Imperial Palace, war memorial
Iroh is twenty-three, Azuli is fifteen
Iroh was packing when Sgt. Holberson found him. He was stowing a pair of socks into the side of his bag, ready to set off for another adventure at sea the next day as a new general when the grizzled old man knocked on his door.
"Sgt. Holberson!" Iroh had said, pleasantly surprised. The two had struck up a friendship after the sergeant's retirement from the service.
"I'm sorry, my boy," Holberson had sighed. He gave Iroh a neatly folded letter stamped with the Special Forces seal. "Ryoku Iyaka'kulani has been declared unrecoverable. Her will indicated that this letter, and several of her other possessions were left to you."
"I'm sorry," he had repeated. "She was a good soldier."
Until that point, he had known without a shadow of a doubt that Rio had escaped. That she was hiding out somewhere in the Earth Kingdom working her way home as the search parties spread out from the remains of the train line she had been on. Then Iroh had yelled at Sgt. Holberson, the letter shaking in his hands, "She was my friend!"
"You think she wasn't mine?" Holberson had barked back. "You think other people don't miss her? Get it together, boy!"
Iroh had looked at the letter in his hands, he had felt a hollow space burn itself into his heart. He closed his eyes, "Yes, you're right. When is the service?"
"They're burying the urn tonight," the sergeant looked tired as he said it.
Now, ten hours later as the last bit of sunlight died, Iroh was still standing over her grave. At his request, they had burned a bouquet of flowers along with the United Forces and Fire Nation flags. There were no dog tags to bury with the urn holding the ashes, two stars marked the gravestone. Commander Ryoku Zaio, second class, was gone. The letter was tucked away, unopened, in his pocket.
"Iroh?" Azuli approached cautiously, padding across the grass carpeting the cemetery. "You should come inside."
"She wouldn't have wanted cut flowers," Iroh said numbly, staring at the vases surrounding the grave. A surprising number of people had shown up to the funeral, the Mus, a motley crew of spooks, the royal family, an array of students from the academy who had never talked to Ryoku in their lives. They all left flowers.
"She would have wanted a plant," he continued, his voice hoarse. "We should have planted something."
"We can plant something tomorrow," Azuli said gently. She reached out and wrapped her hand around his. "She wouldn't-"
"She's dead because of me!" Iroh snarled harshly. "If I hadn't…" He trailed off as he looked down at his sister. There were tears dripping down her face.
"I'm sorry!" she cried, wiping roughly at her face with the sleeve of her silk ceremonial robe. "I'm s-sorry, they w-wanted me, and if…"
"Oh, Azuli," Iroh pulled her into his arms. "That's not-"
"And now you won't t-talk to me, because I'm here instead…" she buried her head, and her voice became muffled by Iroh's dress uniform. "And maybe it should've been me!"
Iroh held her close, "Don't ever talk like that, Azuli. Don't," he pushed her away until he could tip her face up, "ever say that again."
She sniffed, "But-"
Iroh shook his head, "I am not mad at you." He kissed her forehead briefly, and sighed. "I've been such an idiot. It's not you, Azuli," He smiled sadly. "I asked Rio to take care of you and she did, because that's what she does." A tear slid down his face, "It's what made her who she was."
"I'm sorry, is this a bad time?" Iroh turned around and saw a large, broad-shouldered man with a large pot and a trowel.
"Yes," Iroh said, looking him over curiously. He had a long scraggly brown beard with a few braids and bead or two in it. As he approached, the light from the candles surrounding the grave shone on his blood shot eyes, and the corded, wiry muscles in his forearms.
"Well, it'll only be a second, sir," the man abled towards the grave. He was barefoot. He sighed, "She wouldn't have wanted all these flowers like this."
"Did you know Rio?" Azuli asked, sounding a lot less tearful, and a lot more snarky.
"Did I know her?" The man laughed, it almost sounded like a sob. "Maybe a little. But she was my daughter, so I guess I owe her something."
Iroh stopped cold, "You were….?"
"She didn't talk about me?" Rio's father hunkered down by the grave, one gnarled hand reached out to stop an inch from the glossy surface of the memorial stone. "I figured as much."
He grabbed the trowel and stabbed it into the earth, "I'm Kekipi Iyaka'kulani."
