Iroh drained the cup of the last of his tea, placed it on the corner of the table next to him, and leaned back against the wall. "So," he said, stroking his beard, "you read in a letter that Ozai isn't your father and were instantly ready to walk away from your life as Fire Lord, leave the throne to Azula, and take up the life of a commoner in a peasant village?"
"Well, yes," Zuko answered.
Iroh slammed one fist down on the table, slapped his forehead with his other hand, and screamed, "Now he tells me!"
"What do you mean?" Zuko asked, bewildered.
Iroh held his hands up as his gaze alternated between the ceiling and his nephew as he wailed, "That's all it took? All I had to do to make you give up your ambition of taking the throne and becoming Fire Lord was tell you 'Ozai isn't your father'?! I spent years reasoning, arguing, begging and pleading with you, trying to get you to come to that very conclusion, to make you content with a commoner's life and stop longing for the throne, and this letter managed to do it in seconds?! No matter how many times I told you to give up on finding the Avatar, you refused because you wanted 'my honor, my throne!' When you eventually found him and I told you to give up chasing him because that wouldn't solve anything, you refused because if you had no hope of regaining your throne, life wasn't worth living to you! When I tried to get you to settle down to a commoner's life in Ba Sing Se, you would have none of it – all you wanted was to be a prince; you couldn't stand the thought of settling down to a future working in a tea shop! Even after that critical spiritual metamorphosis you went through, you still couldn't let it go! I begged you to ask yourself what you really wanted, and what did you decide? You wanted to be the prince and heir to the throne! That was all you ever wanted! You wanted it so badly, you betrayed me and helped Azula conquer the Earth Kingdom and kill a young boy! And, apparently, I could have avoided all of that just by telling you Ozai wasn't your father, and you would have instantly and entirely given up all ambition of ruling the Fire Nation and just wanted to be normal and live a peaceful life... if only I'd known it was that easy! You put me through all those years of work and all those months of imprisonment for nothing!"
Zuko pounded the table himself as he screamed back, "Don't start with me, Uncle! If anyone's got the right to complain, it's me!"
"You?" Sokka exclaimed.
Zuko turned to his left and pointed at Sokka and Katara. "Yes, me!" he repeated. "For all the unnecessary grief you put me through!"
"What are you talking about?" Katara demanded.
"You know what I was expecting when I asked you let me bring Azula along? Remember what happened when I tried to join your group? When I offered my services to help you by teaching Aang Firebending? You don't remember how you mistrusted me and adamantly refused to let me join you and how hard you made it for me and refused to believe or forgive me until I'd proven I was on your side, and even after that, Katara mistrusted me so much, she threatened to kill me if I made one false move? Well, I guess I shouldn't be surprised you were so readily willing to work with Azula – she gets everything easier than I do, after all! Oh, sure, you protested against the idea at first... for about a minute! Didn't take very much for me to convince you we'd be safe with her, did it? Sure, she'd always been more dangerous than me, you had even more reason to hate her than you did me, and, between conquering Ba Sing Se and killing (okay, temporarily killing) Aang, she did way more things far unforgivable than I ever did! You had even more reason to refuse to let Azula join your group than you did with me! How many death threats did you make to her, Katara? Ever get mad at her for what she did to your boyfriend? How nice of all of you to be so much more accepting of her than you were of me! Glad you don't hold grudges for things like attempted murder!"
"What?!" Katara yelped. "You're blaming us for this?!" She pointed across the room at Ursa. "If anyone's to blame, it's her!"
"Me?" Ursa gasped.
"Yes, you!" Katara yelled. "You're the one who had a surefire, lethal, colorless, odourless, untraceable poison and no qualms about using it when you needed to! Why didn't you use it as soon as you could after the Fire Lord and his son kidnapped you? Or at least after Ozai bragged that he killed your boyfriend? You could have saved us all this trouble!"
