Firebender: Write about someone attempting something for the third time.

Prompts:

"Third time's the charm" (easy)

Ursa (medium)

Third person PoV (hard)

Word count: 1,454

There were many misconceptions surrounding this trip.

Just because he had gone on the same trip twice before with no outcome did not mean it was a lost cause. Just because she hadn't been seen in eight years didn't mean she was dead. Just because this was the third time he was travelling solely with Katara did not mean he liked her in anything more than a strictly, utterly and completely platatonic way.

Okay, so maybe the third point was a bit of a lie. But Katara was very happy with Aang, so he was allowed to lie about whether he liked her in more than a strictly, utterly and completely platatonic way or not.

Besides, it's not like he had begged Katara to come on this trip with him. She volunteered. For the third time.

At at first he thought that she felt obliged to come with, because he had helped her find Yon Rha and get closure for her mother's death, but now he was having second thoughts. Returning a favour three times was a bit excessive, even if it was quite a big favour. Not that he had even wanted anything in return in the first place. Maybe she just wanted to be there when he found his mother; it did seem like quite a Katara-like thing to do.

Unfortunately, he hadn't found his mother yet, so her plan of being there when that happened wasn't going too well.

He honestly didn't know where else to look. They had scoured the Fire Nation and covered the Earth Kingdom, and although he didn't think his mother had decided to become a recluse and live on her own in an air temple, they checked those as well. Where else could she be hiding?

He had begun to think it really was a lost cause. Where else could she be? His father told him the whole story of how his mother was banished, but maybe she was dead. There had been a war going on, lives had been lost and families broken. Her life could have been snuffed out like the plucking of a daisy from the dry, ashy ground.

Then, out of no where, Katara's eyes had lit up like candlelit cobalt.

"I know where your mother could be."

And just like that, they were gone on another trip.

Third time's the charm.

This time they were headed to Ba Sing Se. Although they had already checked there, Katara seemed to know of one place that they hadn't looked before. Some place called Lake Laogai, where the Dai Lee used to brainwash people. It was destroyed the last time Katara had been there, but after two years, it could have easily been restored.

He wasn't sure why Katara thought his mother would be hidden in a secret underwater fort used for brainwashing people, but he wasn't going to reject the idea. If his mother had been hiding in Ba Sing Se, it wasn't unlikely that the Dai Lee would have found her suspicious; her face was famous in the Fire Nation, and those slanted eyes and silky hair were probably well-known in the earth kingdom as well.

Now it was just the matter of travelling to the Earth Kingdom, finding Lake Laogai, getting into it without being caught and somehow finding his mother in the maze-like hallways and echoing chambers.

Simple.

The Ba Sing Se not changed much in two years. The same gritty streets of the lower ring, the same immaculate buildings of the upper ring, and the same horrible feeling that someone was hiding something. After Long Feng had fallen, the Dai Lee must have carried on, because although the King seemed slightly more independent, shadowed figures lurked in every alleyway and residents always kept to themselves, heads down and lips sealed.

Finding Lake Laogai was tiresome and time-consuming, mostly because they were lacking an earthbender to see where it was. Still, two days after their arrival, Katara and Zuko found it.

It may have also been hard to find because it was just ruins of rock hidden by blue-green saltwater. Lake Laogai was still destroyed.

All this way for nothing. All the way to the opposite side of the world, and she's nowhere to be seen.

Zuko was ready to give up. Accept the fact that his mother had seemingly vanished off the face of the earth and head back to the Fire Nation. Katara, however, had different ideas.

"She could still be out there."

He stared into her with blank eyes, amber and stripped of hope.

"Zuko, you don't understand what happened to the people in there. They were brainwashed, their identities completely taken away from them. Once Lake Laogai was destroyed, the Dai Lee wouldn't have just put them back into the public. They're probably locked up somewhere."

"And what are we going to do about that? The people here don't seem very willing to talk, and besides, if my mother really was brainwashed and stripped of her identity, is there even any point in seeing her?"

"I'm just trying to help. If you want to stop now, then we can turn around and head back. I just don't want you to regret not trying to find her."

He looked away from her warm, azure eyes, staring at the damp ground and the tips of his shoes.

"Let's keep looking. Third time's the charm, right?"

He was an old man, with dry, creased skin that hung loosely off his cheekbones and wispy white hair like spun sugar. It took weeks to find someone who could give them information, but he seemed to be full of facts. His granddaughter was apparently taken by the Dai Lee when she was walking in town with him, and now she was being kept in a underground prison. The prison was not very well guarded, but no body visited except him.

It seemed suspicious, but when he offered to show them the prison, the pair agreed. Following his slow, pained steps, they gradually made their way through Ba Sing Se, stopping at a large, square dent in the ground. Earthbending the dirt away, the old man gestured for them to go in.

The tunnel carried on for a little while, before widening to a large prison. Young women with wide eyes and unruly hair gripped to the filthy prison bars, whispering at the sight new of visitors. Hundreds of women, mostly in around their early twenties, were packed into the cell, making the room stuffy and uncomfortably warm. If his mother was in here, it would be almost impossible to spot her.

They wandered around the edge of the cell, avoiding the bony hands that reached out to them through the bars and the dark eyes that seemed to bore into them, framed with sickly pale skin and adorned with baggy purple circles.

His is golden eyes skimmed the room, looking for her slanted eyes, her high cheekbones, her pale skin, her silky hair. He almost looked away, almost averted his eyes from the painful sight of brainwashed women left to rot underneath the city, until-

He saw her. Her once warm smile now downturned, her sparkling eyes now dull, her smooth hair now tangled, but it was her all the same. He stopped abruptly, his heartbeat pounding in his head and bile in his throat. It was her.

He stood, frozen, staring at his long-lost mother. He was somewhere into between numbness and panic, until Katara's voice snapped him out of his trance.

"Zuko? Do you see her?"

He didn't reply, only walked to the woman, focusing in each footstep until he reached her.

"E-excuse me," he called, his voice small and hoarse, barely sounding like his own. She looked up and he gestured for her, which she answered by walking over to him. The only thing between them were the rusty bars, and he could barely hear his own voice over his bellowing heartbeats. "Are you Ursa?"

She stared into him, her large pupils skimming over his frame. She smiled, a wide smile that reminded his of when she would hold his frail, eight-year-old body in her arms and laugh at the little turtle ducklings playing in the pond. She opened her mouth to speak and hope filled his chest. Even with the pounding of his heart filling his head, her voice rung out loud and clear.

"My name is Joo Dee."

And in that moment, Zuko knew that his long-lost mother was lost for good.

First round is written! I will admit, it's not my best writing, but I've been ill with a chest infection so blame it on that (also I'm still getting used to being obsessed with bts so that's pretty time-consuming. Oh yeah and school as well.)

Anyway, I hope you like it, and I hope it's good enough for pro-bending circuit!