Hello there! This is my first ATLA fanfiction! This takes place about two years after Sozin's comet. I am sorry for any discrepancies with the main series in terms of names and locations. As for pairings... okay, we all know that it ended with Kataang (I, myself a big Zutara fan, saw this coming from the beginning). I can tell you that this story will have a variety of pairings, but they will all be rather dark and angsty if things go on as they are planned.
DISCLAIMER: I do not own Avatar: The Last Airbender. It is property of Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konieztko, and I will, in no shape or form, be making any profit off this fanfiction, only your kind reviews.
Chapter One
Zuko inhaled a deep breath. The scent of the sea proved to be nostalgic. He reflected back upon his days spent aboard his ship in exile, searching, scouring the globe for the Avatar. He was reminded of his short temper, his disrespect of his Uncle and crew, his hungry desire to restore a false honor which his father had implanted within Zuko's young mind. He had come far from such times. No longer in exile. No longer hunting the Avatar. However, even though the war had ended, Zuko, like so many others, still clung to the past.
With the end of the war, a wave of great joy swept across the world. The century of oppression and bloodshed finally came to a close. At last, the world could evolve into a new era of peace and balance between the nations and elements. But for every person that was glad the war was over, there was another that demanded retribution for the Fire Nation's crimes. The Northern Water Tribe called for justice after the final large-scale attack on the North Pole took from them many young male waterbenders and their beloved Princess Yue. Their brethren to the South had not formally expressed their enmity towards the Fire Nation raids upon their small village, but many within the tribe had felt a deep-seeded anger against the raiders who captured and murdered many of the tribe's loved ones. The efforts of Chief Hadoka and Grandmaster Pakku had kept that anger from developing into violence for these past two years, but it could only be restrained for so long. The people of the Earth Kingdom, strong, proud, and just as stubborn, demanded reimbursement for being forced into slavery. Even the nobles, who surrendered to the Fire Nation just to keep their rank and fortune, demanded payment. And then there were those in the Fire Nation who believed so strongly in Fire Nation supremacy that stirred up propaganda to try and reignite the war again.
Politics, Zuko complained mentally to himself. He wondered in he was happier living as the rejected prince rather than living in this world of shit. As the Fire Lord, he was the one that had to deal with the backlash of this war. He and his supporters had spent the past two years struggling to keep the newfound peace. This left no time for his personal life. There was always an incident which needed to be taken care of with the utmost haste and diplomacy. In fact, one such incident was the reason Zuko was now sailing for the Earth Kingdom, specifically Ba Sing Se. There had been several increasing reports of rebellions springing up in the Earth Kingdom. The King of Ba Sing Se requested assistance to help keep down these insurgents. Fire Lord Zuko answered the call and was on his way to sort out negotiations with the King. Sure he could have sent an envoy to make the treaty for him and the rest of the Fire Nation, but Zuko needed to escape the palace and wished to see his Uncle Iroh.
Iroh, the easygoing man he was, did not want to get actively involved in dealing with the rebellion. Instead he stuck to managing his popular and successful teashop. It made Iroh happy. Zuko could not ask his uncle to leave that happiness and be thrusted back onto the battlefield. No, it's better this way,Zuko decided. After all, Iroh was all the family he had left.
Ex-"Pheonix King", ex-Fire Lord, eternal "Loser King" Ozai died four months after his battle with the Avatar. He had withered away, lost all his will to live. Ozai would not eat, sleep, he barely moved. Until one day, he did not move anymore. Only the next day, when Zuko charged into Ozai's cell, did anyone know Ozai had died. On the eve of Ozai's death, Ozai finally told Zuko where he could find Fire Lady Ursa. He told Zuko to journey to a village on the Southern shore of the Fire Nation. "When you find her, you will know," Ozai had told Zuko. It was hard to believe that voice once belonged to the megalomaniac. That voice was dry, barely wheezing out the words. It was broken. The next day, Zuko journeyed to that village. It was a ghost town. Zuko searched the village for any signs of life. There were none. He came upon a graveyard. And beside an unmarked grave, fire lillies bloomed. Zuko dropped to his knees as tears ran like rivers down his cheek. He knew.
