"It's funny, you know, about what you said; a lazy, shallow old man who's always been jealous of his brother. I didn't have the heart to say it, for your words had struck me. They were so profound, and yet so incredibly astute that there was nothing that really could be said. The fact of the matter, my nephew, is that you were right.
I have been jealous of my brother for years now, but not for the reasons you might think. It is true that he has power, envious power both politically and physically. By his status alone he is hailed as the greatest living Fire Bender in the world, which is probably a very accurate title. I certainly could not defeat him, even now. I hope someday that you will have that power, but I hope also that you will have the wisdom to know how to use it -- a wisdom your father sorely lacks, and always has.
Nevertheless, it is not because of his power that I am jealous, nor his position as Fire Lord. I would never desire such a burden, and it worried me at times how you so often hungered for it. Even in your youth, you wished always to be prepared for the day you would ascend that throne. Perhaps I should have been pleased. You desired to do so well, to both please and honor your father, as well as do great things for your people. You would have been a great king, and I have hopes that someday you will climb back out of this darkness we have both found ourselves in to be placed upon the king's throne as one of the greatest rulers our nation has ever seen. Yes, my nephew, I still have my hopes for that day, because I know that everything I have taught you will stay with you, and that you will become a greater ruler than your father, and his father before him, and his father before him. You will make your people proud, and you will make me proud.
But no, I am not jealous of Ozai for his power, or his throne. In fact, what he has that makes me so envious of him I once had myself. Yet, that which I had was unwillingly lost while my brother threw his away; cast to the wind like a burden that was of no more use. Perhaps those were his exact thoughts, but if he only understood the depths of his mistake I think he would have changed his mind. Yes my nephew, the true reason why I am jealous of my brother is because he has a son. Not just any son, but one that loves him unconditionally, and would readily forgive him all his trespasses if he desired to be forgiven. He has you, and that is what makes me so envious of him. The bond that you could have shared as father and son would outshine the greatest bond the two of us could ever create.
Even though I have always thought of you as my own, and I sometimes must remind myself that I am not your father, I know that what I would desire most could never be. To adopt you as my own would obligate you to forsake your rightful place on the throne, and I would never be so selfish as to take that away from you. I simply had to be satisfied with the fact that though you were my nephew, I could still love you and treat you as I would a son, and that I would be there for you at every turn, until I no longer drew breath, to guide you on your journey. Whatever you asked I would give you, and my strength and wisdom would always be used to help you in every way possible. You became my world, and everything revolved around you.
As such, it pained me to see your father neglect you so, even when you showed nothing but love and admiration for him. I don't know what it was that made him treat you as he did, but know that it pained me as much as it pained you. I found it shameful that he thought so little of you, when clearly you had so much potential. You did your best, and still it did not please him. I never understood, and I never will. Unconditional love is such a rare thing, even from those closest to us. Yet you held on to your love for your father, even now I think you have not given up on him. The child in you that yearns for your father's love and attention still holds out for him to one day call you back across the oceans to come home and be with him once more.
I wish I could encourage those hopes, my nephew, but I know my brother too well. He would happily keep you banished for the rest of his years and yours. He would think nothing of leaving you to rot upon the shores of our enemies, and he would not shed a single tear if the worst had happened to you. It angers me that he would throw something so precious away, so much that it is often hard for me to conceal my rage when you speak highly of him still after three years of banishment. Of course it is not with you that my anger lies. In fact, it gives me some semblance of joy to see that a part of the nephew I once knew back home still exists within you, but that scar is not the only change that has occurred in three years. For years I gave in to the painful fact that part of you had died at the hands of you father the day you fought him. I wanted so badly to stand up and fight for you, knowing that you would not do so, but there was nothing I could do, and I feared that you would be ashamed and hurt, believing perhaps that I did not think you had the strength to go through with the Agni Kai. It pained me to witness you weep before the entire council, kneeling before your father and pleading for forgiveness. I knew what was to come next of course, and I could not watch as he scarred your face forever. I turned away. I was a coward and could not watch, but I heard your screams that night, and I have heard them every night since. The screams in your soul for a father that would not hear your pleas for forgiveness, and the screams for a father who never deserved you, but for who's love you have always strived to obtain.
