Summary: Measure Each Step side-story: Iroh confronts Ozai during the events of Book 2. You should definitely read Book 2 through the end of the epilogue before you read this. Really.

Iroh was filled with vague déjà vu as he walked into the iron prison. Unlike his journey years ago to fetch Azula, today he was not here to offer forgiveness and a second chance. Ozai deserved nothing but the noose.

He hadn't seen his brother since before the war ended. The change startled him. Even after all these years, Iroh expected silk and oil. A stranger sat on the linen pallet: Ozai was fat, his head was shaved, and his beard was unkempt. As vain a man as he was, he had let himself go. He looked older than Iroh.

Azula had loved this man as her father and offered him more care than Ozai would have ever received from anyone else, and Ozai had squandered it all for nothing. Iroh thought of his daughter for a moment…what a fierce, prideful, vexing sensation she evoked in him. How had Ozai thrown her away?

Iroh looked at this man who was his younger brother and wondered how they had come to this.

Perhaps it was no surprise that Ozai had turned out as he had. He'd always envied Iroh, even when they were little boys. Ozai was a failure at most things in his life, something Azulon had never failed to point out. He was a terrible tactician, a pompous firebender that relied upon flash and flutter more than strength and heat, and he'd never lived up to the ideal Azulon held for his sons.

What Ozai had failed to realize was that Iroh was a failure too.

Iroh had never lived up to Azulon's demands, but unlike Ozai, Iroh had taken pride in his failures. Iroh had learned how to hold his quiet rebellions inside him. Ozai never managed it. He'd always tried to fulfill Azulon's every wish with apparent anxiety. Azulon had sensed that desperation as easily as he'd sensed Iroh hadn't needed his approval. He'd rewarded Ozai's emotional weakness with dismissal and Iroh's independence with approval.

Ozai was a product of their father.

It was a tradition in their family: bad parenting. Even as a proud young man, Iroh had vowed to himself as soon as he was married that he would break that tradition. He had with Lu Ten…and then he'd led his son to his death at war. He hadn't with Azula. He'd failed to hold her close as a baby, to smile at her and praise her as a little girl, and he'd failed to protect her from Ozai—then and now.

He could close his eyes and picture Azula standing in the middle of the gardens with an arrow in her throat, watching as the second slipped between her ribs, Zuko's hand outstretched too late to save her from it. She'd been smiling.

He had failed her as a father.

But Iroh's one true comfort and his greatest pride was his certainty that Azula and Zuko would break that terrible tradition of their family. They would love their children as they had not been loved, and they would teach their children what was right in life.

Ozai began to laugh softly within the cell. His chains rattled. "Why hello, big brother."

"You don't have the right to call me that."

"Are you here to make me beg forgiveness, to say that I'm so so sorry for putting my daughter in her place? When did she die? Tell me it was after hours of screaming pain, in the arms of her waterbender whore." Ozai's lip curled with his sneer.

"No," Iroh said quietly. "I'm here to tell you something else."

Ozai grinned as he turned to face Iroh. What had happened to the happy little boy Iroh had once known? "Go on then. I haven't got all day."

"I had an affair with Ursa."

Ozai rocked back and laughed. "Oh, a confession? I forgive you." Ozai gave an arm rolling bow with a smirk. "I know you're fucking her. I certainly can't blame you; she's such a pretty face. When I fucked my whore, sometimes I closed my eyes and pictured her. Do you make her scream, Brother?"

"A pretty face," Iroh repeated softly. "That's all you ever saw when you looked at her. Ursa is much more than that. I love her. I loved her then."

Ozai began to frown as he sensed the incongruity of Iroh's statement. Iroh continued, "I loved her very much, and I never took for granted when she took me into her bed while you were away on your failed campaign."

Ozai's face stretched in shock.

"I did take for granted that Azula was born nine months later."

Ozai's chest began to heave; his expression turned to horror. There was no doubt in Iroh's mind that he had a grain of doubt about Azula's birth time and her birth weight. Ursa held fast to the claim that Azula had been born early, but as prideful as Ozai was, he must have wondered.

"No!" He snarled. "No! You're lying!"

"Azula is my daughter, Ozai. She was never yours."

"No!" Ozai lurched to his feet with a screaming snarl, rattling his restraints as he lunged at Iroh. Iroh didn't flinch. He watched Ozai's eyes fill with tears. "Azula is mine! She's mine!"

Iroh wondered how Ozai could feel such pain at the truth after he'd ordered Azula's murder. Yet he knew despite himself; Azula was the last thing Ozai could claim in this world, named for a man he could never make proud. Iroh barely restrained himself from putting a fiery fist through Ozai's head. "Even if she were, you lost the right to call her your daughter the day you ordered her death."

"Then I'm doubly glad she's dead," Ozai whispered.

Now Iroh hit him. Ozai dropped to his knees on the floor, a hand to his swollen cheek, eyes wide in shock.

"She is not dead," Iroh replied quietly. "And she will not die. She will grow strong again and continue on and never think of you again. She will command fire again. She will rise up and sit on the throne again. She will live to see her own children sit on the throne and carry on the legacy. And she will do so as my daughter."

Ozai made a sound between a sob and a snarl.

Iroh looked down at Ozai. "You will be hanged tonight. When you are dangling by your neck, paralyzed and unable to breathe, look into Azula's eyes and see that your petty insults, your abuse, and your every attempt to mold her into you have failed. And then…then die."

-end-