Azula only lasted three months. Her cruelty and insanity were finally reflected back upon herself. At first, she screamed. For weeks, the prison was subject to her roars of rage and torment, spouting blue flames from her mouth. Then, when her voice gave out, she sobbed. Like her father, she hardly moved, just laying there, not eating, not sleeping. When her voice finally returned, Azula began to sing. The guards reported that inbetween her songs, she would often ask, "Mommy? Did you like the song? I sang it just for you. Do you love me now?" And then, three months after her defeat by Zuzu and the water tribe peasant, there was no more singing. Witnesses reported hearing Azula shriek, "Mommy! Wait for me! I'm coming!" before her cell exploded with a red fire. Nothing which identified as Azula, to the naked eye, remained. Zuko sometimes pondered what happened to his sister's blue flame. Did she really lose herself? Or was that red fire her true flame, the love she so desired from her mother? However, before Zuko could delve into the more philosophical details of Azula's suicide, he was usually swamped with more incidents and paperwork.
Before long, Zuko arrived on the shores of the Earth Kingdom. It would still be quite a journey to Full Moon Bay, and from there he would take a ferry to Ba Sing Se. With the increase in rebellions, the Fire Lord had decided it was in the best interests for him to get to Ba Sing Se the old-fashioned way. Dressed in the simple robes he wore while teaching Aang firebending, Zuko, along with five other soldiers in less conspicuous clothing, disembarked the ship and made their way on foot. The soldiers were among those that watched over Zuko in his period of exile. They were not exactly the best soldiers, but they were Zuko's most trusted in the Fire Nation Army. All five gladly jumped at the chance to serve their former prince. And now, here they were, on another ground which proved nostalgic for Zuko.
On the beaten, dusty path, the men exchanged jokes, stories of old girlfriends, and whatnot. There was great laughter among them, except from Zuko. He led their march, wanting to join in the fun, but those things never came easy to the Fire Lord. This is just like trying to join Aang's group all over again, Zuko thought to himself. He remembered the frustration of trying to make a good impression on those he tried to hunt down. And in the end, somehow, they accepted him, except Katara. Katara, Zuko's hand moved down to the star-shaped scar left by Azula, the wound Katara healed. Back then, she had good reason the reject his apology. She had opened up her worst memories of her mother to him, and he responded to that trust with fire. I was suchf a horrible person. I guess part of me still is. Zuko though he was past beating himself over the head for his past mistakes, but they would always seem to creep up on him. Now he led a handful of men who he probably lashed out against and beat down into the ground with anger four plus years ago. Dammit! Why couldn't I be born like Sokka and say something horribly stupid and still have people (girls) flock to me? Wait... I want to be like Sokka? I must be going crazy.
"Hey Zuko!" one of his men, named Wan, called from the rear.
Zuko stopped and let Wan catch up to him. Wan put his hands on Zuko's shoulders and stared him straight in the eye with a serious look on his face. A pregnant pause hung in the air.
"Blo-lo-lo-lo-lo-loop," Wan sounded as he flailed his tougue at Zuko.
This cause a riot of laughter among the rest of the men while Zuko just stood there with a puzzled look on his face. "What the fuck was that?" he asked the soldiers.
Wan, still recovering from laughing, pat Zuko on the back, "C'mon, lighten up! You've been moping this whole trip! Besides, we always used to do shit like this back when you had that ponytail growing out from your bald scalp. Of course you always were sulking up on deck or something."
"Oh," Zuko simply muttered, now regretting on what he missed out on back then.
Another soldier stepped forward. This one named Liang. "What Wan means to say, my lord, is that we wish for you to join us in our rememberance of old times and share our humor."
Zuko, now embarrassed, stuttered, "Oh... uh-okay. Bah-lou-lou-lou?" he tried to imitate Wan. Pathetically.
This sparked another wave of laughter among the soldiers. "N-no haha no-haha-not like that-hahaha!" Wan struggled to speak through his laughter. "It-haha-it's like--" Wan had been cut off by the arrow now sticking through his neck.
"Wan!" Zuko yelled before he was struck onto his back with an arrow to the left shoulder.
"We're under attack! Protect our lord!" Liang cried, removing his sword from its sheath and deflecting the arrows raining down upon them. The other three soldiers bended their fire to burn away the arrows. When the attackers noticed this, they jumped out from the trees and rocks and started attacking directly with steel. One, a thin man wielding a chained sickle, lept towards Zuko. The Fire Lord roared and spat forth a flame which burned through the thin man's rag of a shirt and singed the flesh of the man's chest. Zuko's attacker's eyes bulged from their sockets.
"I-It's the Fire Lord!" he yelled to his comrades.
"Don't let them escape!" "Kill them all!" The bandits had gained a burst of energy upon discovering the opportunity to draw royal blood.
