"Mom?"
Ursa lifts her head up from the pillow too fast, the world spinning and spinning, and gestures him towards her. Today is a bad day, and those are getting more and more common as the years pass. "Come here, my love." He folds into her side and her breathing eases, just knowing he's there. "I won't let your father send you away. Your health isn't nearly good enough yet."
He was born a month early, her tiny, blue boy, small enough to fit inside cupped hands, and there was no spark in his eyes. Ozai had wanted to smother him right then and there, before his fluid-filled lungs could fail on their own. With all the strength in her hypovolemic body, she'd thrown herself in front of her son and refused to be moved.
"Dad says I need to toughen up." His voice is muffled in the fabric of her robe. "That I shouldn't be at home with you all day—"
"You should be." She presses her lips to the top of his head, inhales the clean, sweet smell of the soap he uses on his hair. "I'm your mother, your family. You wouldn't like—"
"Of course you'll like school," Iroh says in his booming voice. She didn't even notice him approach the doorway; he's rarely in the women's wing. "There's plenty of boys your own age there. Aren't you tired of only getting to play with your sister's friends?"
Zuko's eyes flit guiltily towards her, back again to Iroh's broad frame, filling the room without trying. He squirms in her grip. "... Yeah."
"Why don't you go ask Lu Ten about all the trouble he got into at the academy." Half the words out of her mouth to Azula are meant to scold, but she can't imagine quiet, eager-to-please Zuko ever getting into trouble like his profligate cousin. "He'll tell you there's nothing to worry about." Iroh pulls him out of the bed gently, guides him into the hallway. "I need to talk to your mother for a minute."
"I'm ill, brother," she says flatly; he wrinkles his nose and she knows he can smell the saké radiating off of her, exposing her lies. She can never decide how she feels about her husband's elder brother, but Zuko thinks he hangs the moon and the stars, far more attached to him than to Ozai, and so she tries to hold her tongue. "Can this wait?"
"Sister... a plant kept in the shade will never grow."
He uses more obscure metaphors on her five-year-old daughter. "Don't patronize me."
"Don't expose your children to this." He snatches the bottle out of her reach, though it's already close to empty. "Zuko isn't your second husband, you know. You can't just keep him here to comfort you."
Ursa may be a drunk, helpless in the face of her husband's tyranny, but she is still of an Avatar's blood and she sits up straight. "I may be young," she bites out, despite her impudence in speaking to the crown prince this way, "but I can raise my children without your interference."
She sees his temper spark, but like a firework in the rain, sputter out before it starts. "You can let go of him, princess, and he'll come back to you," he says in a long sigh. "You'll have to, eventually."