Chapter Three: Ozai Reads His Mail
"Uncle," Zuko began.
"The answers you seek," Iroh replied, "are inside yourself."
Which was not, and had never been, an answer to the question 'is my ponytail stupid.' He didn't need Uncle to answer—it was a phoenix plume not a ponytail and it was practical not stupid and he couldn't do anything else while the bandages were on and they only just came off and it was easier to shave every day than to wonder whether he'd wake up with hair stuck in his scab which was a nightmare on par with that one about loose baby teeth falling out—but Uncle had been avoiding answering the question. And that made Zuko wonder if maybe, possibly, what the Water Tribe peasant had shouted was true.
"Uncle—"
"A man whose image reflects his true self is a crane wading through still waters. If it does not turn around, how is it to see the ripples it spreads behind it?"
"Uncle."
"Ah, Captain Zhao. What fortuitous timing!"
It was Commander Zhao, now. Zuko didn't have all the rank insignias memorized yet, but he knew Uncle did. And he knew Commander Zhao knew that Uncle did. But both of them smiled and pretended not to know what each other knew, and it was times like this that Zuko was almost glad he wasn't at court any more.
Though he'd be going back soon. Very soon.
Zhao was eyeing the Wani like a crocomander at a puppy-kitten buffet. "What happened to your ship, Prince Zuko?"
"I found the Avatar!" That was one exclamation point too many. Even the Avatar's name was his destined foe.
Zhao's mouth hung open, briefly. And Uncle didn't immediately invite the new Commander in for tea. Zuko wasn't sure which of these was the surer sign that he'd said something wrong.
He cleared his throat into his fist, and stood up straighter, which made him almost as tall as Uncle. "I found the Avatar. At the South Pole."
"Did you, now?" The puppy-kitten buffet was all-you-can-eat.
"I did," Zuko said. "And you're going to help me catch him."
"I am?" The crocomander hadn't eaten in three days.
"Prince outranks Commander," Zuko said, with the absolute confidence of someone waking from a month-long nightmare back to a world where everything made the simple sort of sense.
The crocomander choked.
Responses Zhao could have made, but didn't:
Banished prince. You don't outrank me, any of my men, any of your men. You don't even outrank my boots.
Wan Shi Tong keeps a library of everything you don't outrank. Hint: it's more than Ten Thousand Things.
Or, more concisely:
Your father should have aimed for your mouth.
The prince had been banished a month ago. Banished, exiled except for a mocking technicality, sent on a wild goose-snipe hunt until he figured out that 'banished' meant 'your presence is no longer required'. The Avatar hadn't been seen for a hundred years, the Avatar cycle had broken when the nomads burned, the Avatar was gone.
But General Iroh wasn't chuckling, and the Banished Prince's crew were banging dents out of his ship like the fate of the Fire Nation depended on it.
A Banished Prince held no rank. But a Banished Prince who'd found a legend in only a month? Zhao had a successful policy of bootlicking first, backstabbing second. He bowed, hand over fist.
"You do me honor, my Prince."
The Commander exchanged further pleasantries to the boy's half-beaming half-hideous face, avoided the General's all-smiling cold-fire stare, and went directly to his own ship to write to the Fire Lord.
In the Fire Lord's court, the Prince's banishment was a joke. The kind that wasn't funny so much as instructive: the kind to be laughed at when the Fire Lord was laughing, to make sure you were seen laughing, too.
Go and find the Avatar, the Fire Lord said. I'll welcome you home just as soon as you do. And off the little prince went, with his uncle waddling behind like a mother turtleduck whose own chicks had been eaten by a messenger hawk. Or an Earth Kingdom army.
It was a joke, until the first letter arrived.
(Not the Prince's letters—those were hawk exercise, and nothing more. Kindling with ink, piled on a table next to Ozai's real work, waiting for the Fire Lord to notice them enough to warrant burning. Words to a father who hadn't listened to a word past please.)
The Prince's mission was a joke, and then it wasn't.
The Prince was at the South Pole just in time to see the Avatar awaken. The Prince had fought against an ancient bending art and held his own, had captured a legend, the Prince was on his trail even after the Avatar crippled his ship in an escape after another legend crashed on his deck.
The Prince had flushed out their nation's greatest enemy in the same year the sun would go dark and the comet would return, a year where greatest weakness came before greatest strength with the absolute certainty of the heavens.
In the court of the Fire Lord, the nobles began to whisper a different punchline. The Fire Lord stopped laughing. Zhao received a hawk, the reply as swift as the original message.
Ozai shut himself in his rooms, and read his son's letters from the beginning.