Zuko could barely be seen over the number of scrolls piled on his table. They detailed the current state of the government, provided a complete inventory of the various artifacts kept in the royal libraries, and featured requests from several Fire Nation governors petitioning for aid, funding, and other economic sensibilities. Scattered across these scrolls were pamphlets issued by the New Ozai Society protesting the outrageous decision to release Firelord Ozai to Ba Sing Se so that he might stand trial for his supposed crimes against the Earth Kingdom.
Zuko's tea had gone cold, almost stale, as he slept for the first time in several days.
A messenger hawk interrupted, tapping his window as it fluttered to the sill, and he jumped as he rubbed his bleary eyes with his fists. There was a tube stamped with the mark of the Southern Water tribe strapped to its back. A very small smile flitted across Zuko's face before he realized that whatever news the hawk bore was probably bad, and then he wished that Mai were here instead of elsewhere with Azula.
He sighed, scraped his palm against his jaw, and opened the window. The hawk sat prettily on his arm as he plucked the scroll from its tube, but then it hopped to Zuko's shoulder and began to run its beak through Zuko's hair. "Stop," Zuko said, half-heartedly as he made no effort to remove the creature. "You're pulling." The hawk chirruped something that could be construed as an apology, and nestled its beak in the curve of Zuko's neck before flapping back to the window to preen in the sunshine.
Carefully, Zuko unrolled the parchment.
He had been right. It wasn't good news.
It was from Aang, whom Katara had invited to the South Pole when Suki had shown up without the Fire Nation girls, distraught about a spirit that had pulled them into the ocean. "I've never seen her like this," Aang wrote. "Even Sokka can't get her mind off what happened."
Zuko's face fell as he continued to read. He had long been expecting some kind of word about Azula—something about how she had given them the slip or tried to stage a coup or anything but this.
Aang told him how he had immediately meditated into the spirit world, where he had learned from a very grumpy monkey that Azula had gone to visit Koh, which according to Aang, was a very dangerous and very bad idea because Koh steals people's faces, Zuko, he steals their faces! Koh was wearing her face when Aang found him, and then he had to return to the physical world because he didn't know how to return a face that Koh had stolen. Later, he would commune with his past selves. They had lived a long time, he assured Zuko. He would learn what to do from them.
Zuko crushed the parchment in his fist and squeezed his eyes shut. That was just hopeful Avatar talk.
He didn't know how this Koh looked but he imagined his sister without a face, without those cold, sparking eyes, without the cunning turn to her mouth as she smiled like she always knew something he didn't know.
Zuko swallowed around the lump welling in his throat. He tried to smooth the parchment where it had wrinkled, but his hands shook. "But she always makes it," he whispered. Didn't she?
He thought of her falling through air. He thought of him falling with her, so far apart. He thought of Katara pulling him to the bison as Azula fell. She wasn't going to make it. There was nowhere to go but down. He thought of her hair come undone, caught in the wind, as she used her piece to catch herself on the rock as she watched him go.
She always made it.
Except this time. She was lost in the spirit world. Lost forever, maybe.
Zuko looked at the hawk, who seemed sad, but perhaps that was just him being lonely and wishing for someone to share these feelings, whatever they might be. He could not tell if he felt grief or relief, and he hated that he did not know.
He kept reading. Of course, Mai and Ty Lee had been dragged down with her, and of course Aang couldn't find them either. But at least, Koh probably didn't have their faces. That was some reason for hope, Aang wrote, as if that would assure Zuko. Aang told Zuko that he wasn't sure how long Azula could survive without her face if her physical body had been dragged into the spirit world. Anything could happen—but realistically speaking.
Aang didn't finish the sentence. Only assured Zuko that he would do everything he could to find her and to help her.
The letter crumpled in Zuko's hand, beginning to smoke and smolder before he remembered that he did not want to fuel his bending with anger and rage and hurt. He dropped the parchment, its edges burnt black, and stalked circles in the ornate rug under his feet.
He needed to go to the Southern Water Tribe. He needed to find Mai and his sister, even if it would be better if she were to stay in the spirit world where she couldn't hurt anybody ever again. But maybe it wouldn't come to that. Maybe—she would change.
He had changed, hadn't he?
But he couldn't just up and leave. The political situation was already unstable, and who knew what the New Ozai Society would do if he absented himself from the throne.
Leaving would only send his people into more turmoil, and his duty had to be to them first.
He looked down at his clenched fists.
