have been slaughtered, the new recruits, but the general though that this was acceptable; a thousand of our soldiers to destroy the opposition that had been keeping us at bay for months. I couldn't stand the thought of it, though, and I stood up. I told the general that his plan was madness, that he had no right to sacrifice our soldiers to kill a handful of Earth Benders."

Zuko stopped, taking a drink and rubbing his arms, as though the memories made him cold, "The General was outraged. He said that I didn't understand the weight of success that their deaths would bring; he said that I didn't understand that the soldiers in question would gladly lay their lives down in the defense of their nation. I couldn't stop myself; I told him that the battle that they were going to die in wasn't in the defense of our nation, our people. I told him, in front of the entire war chamber, that the war with the other nations was nothing but a bid for domination that had cost more lives than it was worth."

Sokka and Toph gasped, "What happened?" Toph whispered, her sightless eyes wide.

"My Father got mad. The General that I had insulted declared that the only way for this abomination to be cleansed was for me to fight in an Agni Kai. I had looked at the general, and I had had no fear of defeat; he had experience, but I was strong and arrogant in my youth."

Zuko pulled his knees up to his chest, his eyes growing distant as he stared into the fire, seeing, not the faces of his companions, but the blur of a thousand people in a screaming crowd, "That night, when I should have been in my uncle's house having my Birthday dinner with him, I was getting ready for an Agni Kai. I was calm, excited, even, to be able to finally prove myself to my father, to prove that I was worth something. The gong tolled, and I stood and faced my opponent. But it wasn't the aged general that starred back at me from across the arena."

Zuko didn't hear Katara ask who it had been, he just felt the shock of it over again, caught in the memory; "I stared into the eyes of my father, the Fire Lord."

Everyone gasped, their mouths falling open. "Why?" rang out from several mouths, but Zuko was already going on.

"I had misunderstood; though I had spoken out against the general's plan, I had done it in my Father's war chamber. The insult had not been to the General, but to the Fire Lord himself."

"What'd you do?" Someone asked, but Zuko couldn't hear them anymore, he just continued on, voice distant, "I couldn't fight him; he was my father. I begged. Begged to be forgiven for speaking out in his war chamber. He demanded that I fight, but I couldn't, I abased myself, begging like a child in front of the entire court. I can still hear them laughing at me, jeering so loudly I couldn't even hear myself think. My father approached, and I had begun to cry. I cried!" Zuko screamed it, making everyone jump.

"I cried like a damned fool as he pinned me to the ground, using all of his strength though I didn't fight his hold." A single tear slid from Zuko's damaged eye, but he didn't make a move to wipe it away. "Lying there, with my father on top of me, I heard the words that will haunt me to my grave."

Zuko paused, shivering as the venom he had heard in his father's voice gripped him.

"What?" Katara whispered, not wanting to know, but needing to all the same.

Zuko nodded in her direction idly, "As he placed his hand over my left eye, he leaned close to whisper into my ear, 'You will learn respect, and suffering will be your teacher.' Then he burned me, searing the flesh off of my young face in one rush of pain; then he was gone. He left me to scream my anguish in front of a crowd of people I had considered family until then."

Zuko took a shaking breath, his eyes still distant as he remembered everything about that day over again, "I don't know how far into my punishment I passed out, but I woke up on a ship, just outside of the borders of my nation. It was there that I found out that I had lost everything that a person could lose, and all in one day; my home, my family, my freedom. And the only chance of ever regaining any of it rested in an impossible task."

Toph, eyes watery, asked in a trembling voice, "What task?"

Zuko smiled bitterly towards Aang, "Capture the Avatar." He said, his voice heavy with resentment, but not towards the twelve year old.

Before anyone could think of anything to say, Zuko was gone, his bowl the only indicator that he had been there at all.

Katara sat still for a moment before gasping, her eyes wide, "He couldn't have known."

Sokka looked at her oddly, "What; that sticking up for a group of untrained soldiers would make his psycho dad banish him? How could he? I can't even believe it now."

Toph took a deep breath; "He told the truth; all of it. Nothing he said was a lie."

Katara shook her head, "No," she said, her tone strangled, "His Father couldn't have known. About Aang. At the time that Zuko was banished, he couldn't have known that Aang would come back. Aang had been gone for almost a hundred years at the time, and no one had heard anything about him. There was no way that Zuko could find him." Katara stopped, her face losing its color, "He did it on purpose. He gave Zuko a task that no one could complete, much less a thirteen year old boy. He made sure that Zuko could never go home."

Aang actually felt sick as he thought of a thirteen year old boy being told that his only chance to go home was in catching a person that everyone believed to be dead. "Even if he had found another avatar, how would he have caught him or her? He was just a kid; the Avatar is a master in every element. Zuko had no hope in taking someone that strong in, even if he did find him." Aang looked in the direction that Zuko had fled, suddenly feeling bad for escaping all of the times that the Fire Prince had had him.

It was Sokka who spoke next, "Imagine what it must have been like for him; knowing that he should have been a king and having to be an outcast. And that his own family had done it to him."

Toph nodded, but didn't say anything, which was a rarity for her.

Everyone just stared at the fire, each caught up in their own thoughts, and though they didn't know it, a lone fire nation boy sat nearby in the darkness, his sobs held in by a bloody knuckle.

Zuko couldn't believe that he had told them everything. He couldn't believe that they KNEW now, about the thing that kept him up most of the night.

Zuko got up, using his years of stealth training to get away silently. He slipped into his room, so far away from everyone else's, and, as he fell into a fitful sleep, he remembered a time when he had been loved, when he had known the comforts of safety and the joys of knowing where he would be the next day.

And, almost unnoticed by him, he gave a soft sob as his fathers face flitted across his mind.

'I want to go home,' he though hazily. But even as he let the treacherous words float cross his mind he knew the truth; He had no home. That had all been ruined for him the moment he allowed the love his Mother had instilled in him out into the poisonous world his father had made.

And, in the darkness of his room, Zuko cried.

This is the end. I just wanted to make one of these for myself, since I am picking up my Ba Sing Sei arc story. This has always been something that I have thought about; how Zuko would explain his scar to the people he came to travel with.

The episode where they see it all happen in the play was disappointing for me. How could they believe that they would put something like that in a play and not have it be at least a little bit true?

Fools. Poor Zuko.