It was the main thing Iroh noticed on their futile back-and-forth march across the world. The creeping blackness. Sometimes they would ride or sail a calm four miles, five, half a day-but sooner or later the peaceful harmony of nature was always shocked into silence by an ugly charcoal slash on the horizon. Beach, forest, ice-crusted coastline...it didn't matter. The Fire Kingdom had made the entire world its litter heap. Some days Iroh imagined that the very birds went silent at the sight of black and scarlet.
It may have been true that firebenders rose with the sun, but Iroh could never fail to notice what rose in their wake. The smoke. Thick, roiling, and increasingly oily and polluted, thanks to the industrial era his brother Ozai was ringing in.
Their siblinghood was the strangest Iroh had ever known, Zuko and Azula's explosive sixteen years not excepted. Try as he might, Iroh could dredge up only a single memory that could have predicted the turns their lives would one day take. Iroh was the elder by twelve years, and as casually talented in the firebending arts as his niece would be brilliant in manipulating them to her own cruel means. He could naturally have expected the kingdom to fall to him, and yet, Iroh's clearest memory was of watching a brow-furrowed five-year-old determinedly mimick the pattern of his kata, and the settling knowledge that he was watching the future Fire Lord trace a path to his throne. Oddly enough, Iroh never felt a trace of envy. The same could not be said for his brother. Even Iroh's affection went unnoticed, damned in the fire of Ozai's determination and his own talent. Ozai was never able to forgive Iroh his gifts and personal charm, but did possess the one trait Iroh never would: ambition.
Sozon, their grandfather, favored ambition. Azulon, their father, preferred his eldest. For reasons that took Iroh a long time to trace out, the long-dead Sozon got his way.
These days, long after the time had passed to do anything about it- isn't that always the way of it? Iroh wished he had asserted his rights following his father's death. He would not have been a successful Firelord in the same way that Ozai was. Much less would he have enjoyed the burden or title of ruler.
But he would have been a humane one.
You were young and self-centered, Iroh told himself, as all young people are.
The martial arts had intrigued him enough to spend his energies in his father's service. For years he had swept through the same countryside that he and Zuko trudged through now, relishing the challenge of combat, of outwitting his enemy. Warfare was very like bending- or Pai Cho- if you swapped out the tongues of flame and small tiles for long lines of soldiers and supply chains, poising them to congregate in exactly the right place at the right moment. He had played life like a game, long and well, for years. Enjoying the camaraderie of his men and giving little thought to the Firelord's gilded throne, still less to his policies.
Until that day when he had first noticed the slash of blackness on the walls of Ba-Sing-Se, the soot that settled on the freshly dug mound at his feet. Without Lu Ten, the whole world had gone gray.
Iroh had gone home then. Plucked up his army from their two years' encampment and left, just like that. Crowds thronged the streets at Iroh's return, hailing him as a savior for his earlier victories and safe return of (most of) their loved ones. His reception at the palace was colder. But it didn't matter, because all Iroh saw was black, black, black, and red.
Azulon was very recently dead, and Ozai, conscious of the threat a popular royal general might pose to his reign, waited years to apply to Iroh's retreat his favorite word: weakness. Iroh wore black for his father, for his son.
It had been years since he had done so. Now the sky wore black for him.
He could always find that color, too, in Zuko's expression. The words of that healer girl from the Earth Kingdom village drifted back to him. Harmed by the Fire Nation. That was Zuko, to a T. Iroh's feelings on the Avatar were as pronounced as he had told Admiral Zhaou. We all need the balance. He had been called a traitor for it. And he supposed he was- hunting the poor child through moor and fen to satisfy Zuko's obsessive desire for achievement was hardly a worthy contribution to the balance of nature. But obsession was all that kept Zuko from despair. Iroh had tried everything else.
And for Zuko, the balance of nature could go to hell.
It wouldn't come to that, though. Iroh was fairly certain of it. The boy Avatar had proven himself as slippery and full of surprises as an Avatar should be. Not to mention as magnanimous, for letting Zuko live. In different circumstances, Iroh would have been very pleased to share a pot of jasmine tea with that spirited little trio...or was it a quartet now? Maybe one day he'd have the pleasure. But for now he was stuck in the tiresome company of his hormone-fuelled nephew, who had in fact just said something unspeakable about tea.
Just hot leaf juice! Iroh tried not to feel personally hurt.
He'd spent a lot of time doing that, at the beginning of this journey. Now he accepted it. The backlash was his due, for bringing the boy into that fateful war council at all. Into the range of his father's searing gaze.
Now he tried not to wallow in Zuko's pain. He could have sunk himself neck-deep, but they couldn't both afford it. Especially not now, as fugitives.
It was intriguing, watching Zuko interact with the native Earth peasantry, stripped of the benefits or drawbacks of his rank, identity, army. Suddenly he was a brooding young man like any other. The sort you found in every nation, itching to go to war to burn off the fire in his blood. No one here could guess that the fire in Zuko's case was literal. Iroh cringed at his nephew's blunders, blushed at the small cruelties he still believed represented strength, had sent many a silent sorry and dropped gold piece in the direction of those they robbed. But he let Zuko lead. That had been important from the start, for Zuko. It meant more than ever now.
Zuko was Iroh's second chance. More than a replacement son. That was the biggest of the things Iroh saw differently when he had returned to his homeland. The hope of the nation didn't rest in the hands of its prodigy princess. It lay with the soft-eyed prince with so much of his mother in him.
That last day staring up at the stained walls of Ba-Sing-Se had changed Iroh. That night's step into the spirit world had granted him the gift of vision. Double-edged, like all the spirits' gifts. Like the Avatar's own. The Fire Nation, strained body and soul after a century of war, was falling apart at the seams. But no one would believe him. No one would realize it until the world they conquered turned out to be just so much charcoal and ash. Iroh watched it fall constantly.
Yet, Zuko would be its atonement. His atonement. If he could only coax out the small boy who once saw worlds of color in the fire. A boy who could keep more than the flames of industry burning, who could rekindle the ashy heart of a nation, who would remind the world that kings could be humane, that warmth and light were as real as destruction.
Right now that boy's heart was seared as hard as a komodo rhino's horn. But a spark of hope still lived there. Its name was Aang.
Iroh kept his own spark burning, and its name was Zuko.
A/N: I'm further through the series now...I revamped this fic to correct the many inconsistencies present before :)