I never understood my brother when it came to you, and I suppose there's nothing worth taking the time to understand. He threw you away, possibly the greatest thing that he could have ever experienced in his life. He threw it away. With my son it had been different. I pushed him so much, perhaps too hard at times, always to do his best. Something I didn't have to do with you, because you always pushed yourself. My son was different though. He was lazy at times, probably something he got from me. He was brilliant. His bending skills were exceptional, and he always did well in his studies, but I knew that he never really dedicated himself. He was too busy chasing girls…perhaps another trait he had inherited from me?
Nevertheless, I did push him, and I think part of him began to grow bitter toward me. He would accuse me of being controlling and overbearing, sometimes even a hypocrite. We argued often, especially once he reached your age. Despite that however, I did love him greatly, and he knew it too. I made sure of that, though he was often uncomfortable with it.
I cannot begin to describe the sorrow that I felt at his loss, or feel even now when I think about it for long enough. There is only one greater pain than watching the light fade from the eyes of someone you love, my nephew, and that is watching them fade away from you knowing that it is not their time to leave this world. A father should never have to bury his son, whether he is from the Fire Nation, Earth Kingdom, or Water tribes. Such grief should never be inflicted upon anyone. That is an anguish no one deserves to know, and a weight that is nearly impossible to bear. For my brother to throw away what so many, myself included, have lost in this war is foolish, and if he were here I would tell him so.
I often wondered if it was wrong to have so strongly attached myself to you. After all, as your uncle I really had no obligation to you, and yet somehow I was drawn to you. Perhaps it was the recent loss of my son, but it seemed right away that there was a sort of kindred spirit between us. I felt a connection to you that I had not felt with anyone, and you seemed equally attached to me. I enjoyed spending my time with you after retiring. In fact, that had been the catalyst that had finally encouraged me to leave the battlefield once and for all. I knew you would be happy when I finally came home and promised that I would be staying from now on. You were so overjoyed that you hugged me. I carried you on my back toward the castle where we immediately got to work on lost time those last few months I had been away.
You never failed to make me smile.
I never told you this, but it had always given me strength knowing that even with my son gone, someone was waiting for me back at home. You became the light that guided me there.
Over the years you grew, as children do, but we never grew apart. It made me happy, and you had a friend inside the castle walls, and a teacher you knew you could trust. I was more than eager to become your teacher when the time was right. I would not have entrusted your hungry young mind to the biased old men who normally taught the children of the courts at the academy. Their ideologies would have poisoned your mind, and I would have lost you to them forever. Since day one I took pride in your progress, and was proud to call you my student. Yet we never obtained the formalities a teacher and student would. When we were finished I would drag you aside for tea, though you hated the stuff, and we would talk and share tall tales that we had heard, or I would tell you about some great battle I'd fought in, always over emphasizing the best parts just to hear you laugh and say 'That's not how it happened! You're making that up, Uncle!'
Those were perhaps the greatest years of my life, even after my son had died, which had been the most painful day I'd experienced in all my years.
Well, that is not entirely true. There was one day that almost rivaled it.
My dear nephew, I never told you how sorry I was, the cruel things I had said to you when I had left you on that ship alone to take a walk outside. I still wish bitterly that I hadn't left you alone. I should have followed my instincts and forced you to come with me, not leaving it as just a mere offer.
I should have been more understanding toward your anger. You had lost your crew to Zhao who was heading north to take away the key to your salvation. The Avatar, the one thing that would allow you to return home, lest your father decided to change his mind, which I have no doubt he very well might have done.
Still, that was not on my mind. In fact, I did not want to think about anything that night. I left you to stew in your anger, as I knew you would do, and left the ship to take a walk along the lower mountain trails. I needed to clear my head and think about our next move, since we would clearly not be heading toward our intended course. Still, inside of me lurched some anger that you could not have tried to be more cooperative. Nevertheless, I wanted to clear my head. I had not gone a single mile on the trails however when I heard the night air shattered by an angry explosion. When I turned around, the last thing I expected to see was our ship engulfed in flames…with you still inside!
Had I given myself any time to actually think I probably would have collapsed right their on the trails, assuming you dead. Something gave me hope however that I would somehow miraculously reach the ship in time to bring you to safety. After all, it didn't seem right that something could happen to you, not something like this anyway. I had naively believed up until that moment that somehow my….love for you would act as a magical shield of some sort to protect you whenever I wasn't there. Having lost my son, I didn't think that the spirits could ever be so cruel as to take you away from me. But when I reached the end of the docks to find the remains of the ship blanketed in fire too strong for even me to bend away, I succumbed to the fact that I had lost you. My world had gone up in flames, just as our ship had.