The sickle-man charged again at Zuko, swinging his weapon above his head in a circular motion. Zuko removed the arrow from his shoulder before rolling away from the sickle's path as the blade came crashing down into the ground. He saw an opening and shot a fist of fire into the already-burnt flesh of the bandit. As the bandit went down, Zuko turned his attention to his companions. Liang, although not a firebender, was a skilled martial artist, and especially lethal with a blade. His sword danced against the crude clubs and spears of four bandits at once, parrying and countering with seemingly little effort, but intense focus. The other three were dealing with the three earthbenders of the bandits. Heavy rocks exploded upon the impact of fire.
Zuko lept into the fray. From his fist sparked balls of fire thrown towards the bandits, intentionally missing their targets. The bandits surrounding Liang turned their attention to the Fire Lord. Liang took advantage of their divided attention. He grabbed the bandit to right and plunged his sword through the man's heart. He kicked the bandit off his blade and used the momentum to decapitate another bandit, who heard the death cry of his comrade and turned around to look. The two remaining bandits who had faced Liang were now frozen with terror and disgust at their comrades' corpses. Liang made quick work of them, slicing both their juggulars in one clean maneuver.
Zuko launched more blasts of fire around the earthbenders, drawing smoke from the charred ground. The firebenders took advantage of their confusion. One, with a flame in each hand, grabbed an earthbender and let out a mighty roar. The fire streaming from the soldiers mouth and palms left a corpse with a smoking grey skull. Another firebender wrapped his enemy in a cage of fire. The earthbender tried to form a protective cocoon of earth, but he was not quick enough, and only a pink husk of meat remained. The final earthbender saw that he was the only one left, and as any stubborn earthbender would, he charged. The third firebender withdrew a pair of knives and exhaled a warm breath onto them, causing the metal to glow. He ran head-on toward the earthbender. Once close enough, the firebender slid on his knees through the earthbender's legs and sliced his hamstrings with the searing blades. The earthbender dropped to his knees, and before he could bend any earth, the firebender cut both of the man's hands from the wrists.
"P-p-please! M-mercy!" the defeated man begged. The firebender wrapped his arm around the earthbender's neck. He plunged a knife into the man's back, drawing a scream, and withdrew the knife, and plunged again, drawing another scream again, and withdrew again, and plunge... scream... withdraw... until there was no more screaming.
The firebender let the earthbender's dead body go. It hit the ground with a thud more powerful to Zuko's ears than any of his screams. The firebender stood up and hobbled his way towards Wan's dead body, as if he was the one who had died. Zuko looked into his soldier's eyes. They were full of such pain. Zuko allowed the firebender to pass. Tears started to fall, growing in volume as he stumbled closer to their only casualty that day. Once the firebender had reached Wan's body, he collapsed over it, howling in pain.
"WAN! WAN! COME BACK! COME BACK!.." Zuko and the others felt the firebender's sorrow flow over them. The firebender's name was Huang. Wan was his lover.
Suddenly a noise shattered the wave of sorrow. The thin man rose from his unconscious state, only waking to find all his comrades dead. "Y-y-y-y-you're all monsters! Every last one of you!" the man yelled in a frenzy.
Liang stepped forward towards this man. "In order to protect our kind and redeemed lord, I gladly wear the mantle of 'monster,'" he declared before silencing the thin man by giving him a thin, red third eye.
"My lord, we must go," said Ahdou, the firebender who wrapped his enemy in fire.
Zuko turned to look at the still grieving Huang. "But what about..."
The other firebender, Ning, put his hand on Zuko's shoulder. "Wan knew what he was getting in to. We all did. Huang will understand. Come, we'll give Wan a proper burial."
Twenty minutes later, the five men constructed a makeshift funeral pyre. Then, all together, they set Wan's body aflame, returning one who had been blessed by fire back to fire. Zuko though about Wan, the one who opened him up to the others. Those bandits were scum, fucking lowlife dirtier-than-platapus-bear-shit scum. They had attacked with murderous intent before they found out the Fire Lord was their target. Was this the world he had helped to create? This world without war, but still the innocent, like Wan, were killed without mercy. This world where people, like Liang, wore the title "monster" so others, like Zuko, could be kept clean. This world where people cry and rage for their beloved ones who were taken away before their time, and who can never return. This world where the past seemed unescapable.
End of Chapter One
Umm yeah... If you liked it, please review. If you are confused about the "Blo-lo-lo-lo-loop" thing, please watch "Charlie the Unicorn 2" (which I also do not own).