Introduction
Fire Lord Zuko squeezes the hand of his unconscious wife as he whispers 'I am sorry…'
His heart is filled with guilt and sorrow; a few tears escape his already swollen eyes.
Just a few hours before, they had been involved in yet another intense fight. As usual she accused him of cheating, while she ended up being the cheater. As usual he told her to seek treatment for her mental illness, and offended she refused. Their yelling match ended with Zuko's request for a divorce. Of course she declined and ran off.
Later he found her inside their bathtub, unconscious, as pale as snow, fully naked, her blood gushing from her wrists into the already red water. It was his worse nightmare. For a few seconds he stood paralyzed in shock. He felt like fainting, vomiting, screaming. Then instinct took over, he dragged her out of the bathtub, wrapped a towel around her frail body, and carried her as fast as he could into the palace hospital. Water and blood dripped behind them.
The minutes he spent in the waiting room were the most suffocating in his life.
Finally he was allowed inside her room. The doctors had stitched her up, but great amounts of blood loss left her unstable.
As his wife fights for her life, Fire Lord Zuko reminisces the last 6 years of his life, his unhappy marriage, his reign stuck between team Avatar and the Zhao family, all his regrets.
A/N:In this AtlA version the Zhao family ( =Zhao and his children) are very powerful, they control the Fire Nation military, which leads Zuko to seek alliance with them to defeat the Fire Lord. Once in power, he has to mediate between team Avatar and the Zhao family, who keep clashing with each other in terms of ideology and methods. In addition Zuko becomes trapped in an arranged marriage with a girl suffering from borderline personality disorder (BPD).
The next chapters, Zuko's memories, will be longer. This story contains violence and sex.
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