It seemed these days all he did was learn. He learned what he was – and what he wasn't. He learned how to live. He learned because they taught him.
Sokka taught him how to hunt. One day the little ragtag group of benders was running dangerously low on food. "Rice congee again Katara?" the scrawny boy complained. "Where's the meat?"
The waterbender in question stomped with a huff, a dusting of furious color tinting her cheeks. "Why don't you make all of our meals then!"
"Sheesh, Sugar Queen," the blind earthbender commented wryly, a finger digging in her ear. "That time of the month already?"
Sokka clapped his hands over his head and chanted lalalala at the top of his voice. "Lalalala. Not. Listening! Keep your girl talk out of my dinner!"
Katara ignored them both. Hands on her hips, she continued to glare down at Sokka. "If you're so tired of congee, why don't you find something to make next time?"
"Because," he said, waving his hands in way of explanation, "we're all a team, Katara. Zuko here, he's the fiery offense, Toph is our own personal metalbending badass, Aang's the Avatar, you're the watery defense and you cook all our meals – delicious, delicious meals!" he added hastily when her expression darkened at him. "And I'm the plan guy. And I'm not sure if you know this, but being the plan guy is really strenuous and exhausting. So no meat, no plans. Easy as rice cakes.
"Which is all we've been eating, lately," he muttered under his breath.
"Well, plan guy," Katara, who thankfully for Sokka's sake seemed not to have heard his comment, hissed, "why don't we switch things up a bit – if we're such a team – and you cook for once?"
"Sorry, Katara, but there's no 'I' in team. There is, however, 'meat'."
The group was spared from Katara's explosion (and from a lecture on the importance of meat) when Sokka agreed to go hunting the next morning, enlisting Zuko's help.
As the sun brushed across the western sky and filled Zuko's veins with light, he decided to wait for Sokka to wake up. So he waited.
And waited.
And waited.
Finally when Katara got up to make breakfast and saw that her brother was still stubbornly clinging to his wrinkled bedroll, she whipped up the puddle of drool he'd amassed for himself in his dreams, and-
"OW!"
Zuko was glad he woke with the sun.
Half an hour later the summer sun had painted everything an orange hue, and leaves danced in the air as Sokka sighted down their target. "So," he whispered, holding his spear aloft, aiming at the baby anteater sloth in the clearing before them. "You just aim – wait for the perfect moment – and -!"
The spear flew through the clearing, hitting a few trees on the way and making an absolute racket. The anteater sloth looked quizzically at the noise, then hobbled slowly away.
"…I see why we don't eat meat more often," Zuko commented dryly.
They hunted the rest of the day. Each hit and miss, each drop of sweat that rolled down his back, made Zuko further appreciate just how hard it had been on the Southern Water Tribe when their men had left to fight in the war. Because that left Sokka to provide for his family, for his community. The lives of everyone he'd cared about had rested on his shoulders.
Zuko thought he better understood why Sokka liked meat so much.
Toph taught him how to see.
It had been a long day at the Southern Air Temple. He'd awoken to the sunrise as always, its life burning in his veins even though he'd barely gotten any sleep. Then, he'd sat through a cold – cold – breakfast with the rest of the group. He saw the steam rising from everyone else's bowls, and his jaw clenched with disbelief; had she really woken up early just to make sure his portion was cold? Had she gone through that much effort just to spite him?
He was a firebender. He could have easily heated up his icy food. But that would be like giving in to her, like losing whatever fight she kept instigating between them. So Zuko had forced down the cold, bland mush in front of him and carried on with his day.
…Which was getting progressively worse. After hours of training the Avatar (in which he'd singed his own clothes twice, let his flame go out four times, and tried to give up so often Zuko's temples began to throb) he went to lie down in his bedroll. He was just drifting off to sleep when an angry welt found its way onto his shoulder.
"Oops," Katara said, redirecting her water whip back into her waterskin, "didn't see you there."
She stalked off with her nose in the air, refusing to remain in his presence for a second longer.
What was her problem?
"Hey Sparky," Toph called nonchalantly from behind a pillar. "Girl problems?"
He answered almost against his will. "She hates me."
A ghost of a grin flicked across the girl's face. "And I'm the blind one."
She let that sink in, before her voice softened the slightest bit. "Sugar Queen doesn't hate anyone. She's too motherly for that."
"Hah. Yeah, right."
But Toph's face became serious and she looked directly at him (how unnerving to be stared at by a blind girl), all traces of her joke gone as she said, "Katara doesn't hate you. Trust me on that."
And she left him sitting there, wondering out of the two of them, who was really blind.
Aang taught him to really, truly fear.
"If violence isn't the answer, what are you going to do when you face my father?"
It was a simple question, but the answer went unspoken; that or there was no answer, and the Avatar truly had no concept of how to end this war.
How was he supposed to believe they had a chance during Sozin's Comet if Aang thought he could gluebend the fatherlord into being 'good again'?
Zuko feared and prepared for the worst. (There was no hoping for the best; either they would win or they wouldn't and after all Zuko wasn't much of an optimist.)
So while Aang fell into a repetitive pattern of I don't want and why me, Zuko drilled him continuously in redirecting lightning and trained Aang to kill his own father.
Zuko tried not to think about it, directing all thought into in one arm, through the stomach, out the other until his arms felt leaden and he could fall into a dreamless sleep each night.
Zuko feared.
Katara taught him just about everything else.
At first it was how to put up with an angry PMSing waterbender. But that goes without saying.
Then, when he offered to take her to Yon Rha, she taught him that there are two sides to Katara, a dark and a light. Aang and Sokka may not have been able to understand that, but Zuko accepted it for what it was – accepted her for who she was – and took her to him.
When Katara forgave Zuko, she taught him that he was worth her forgiveness. It was one of the sweetest lessons yet.
Until their lessons turned to sparring matches on the Ember Island beach at night and they learned just how much steam it took to make the sand stick to them like mud and leave them panting in the humidity. He learned she was slower if he aimed to her left, and to always drag their bouts as far away from the lapping waves as possible, to try and give himself an advantage.
Then he learned that there was no advantage to Katara. They were equally well matched and it would be impossible to best her. But she couldn't best him either, and sometimes that was enough.
Katara taught him how to believe in himself. When she said, "He'll forgive you. I know he will," he hadn't believed her but he learned that she was right and that maybe, he should listen to her more often. He learned that Katara could be as gentle and caring with him as she had been cruel in the past, and while he accepted all of her facets he liked this one the best.
When she agreed to join him against his sister on the day of Sozin's Comet, he learned that they could overcome anything if they did it together.
It wasn't until he saw a shock of blue lightning hurtling towards her that he learned what she meant to him. But it didn't stop there.
Seventy years later, Zuko can attest that if nothing else, his time with her has been a learning experience.
"Hurry up, will you?" she said, bustling through the snow in her parka and leaving him in her wake.
"Katara, I'm eighty-seven."
"Says Mr. I'll-Walk-From-The-North-Pole."
Zuko smiled at the memory. "Would you really have left me if Aang hadn't intervened?"
Katara tapped her chin in mock thought. "Well as I remember it, a certain hotheaded firebender had just tried to kidnap him in the snow and then walk back to the Fire Nation."
"And as I remember it, your memory isn't what it used to be."
A wave of snow rose but melted before it could reach his face, and as he retaliated with a burst of flame he was sixteen again on Ember Island, sparring in the sand with the waterbender who'd taught him so much.