Things Discovered
You are thirteen years old, and you never thought life would ever get much worse after the disappearance of your mother, and you are wrong. Azula always lies, and you don't always like her, but you did not believe life to be too complicated. Thirteen and a little naïve, the supposition was that with hard work and ambition would come mastery of firebending technique, with a few years and following the laws of courtship would come love and a proper marriage, and with many years and the untimely death of your father would come the ascension to the throne and title of the Fire Lord. These were your claims to life, but it turns out, you were really sleeping, and it is at age thirteen when life finally decides to wake you up.
It takes only one day for everything to fall down.
You never thought your father could be so cruel, and you still don't quite understand it when it happens, but only take it as it is, and set upon a new path. You will find the Avatar, and you begin to believe if you do, everything will return to normal. You do not realize that this is faulty thinking, that things could be rebuilt over and over and over again, but could never be built exactly the same.
You find the Avatar and then you lose him, and you discover he is only a child, but this changes nothing. You find you rely and care deeply for your uncle, but this changes nothing. You find your father has put a reward on your head and your sister is determined to take you in, but this, too, changes nothing. You tell yourself, all this is temporary, and eventually, eventually everything will return back to normal. You tell yourself, you will get what you deserve, and in this, you are actually right. Only, you do not realize that what you deserve and what you think you deserve are two very different things.
You discover you are not meant to be shackled by the life commonplace, serving tea in a tea shop, but this, you already knew. You later discover also that you are not meant to be the puppet of your father. The life you always thought you wanted turns out not to be what you want at all, and instead of finding happiness, you find unexplainable anger in great amounts that turns to devastation when you finally open your eyes and see what is good and what is bad.
Your uncle is good, your father is bad, and by way of serving your father, you, too, are bad. This is correctable, and you set yourself upon a path of reformation and swear you will seize honor by becoming a faithful servant of justice, and this in turn, leads to you bowing down to the Avatar and claiming debts to the past. Eventually, you are taken in, maybe more tolerated than accepted, but you take this all in with stride because you remember that you once told yourself that you will get what you deserve, and you do not deserve their trust or goodwill, at least, not yet.
Toph accepts you first, and her attitude towards you never really changes. From day one, she treats with you blasé nonchalance and immediately gives you a nickname you will never admit you sort of like. She beats you hard when you two spar—but she beats Aang hard, too, when they spar. Most importantly, she watches out for you in battle, and she trusts in you to watch out for her, so you do. All this comes from day one, and though she never offers much more from day two onwards, it is more than you could ever ask for, and you are grateful.
Sokka is wary, but you discover, his extreme laid-back, carefree attitude is what becomes his downfall, or your good luck. For Sokka, trust does not come as easily as it does from Toph, but he does not dig his heels deep into the past and grudge you for it. By the end, the two of you can fight back-to-back in perfect unison, but you don't think he really likes you very much, and you cannot blame him, because honestly, you don't think you really like him very much, either. He will never be your friend, but he will always be someone who is important.
Aang is both. He told you once that he thought you two could be friends, and you thought with every fiber of your being that he was wrong, but the truth is, he was right. While you and Sokka can never quite get it right, you and Aang easily connect, and you suppose it has something to do with the fact that in the end, you two are both completely similar yet opposite.
Katara feared you, Katara pitied you, Katara hated you, and now, Katara… you're not quite sure, but maybe, she understands you, sort of. She no longer regards you with a look of pure loathing, but she doesn't turn to you that same softness in her tone or expression as when she turns to Toph or Sokka or Aang.
There comes a time, much later, when you are sitting alone with Katara, and neither you or her say much, because there is nothing much to say—or maybe too much to say, and you two never speak too much to each other, anyway. But this one time, after a stretch of time long past awkward and uncomfortable, she finally speaks to you with words that are more than the bare necessity since her last message of an impending death possibility.
She turns to you, and there is a hint of softness, but mostly apology, and she says, "Your father was wrong." It doesn't take long for the words to register in your head, but long enough for her to stand up and leave you alone. Katara is right; your father was wrong, but by now, you knew that, too.
Then there is the after, after the war, after the timely death of your father and ascension to the throne and title of the Fire Lord—not that you fought for it; you fought for Iroh to have it, but he refuses, and everyone says you must bear the crown, and it truly no longer has the same desire as it used to, but you take it because you realize this, too, is a role you must play to make the world right.
Life is still not easy in the after, as you quickly learn. Once you became good and not bad, you actually thought in the after, things would become much easier, but you were wrong; it is better, but never easy. You discover, also, that the Avatar truly is in many ways, your other half, because you were once lost then found, and now, it seems Aang was found and now lost. You wish the best for him, but bigger concerns occupy your sphere, and you tend to them dutifully.
Years later, you do marry, but you do not marry Mai, as you might have once thought. You do not follow the right laws of courtship, nor do you care, when the time comes. You marry because of necessity and propriety, and because the match offered is just too good to pass. You marry a very high prestigious noble, with both wealth and lineage behind a title, and she is not a Fire Nation noble, but an Earth Kingdom noble, and this turns out to be just what is best for your country, and what are you, but a servant to the state?
You marry Toph Bei Fong, and you would never have thought, not even the bare slightest passing, that you would marry the mere child when you were fighting alongside the ranks of the Avatar, no matter how much you sometimes preferred her company over the rest during those days. But, as you discover, you were wrong, once again, and you discover you are glad of it.
You do not expect to find love, but love finds you, and you learn that though you are Toph's penance, she is your retribution.
When love finds you, you find hope, and you hope long and hard, just as you do everything else. You hope, you hope, and you hope.
Moons come and go, and seasons move from one to the next, and then there comes another time. You sit with your wife in your uncle's home and the three of you take the most delicious jasmine tea. This is a time—a passing glance of happiness; it comes, it goes, and its departure does not sadden you. You long realized that this is how happiness is in its truest form, never permanent, but always like the waves of the ocean.
In the end, your life is the best kind. You are happy sometimes, and very unhappy other times, but you do the right thing and you are a good man; this is how you die, and that is what you find matters most.
Author's Note: This sort of popped up in my head as I was writing 'Surrender', and I wanted to experiment a bit with the second-person. Although this does fit in line with the universe of 'Surrender', it can be read alone.