"Don't lecture me about my past!" Ursa threw her teacup aside, and it shattered in the floor as she marched towards Katara. "Do you have any idea what I had to go through? Forced to marry a man I didn't love, break the heart of the man I truly loved for his own protection, married to a thoroughly evil man with no redeeming qualities and no love for me at all... the most cliché experience possible for a woman! Oh, what I wouldn't give for a husband whom I was betrothed to but still liked enough that the arrangement was satisfying to us both, who actually loved me for awhile and whom I grew to genuinely love until he turned more and more evil, while it broke my heart to watch! That should have been my life, but, no, it was just the same story everyone's heard a million times! Do you have any idea how boring that was?!"
"Drop it you two!" Sokka ordered, stepping between the two women. "The only one you should be yelling at is Zuko. He's the one who apparently forgot everything he learned as a fugitive and part of our group and turned back into the stupid, foolhardy risk-taker who couldn't come up with an intelligent plan to save his life! The guy who helped me break out of the Boiling Rock would never have come up with a plan this stupid!"
"Hey, are you forgetting I'm still the Fire Lord?" Zuko snapped.
Sokka scoffed. "Pfft, 'Fire Lord?' Now, that doesn't make sense. A Fire Lord wouldn't leave his nation at the beginning of a crucial transition period to go on a wild snipe-goose chase with a bunch of kids. Or if he did, he would take a squadron of soldiers, to keep an eye on the psychotic sister he insisted on bringing along, if for nothing else. But then, anyone with half a brain wouldn't have brought her along anyway, since we needed her for nothing after she told you to where to look! You know, this crazy idea might have made a fragment of sense when we were just a ragtag bunch of rebel fighters, wandering and hiding and fleeing for our lives, but for the Fire Lord, it made no sense!"
"You all agreeing to it made even less sense!" Zuko screamed, getting in Sokka's face.
"I can't believe we let you talk us into taking your sister!" Sokka retorted.
"I can't believe you let me do it!" Zuko shouted.
"I can't believe you wrote that stupid letter!" Katara yelled at Ursa.
"Don't try to blame me for that!" Ursa yelled back at her. "I had to write it because of Ozai's voice! It required Zuko to go through something like that!"
"Which I already did!" Zuko reminded her, and said mockingly, " 'Zuko, Avatar Roku is your great-grandfather! Reborn in you is the all the strife of the war, the struggle between good and evil, the opposition between Fire Lord Sozin and Avatar Roku... oops, never mind, just forget all that, never applied to you! It's actually much more cliché – Zuko, Ikem is your father!' Hah! What is this, a new trend?" He turned to Aang. "Your next incarnation will probably have enemies who turn out to be long lost brothers or something."
"Leave Aang alone!" Katara warned him.
"Or what, you'll make me paralyze you by holding your arm behind your back?" Zuko asked sardonically.
"You've got nothing to complain about!" Katara shouted in the Fire Lord's face. "None of it was true anyway!"
"Making all of this pointless!" Zuko screamed in exasperation, pulling at his hair with both hands.
"Oh, it would have been better if it was true?" Sokka asked sarcastically.
"It could have been worse," Iroh conceded. "That letter could have claimed I was his father."
"Now that would have actually been interesting," Ursa declared.
The argument went on, and the three figures slouched against the wall continued to watch.
"So glad I was not involved in this," said Mai, before taking a sip of her tea.
"That makes two of us," said Toph, doing likewise.
"You're lucky," Mai told the younger girl. "You always manage to stay out of these ridiculous farces."
"I'm just too awesome for such shenanigans," Toph said with a justifiably smug smirk.
"I tried to tell him," said Aang, shaking his head. "I told Zuko this was a stupid plan, I told him he was being stupid about that letter..."
"You never should have let him leave the Fire Nation in the first place," said Toph. "If he didn't want to take a group of guards to look for his mom, you should have just volunteered to do it for him, as his friend and as the Avatar. How did you plan to further your 'new era of love and peace' by taking the new Fire Lord of a still-very-unstable nation off on a wacky field trip?"
Aang sighed. "Yeah, I know," he admitted. "Maybe I should stick with you for a while, Mai – you're the only one who seems to be doing anything awesome these days."