He trusted Aang, of course. But it felt wrong for him to sit by and do nothing, to not even try to find them. He took a nearby cushion and screamed into it before calming himself.
If only Uncle Iroh were here. He would know what to do. He was a spiritual man. He himself had gone to the spirit world, or so it was rumored. But even if it wasn't true, his uncle still gave pretty good advice. Even Aang thought so.
Zuko took the cup with the stale tea, and poured its remaining contents into a wilting, potted plant that someone had put in a spot where the sun shone. He prepared a new cup of tea like his uncle had taught him. He warmed the water with a soft blaze from his fingers, and he steeped the jasmine just like his uncle had when they were the owners of a simple tea shop of their own.
He breathed the steam from the jasmine tea, letting the ritual calm his nerves, the scent bringing to mind his uncle's voice, a steady stream of words that he couldn't quite make out but that sounded comforting, that reminded Zuko this wasn't the end, that there was still hope, that he could meet his responsibilities as Firelord and to Mai and even to his sister.
Once he had finished drinking his tea, Zuko sat at his writing desk, stretching a blank piece of parchment taut so he could write without blotting the paper and soiling the words. He dipped his brush to write first to Aang, and he left it poised there over the shallow bowl of ink, little drops dripping from the brush.
What to say?
Resentment bit towards him, and he closed his eyes against it.
He should have known that this would happen, and now that it had, there was no time or energy to wish that things were different. He could only deal with the situation as it was.
He thanked Aang for letting him know what had happened to his sister, but that he could not go to the Southern Water Tribe because of the tense political situation in the Fire Nation. He told Aang he was writing a second letter to his uncle requesting that he come in his stead, and that it would be better that way, since he was more experienced in the ways of the spirit world.
He couldn't help but smile sadly at that. Besides, he would just mess it up if he were to go, just like Azula had messed it up. He could imagine it now, him tromping around in such a world.
Sometimes, it was easy to forget that he and Azula were so similar in so many ways, and how much he hated that. Their bending had been affected by the decisions they had made. He'd often wondered why Azula had lost hers to a greater extent than he had. Maybe it was because she had lost so much and had been unable to find something to replace what she had lost.
It was as if they were fated to perpetually follow the other in some kind of spiraling circle that lead nowhere.
Even though she had been born second, she had always been before him in the eyes of his father, and he had always struggled to follow in her footsteps. He could still hear his father's voice saying that Azula had been born lucky, and that he had been lucky to be born.
He had come to Ba Sing Se as a refugee and beggar, and she had followed him as a conqueror.
She was to have been crowned Firelord, but then she had been defeated, and he had become the new Firelord, vowing to restore the lost honor of his people.
What one started, the other always seemed to finish.
They were separate, and they were whole.
He touched the scar his father had branded into his face, his eyes closed and his head bent. He remembered the way that Azula's hair had been cut jagged over one side of her face, how she had covered her own eye with her hand as she challenged the Avatar to recognize her.
The family resemblance, she had said, her voice brittle with malice.
The thought made his breath shudder in his throat, and he looked down, pulling his robe away from his chest, staring at the livid scar that Azula had burned into him, nearly matching the one that she had given Aang.
"We're not the same," he whispered to himself.
But he knew that wasn't always true. She was the one who had first told him that only he could restore his honor, and he had repeated her words to Aang when he asked that he might join them.
He squeezed his eyes shut.
There were times where Azula was almost kind, and those was the hardest moments of them all. They never lasted, and they were always lies except when they weren't.
She had stepped behind him as they were on the boat to Ba Sing Se. She had smoothed the fringes of his hair with her fingers. She told him that she hadn't been lying when she had said she needed him, that she couldn't have done it without him.
What if she hadn't been talking about conquering Ba Sing Se or killing the Avatar?
What could they have been to each other, as brother and sister, if only things had been a little different, if only they had been on the same side for once in their lives? Except they had been—in Ba Sing Se—and they had done something horrible together, and she had needed him.
Grief belly-bottomed through him as he glanced down at the brief letter he had written to Aang. Maybe he would never see Azula's face again except in memory or in bad dreams.
But then there was the sick relief chasing through him, too, and he let the brush drop from his fingers as he sagged against the desk and wept.
It took a long time before he was able to compose himself enough to write his uncle, pleading with him to make his way to the Southern Water Tribe, so he could help Aang find his terrible, terrible sister.
Chapter title inspired by Avicii's Hey Brother