For one moment, more horrible than the knowledge that you were gone, I wondered if perhaps you had done this yourself: taking your own life because you would not be able to return home and gain your honor. My heart sunk at this thought because I realized that all that I had done had not been enough for you, and failure clenched in my chest like a fist, choking my words away and bringing only tears.
I don't remember much of what happened after, nor how much time passed between then and when I saw your face again. I remember being pulled away from the docks. Apparently I had collapsed, whether from exhaustion or grief I could not say. Tears were still streaming down my face, though that did not surprise me. I could not hear your words if you spoke any, because the flames were still roaring, still consuming the ship and my world. I assumed perhaps that you were a soldier that had found me lying there. The only words that I could manage were… 'My nephew is dead,' I said it over and over again. It was the only reality I knew. There was nothing worth knowing beyond that fact.
Then suddenly I looked up. Miraculously, it was you! You were kneeling beside me, your eyes gazing down at me in worry. To think, after all that had happened, you were worried about me! In one swoop I remember being on my knees with my arms wrapped tightly around you, afraid to let go should something else try to take you away from me.
'I'm all right, Uncle,' you said with such calm that it made me wonder if this had all been a dream. The sound of your voice made me weep even harder, but these were tears of joy. My grief had been washed away, and that which I had lost had somehow come back to me. I would not question why. Why didn't matter. You were alive, and that was all that did matter.
It is still all that matters, Zuko. Even now, as a fugitive of the Fire Nation, and living in disguise in the Earth Kingdom where, if our true identities were ever revealed it would most assuredly cost us our lives, the fact that you are here with me is all that matters. It keeps me going, because as it has been for years, you are all that matters to me. Your father may not appreciate you, or even love you, but I do. I can only hope that it's enough, because it is all I have to offer anymore. Your presence, the fact that you are still talking, eating, breathing, is all that I need to keep going. It keeps me sane even in the midst of so much insanity. I have lost much, my nephew, but it is all trivial in comparison to losing you.
That is a pain that I could not bear. I have already come so close to it once, and I do not think that I could pull myself out of that darkness if such a thing ever did come to pass. I would be forever lost, and surviving to one day see home again would be a meaningless effort. What would the Fire Nation be without my beloved nephew? It would certainly not be home. In fact, it never was home. I know now that the Fire Nation was not home because I was born there. It was home because you were there, waiting and watching for me to return. You made it home, and you have made everyplace we have ever been home. Even now, amidst everything so strange, I am home only because you are here with me.
If that changed, then there would be nothing to continue on for. I could hope only to find the opportunity take out my revenge on your father for having done this to you. Even if it killed me, to leave one scar on him for all the scars you have received, both physically and emotionally because of him, would give me a grim satisfaction that I had done something right before I died."
Iroh looked up and over at his nephew stretched out on a makeshift cot, asleep in front of a small fire he had conjured to keep them both warm. In a few minutes it would be Zuko's turn to keep watch, but for the moment he took comfort that his nephew was getting the rest he needed. It was one of the first night's Zuko had slept soundly for some time now, and it eased the old man's nerves. His nephew had been tense lately, more so than usual, and he had been concerned for his health. Too much stress and strain would cause him to become tired and more susceptible to illness. Right now, that was the last thing he wanted.
The young man twitched slightly where he lay. Iroh grinned, having to hold back a laugh at the humorous sight. Thoughtlessly he placed his hand tenderly upon his nephew's shoulder and sighed.
"As long as we're together, everything will be okay."
Suddenly, Zuko stirred beneath his uncle's hand. "Did you say something?" came his voice, still heavy with sleep.
"No," Iroh stated with a grin. He stood and brushed off his backend, having sat in the dirt for so long. "I think it's your turn for watch though, unless you're too tired. I don't mind sitting up. It's a nice night."
Zuko yawned in protest. "No. Go ahead and sleep." He pulled himself out from beneath the one blanket they had and took a seat where his uncle had been only a moment ago. He yawned once more while wiping the remaining bits of sleep from his eyes. "Good night."
"Goodnight Zuko," said the old man, his back now turned to his nephew. "Wake me if you need me for something."
Within a few minutes Iroh was snoring loudly. Zuko was glad he'd decided to stay up. His uncle was clearly much more exhausted than he let on. Sighing, he sat back against a rock and gazed at the old man for some time.
Zuko decided after a few moments of consideration that he had no intention of telling his uncle that he had never really been asleep at all…