"Uh… Mr. Iyaka-" Azuli stumbled over the name.
Kekipi cackled, "Just call me Keki, Miss."
"Keki…" Iroh bowed, "My condolences for your loss, sir."
"You're the what, third prince of the realm? It ought'a be me calling you 'sir,'"
"How come Rio never talked about you?" Azuli folded her arms. "What's in that pot anyway?"
"Well… ah," Kekipi reached in the small hole he had created and pulled out a rock. "When her mother died, I didn't take it so hot. By the time I realized I had a daughter I ought to be raising, she'd already grown up and shipped out."
Iroh saw the candlelight reflect off a tear as it fell into the mound of earth piling up by the stone.
"Now she's gone, and I can't even-" The old man sobbed. "I don't have anyone, now."
"It's, um…" Iroh patted his shoulder briefly, he noticed distantly that he could feel the ridges of a tattoo benath the man's shirt. "It's alright, I get it."
"And wasn't it my fault?" his hands shook as he lowered the plant from the pot into the hole he had dug for it. "Wasn't it me who kept going on about how warriors have to be strong? Wasn't it me who sent her to the military in the first place?"
He laughed another sobbing laugh, it was as bitter as three day old tea. "Like I thought that she could be stronger than I was." He spread the displaced earth gently over the plan's roots, "I tried to make her like me, and she ended up like her mother anyway."
"Her mother?" Iroh couldn't stop himself from asking, even though Kekipi was crying a gentle rain of tears onto the rose he had just planted.
"She was a healer during the fever epidemic seventeen years ago. She got sick but she didn't heal herself, she just kept-" Kekipi inhaled raggedly, gathering himself. "-healing everyone else until she died."
"How awful!" Azuli gasped. She threw her arms around the grizzled man, "It must have been so hard for you."
"It was how she would have wanted to die," Kekipi said simply. His tears dried up as he looked up at Iroh, "Ask yourself how my daughter would have liked to die, if you knew her. I should have known how all this would end."
He looked down at the grave, having said his piece and cried his tears. Iroh knew the granite expression on his face wasn't the numbness of a grief stricken man, but the stony endurance of a man long used to grief. Who had lived with the pain for so long it had become a part of him, indispensable from the rest.
"You know why they're called 'spooks' don't you?" Kekipi asked, he didn't face Iroh, maybe his words were for the flower at his feet. "It's because the moment they step on that battlefield, they're already dead."
"I don't accept that," Iroh said lowly, spontaneously. He didn't know where the words came from. He didn't know anything anymore, it felt like the vacuum Rio had left was screwing up everything in his head, everything in his heart. He looked at Ryoku's father and felt himself standing on a precipice, staring at his future. That this was what he would be without Rio. Another part of him rejected that future utterly.
"I don't accept that they're all just going to die, that they expect to die. I won't accept that Rio went into every battle expecting to die." With every sentence his voice got louder, the porcelain mask of a prince cracked and slipped.
Iroh hauled Kekipi to his feet, until they were face to face and Iroh was steadily shouting at the man. "Maybe when your wife died, you wanted to die, but Rio wasn't like that!" he snarled, he accused.
"Just because you couldn't live without her didn't mean that Rio didn't live. She lived life more than any of us! She didn't fight to die, she fought to live!" Iroh threw the old gardener back, panting with rage, snatching another breath of air to continue his attack.
"How would you know anything anyway? You're the one who ended up as a drunk, an old recluse who isolated his only family to the point that she doesn't even use your name!" The candle flames were leaping fitfully, propelled by a force more incendiary than the wax that fueled them. "You don't know anything about Rio! You thought she was weak, and delicate, like some stupid flower! Just because you were the weak one, because you couldn't take it and you knew it!"
Kekipi staggered back beneath the force of Iroh's wrath. Azuli retreated as well, crouching by the newly planted rose, as if to shelter the plant from her brother. She had never seen him this angry, even when she had pulled pranks on him, or exercised her own sense of fury and injustice in screaming matches with her mother. The light burning in his eyes had always been one of determined merriness, a personal conviction to live as an example of everything he fought to save. Now he was on fire with fury.
"You want to know something about your only daughter?" Iroh advanced on Kekipi, "Most of her life she thought she was a total screw-up because she couldn't water-bend like her parents, like everyone else in her family. Like she couldn't live up to her healer mother, and her warrior father!"
