This is for all of my friends on LiveJournal who refused to participate in Adopt-a-Plotbunny.
It's all your fault, you know.
It's a game they play, the deposed king and his faithless successor. Zuko demands to know where his mother is, and Ozai answers him with silence or taunts him with cryptic reminiscences. Her absence is all that binds them now, a chain as delicate as spider-silk and as unyielding as star-steel. When chance allows, Ozai twists it ruthlessly, desiring to see that high-crowned head humbled, those stubborn knees brought low.
You are so like her, he murmurs, and when the boy stretches his neck to hear more, a hawk straining after poisoned meat, he whispers, She was a traitor, too.
OoOoOoOoO
His captors are not cruel: twice daily he is fed, and twice escorted into the yard to exercise, after which he returns to find his chamberpot emptied and his linens aired or changed. By his son's order he is served in silence, so that his ambiguous status (what style befits an uncrowned Fire Lord?) need not become an occasion of lèse-majesté.
These courtesies Ozai scorns as cowardice, the hypocrisy of one who pardons what he dares not damn. Without the Avatar to prop you up, you would fall, he accuses Zuko, and accepts the boy's mute headshake as proof.
OoOoOoOoO
He takes the air reluctantly, uneasy now beneath the sun. At dawn the whole valley blushes like a maiden at her lover's fond approach, but that heady passion no longer animates him. The noonday heat on his skin is merely warmth, not power; the darkening sky, an empty invitation to rest. The Avatar has cast his spirit into perpetual eclipse: Ozai wonders whether this is how a corpse feels, shrouded for the pyre, and whether the only ardor he will know henceforth is that final burning.
He learns to prefer the cold stone walls of his cell, which excuse all.
OoOoOoOoO
His son stands ghostlike on the threshold, robed in white. "Azula is dead," he says.
Ozai attends with interest to the tale: she hanged herself in her chamber, by a rope of scraps torn from the seams of her garments and braided secretly in the empty watches of the night, while her attendants slept. A tragic end, and not implausible -- and all bodies look the same, once they are ash. The Phoenix King eyes his heir with the first, faint stirrings of respect. He had not thought the boy so politic.
"Well done," he says. "You are learning, at last."
OoOoOoOoO
At first Ozai believes he has miscounted the days between his son's visits, but the time comes when there can be no mistake: the usurper has fled the field, leaving the true Fire Lord in possession. He stands in the center of his cell, eyes closed, arms spread wide in benediction, as if all the pride of his kingship has been restored. For Zuko has failed: now he must live and die in the shadow of his father's victory.
Ozai laughs until the walls ring with the echoes, his exultation as loud as a flourish of drums, and as hollow.
OoOoOoOoO
In his dreams he knows the truth: that no man can take away another's bending, not even the Avatar. He will rise from the ashes of his own defeat to purify the world as he has been purified. Loss is an illusion, like separation, like death. He burns the Earth Kingdom from shore to shore, and new forests spring up from the seeds of the old. He melts the polar ice, and lion-turtles swim in the rising seas. He cradles his daughter's body in his arms, and at his touch her tormented eyes open.
Father, she says. Let me go.
OoOoOoOoO
Ozai looks up from his dinner to see his son, all unexpected, usher a cloaked figure into the cell. The turtle-duck soup sours in his belly: Am I a spectacle now? He turns away, watching sidelong as this new visitor lifts chapped hands to push back the cloak's deep hood.
She is thinner than he remembers, less elegant, her fair skin freckled and her hair coarse. But she kneels to face him with the same grace, the proud lines of her face (even marred by pity) still queenly, still lovely.
He weeps to see her and know himself truly powerless.