Author's note: revamped for clarity. And authorial vanity :)
Disclaimer: I do hereby disclaim most thoroughly. Please don't execute me. (Did I ever tell you guys the story about my TCK father mixing up the English words prosecute and execute? It's a good one...)
In that deadly darkness, the faculties I had always depended on collapsed. My intellect was useless; my emotions were dead; my will was impotent; my ego was shattered. But from time to time, deep in the thickets of my inner wilderness, I could sense the presence of something that knew how to stay alive even when the rest of me wanted to die. The soul is like a wild animal…tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy, and self-sufficient: it knows how to survive in hard places.
(Parker J. Palmer, Hidden Wholeness)
Impetuous, imperious, she lets blue eyes flick haughtily at guards whose uniforms, she notes with disgust, haven't changed from an unnerving shade of scab-red.
As she passes them with dismissive, arrogant strides, she refuses to let her hand rest on the flask at her side, just as she will refuse to let it rest on her belly in a few months' time. Her body language will not betray her. Zuko deserves to know first, before anyone else. Certainly before his guards, who gossip like sailors and know far more than they should about their ruler's history with her.
Luckily the father and daughter walking quietly next to her provide a distraction. Guilt floods through her as she realizes what her thoughts just voiced – in what universe could this situation possibly be lucky? – but with characteristically annoying perceptiveness her partner notices and shifts the sleeping, tearstained little one to his other shoulder to free up the shockingly large hand he lays gently on her arm.
The gentleness is antithetical to his energetic grief, but she doesn't know how to point that out without sounding like an insensitive bitch, so she braces herself for whichever annoyingly wise platitudes decide to burst from his wronged mouth for the tenth time today. They flood out, a string of semantically empty vocalizations: "Quit it. No guilt trips. The only way to get over this is to find the small gains big losses leave behind"
She may be a master at poker-faces – poker-bodies – but her eyes still roll helplessly. "Fatherhood's made you Iroh's little clone. Without the funny. Would you quit pointing out how irrational my guilt is? What's so wrong with a little guilt? I'm human."
She shuts up when the guards go a hint to quiet, their heads determinedly not turning towards her, ears sharpened in sudden hunger for new gossip about the Avatar and his wife. So much for a private life. She breathes deep, and tries to let her irritation at the information vultures leave with the used-up air she exhales.
Forgiving the people who blindly fought for the Fire Lord is more difficult than forgiving Zuko himself, if not as inconceivable as forgiving his life-destroyer of a fa- of a sire.
Zuko's true father, being a true father, is content to pour tea in Ba Sin Se, elegantly treading the fine line between wise mentor and unhealthy co-dependent. Earning a living despite his no-longer-hidden nationality.
Iroh's ability to wheedle forgiveness for himself trumps every one of his countrymen's. She smiles instinctively at the thought, then bites down on her tongue to stop herself from laughing out loud as she pictures the crafty old man's gleeful reaction to finding out that, even in memory, he's amusing enough to destroy her poker face.
Thoughts chase each other through her restless mind, each somewhat related to the last but not necessarily to its predecessor. It's like playing that midwinter game by herself, the one she and Sokka taught to the younger children to distract them from tragedy's shockwaves, so very long ago, when tragedy was childish anguish at the loss of the soft, warm presence of Mother.
Yes, like the winter game, not like the tragedy, just like the game and nothing beyond that. A whispered message passing through a huddled line of ears. Metaphors morphing, within seconds, into a chaotic jumble of wide open mouths howling with laughter at the nonsense the original message turns into.
Laughter, yes. Laughter and elder brothers and earthy, kindhearted greybeards who smell of jasmine and clean sweat. Men who make grief bloom into healthy laughter when it could be festering into anguish.
From flask to Sokka to Iroh. Nearly full-circle.
Enough wandering, she tell her thoughts sternly, proceeding to redirect them to the hall she is now striding through. Ideally, Zuko would have already stripped it of several dynasties' worth of expensive, pointless ornaments, sold to help with the costs of rebuilding the destruction a century of his people's warmongering has wrought on all four nations.