Kekipi stepped back again, a look of anguish on his face, "I- I didn't know…"
"Of course you didn't!" Iroh spat. "You were too busy drowning your sorrows in a bar! You want to know what I think?" he poked the gardener in the chest, his voice dropping to a dangerous growl. "She was a fire-bender because she had too much life to be anything else, and you," a tear slid down his cheek and boiled away. "You threw that away because you didn't want to live. Don't you dare judge her by your own example, you don't have any right to say how she would have wanted to die."
He slumped after that, turned away and let the candles rest. "She never deserved to die, and even if she did, she would have fought for every second of it." He picked up his fancy Navy beret, and his ceremonial sword from beside the memorial stone. "I used to encourage Rio to get to know you, I thought she needed her father in her life. But now I see that it was all useless because you could never have accepted someone like her. She couldn't ever have saved you because you don't even want to be saved."
Iroh held his hand out to Azuli, prepared to leave. "I'm not going to be like you. I'm shipping out tomorrow, and I'm not coming home in a ceremonial urn. I'm going to find the," he spat a curse word that made Azuli squeak, "Who killed Rio, and I'm going to make him pay for every moment of her life he took away. And when I'm done, I'm going to keep sailing until no one else has to die like Rio did."
"That's impossible," Kekipi gasped. He looked ancient compared to the blazing general in front of him. "You don't even know who-"
"I'll find out who killed her, we have spies for that kind of thing," Iroh said dismissively. "Go ahead, go drink yourself into oblivion for your daughter. I'm going to live for her instead."
Kekipi found a bit of courage, though he still seemed to sway as he called to Iroh's back, "Who are you, anyway?"
Iroh turned for a second, his bearing haughty, and his eyes fiery, "She called me Snowbell. That's all that matters."
He walked away that night with the same walk that carried him up to the helm of his first flagship the day after. And that day, as the ensigns and the petty officers, the gunny sergeants and the lieutenants, watched their brand new general walk the deck, learning his ship, they whispered that he was a dragon of a man. A general with two names written on his heart. One, they said, was the name of his only love, and the other- they would hush, looking around as if saying it would invoke his presence- was the name of the man who killed her.
We're back! So... A quick thank you to everyone who reviewed, it's really motivating to hear from everyone who is so excited. I was going to update earlier, but my special counsel advised me to keep you all in suspense. It seemed a little cruel as all the reviews rolled in though. Moral of the story: reviews = updates! Also, I had two guest reviews, and since I respond to all reviews, they get a response here:
To Guest:
I like the face you made with the :OMG, that's very clever. I'm glad you're so excited! It warms my heart, it really does. As for the chapter format, I , too, have always found highly involved flashbacks embedded in the present to be rather disconcerting, it makes the line of the present difficult to follow. I'm glad you like the "deep" parts, I never plan them, they just kind of happen. The really crazy part is when I end up writing something that I personally disagree with, but fits nicely into Rio's character. In order to help Rio grow as a person, she will probably get her bending back, but I reserve plot twists. She will definitely stay with the United Forces, but the actual position will remain my secret. Iroh and Rio will end up happy because I like happy endings, how they get there is also my secret. I'm a very secretive person, but don't worry, I'm determined to finish this fic, and so all shall be revealed. Happy holidays!
To Laura (Guest)
I have noticed that there aren't so many IrohXOC fanfictions, which is a shame because Iroh is one of my favorite characters, and prime pickings for OC writers like myself. Some of the inspiration for this fiction was another one on this site, Game Over by FalloutAngel101 (Check it out), and so it's particularly flattering that you hold mine as the best. Out of humility, I must disagree, but I thank you for the compliment anyway. I'm glad that you think that Rio is interesting, she's very interesting to me too, and I continually discover new facets of her personality. Then I am obliged to torture her with them, but that's just what authors do. Thanks for the review, and happy Holidays!
Also, I know this is getting long, we have some more friends to welcome. My e-mail system threw a fit, so I've lost track who joined since the last chapter so I might have missed someone, it wasn't intentional. Anyway, everyone welcome Jk522 into our merry little band. That's it, now I get to listen to the frigid wind howling in the eaves, and get cranking on the next update. Merry New Year to you all,
- Hyperbole