She pictures it. The lack of gold and jade would give this place an echoing, wide-open feel not unlike that of the Air Temple where she re-met him; that bright, wide-open, dusty place out of which he emerged, spiritlike, scraggly hair masking the size of his scar while hard-earned grace saved their ungrateful asses.
No one outside of their little group believes it, but Zuko has always been the resident martyr/scapegoat/sacrificial lamb. It's long past time they make it up to him.
Now she can set the clock back to that moment years ago, in an Earth Kingdom dungeon underground.
A second chance, she hopes. For both of them. For her to forgive, and for him to accept forgiveness. After all, forgiveness has never been her strength, much less her life goal.
The little one next to her has changed that, though. Protectiveness, motherhood – these change one's priorities, one's worldview, more permanently than any sea change.
No sea-change, this, no incoming tide ready to pull back into the ocean within hours. No, this is a shifting of immutable land-masses, of paradigms never before revealed as shiftable, much less shift-worthy.
She arrives in the training room. Mai meets her with a glare that somehow contains compassion, reaches for the little one. "I'll put her to bed," she says, with a jokingly suspicious glance at Katara, gaze sliding towards Zuko before she needles "I booby-trap him in my sleep. Even if you get away from Chaperone here, I'm warning you, one step out of line… my cruel streak doesn't stop at stilettos"
Mai leaves, crooning to the child in her arms in a tone Katara can't reconcile with her sharp, fierce edges. Mai will make a good mother, Katara realizes in horror, not because she's a natural, but because she's learned from Azula's mistakes.
Zuko's chest gleams in the redness that tells them twilight is only minutes away. Winter here means little more than the likelihood of warm rain, so they step into his mother's garden after he awkwardly slides into a yukata. She pushes ahead of him, just in case the blush she feels coming on becomes visible.
She's here for a good reason, she thinks, and this time when her fingers itch to rest on the flask, she lets them go where they will. Lets them stay long enough for him to notice. It doesn't take long. The steady, calm rhythm of his steps behind her falters in less than a minute, but he doesn't say anything. She plays oblivious, so he won't feel guilted into saying anything.
"Dude," Sokka starts, and her heart clenches a little, because it's a lighthearted tone she hasn't heard enough of for the last three months.
He's the one who twisted her arm into coming. She's all for letting sleeping monsters lie dormant, but Sokka's new, grieving self is all for closure, for tying up loose ends while it's still possible to.
"I am soooo not sticking around for this. You'll just end up doing it anyway, and then I'll have Mai on my tail for the rest of my life, and I refuse to make an orphan of that kid."
He laughs when they cringe at the – does he really think of that statement as a joke? "You both really need to learn how to lighten up. Whistle in the dark. Look for the small gains.."
"OK," interrupts a frazzled Fire Lord, "your newfound monkhood is killing me. Go wrestle with the tigers my idiot[U1] wife keeps in the Lotus Courtyard, or plan your next prank on the Minister of Finance."
Katara's glad Zuko agrees with her. She misses the violent outbursts. This new Sokka scares her, more than a little, because she doesn't know how much of this apparent reverence for anything alive is actually becoming ingrained in his thought patterns. If the monster comes back, she wonders, will he be able to protect himself? She dreamed, that first night, of him writing under Its claws, dying over and over again, sacrificing himself first for Suki, then for his daughter, for Katara, for the granny that lived down the road, dying over and over again in place of each villager threatened by the hideous being that burnt pregnant Suki alive, left her charred, large-bellied corpse for Katara's brother to find.
She tries to stop the traitorous thought in its tracks, but it crashes into her like a starving wolf, all teeth and claws, tearing away the fantasies that allow her to go through the motions and revealing the bare, broken bones of what's left behind. He's developed a reverence for any life but his own, and she worries that if he loses the little one, the daughter he has left, he'll axe himself altogether.
Sokka has too much caution around the living, too much recklessness in his body's grief-shaped movements for that caution to extend to his own life.
Please, she begs without words, please go wrestle with the predator cats in the Lotus Courtyard, kill one or two with your newfound sword, a little cathartic killing, a little self-preservation, a return to your old hunter self. Please prove to me that you're not as broken as I can tell you are, under that veneer of healthy grief.