That night, Iroh did what he thought was best. It hurt him to be sneaking around behind his nephew's back, but Zuko already bore all the pressure of their current situation. It would be worse to overwhelm him.

Softly but steadily, as though he was not sneaking at all, Iroh made his way to the Avatar's room. The halls were vacant; apparently most of the crew had the same way of dealing with stress as his nephew. Iroh opened the door and stepped inside, lighting a fireball in one hand as he did so. He closed the door behind him slowly, making only a faint click.

The Avatar and his friends, all so young, like Zuko, with their whole life waiting for them, looked up. The Avatar was chained against the wall immediately to the left of the door, his mouth gagged and his feet not touching the floor. The waterbending girl was chained to the wall opposite the door, and her brother was restrained against the wall to the right. The waterbending girl glared. "What do you want?" Whatever Zuko had put in their food had completely cured her and her brother of their illness.

Iroh lowered his head solemnly. "I am not here to be your enemy." He reached up and removed the Avatar's gag.

Aang coughed and smacked his tongue. "Thanks. My tongue was all dry!"

"What are you here for, then?" Katara demanded to know.

Iroh sat in the middle of the room. "I'm here because I think our current problem has something to do with the Avatar."

"Me? What problem is it?" Aang looked down at his cocoon.

"You all have felt the rocking of this ship."

"Yeah…" Sokka yawned. "But what does that have to do with us?"

Iroh looked up at Aang. "It's not natural. This is not how the ocean acts, especially in such fine weather." The past two days had been sunny and cloudy, respectively, with no wind or rain to speak of. "The crew suspects a spirit is behind it."

Katara's angrily narrowed eyes widened. "A spirit might be trying to free Aang?"

"Really?!" Aang looked ready to jump for joy. But then his face dropped. "I can't get out, though. It would have to…"

Iroh chuckled. "I'm not worried about that!" He held the flame up higher. "If the spirit wanted to tear this ship apart to get you out, it would have by now."

Aang blinked. "Then why do you think it's trying to free me?"

Iroh looked slyly at him. "I don't know this spirit," he warned. "I might not be correct. But from what I have seen, its goal may be far, far more ambitious than simply freeing you."

"Just tell us already," Sokka begged. "I like suspense as much as the next guy, but not when it can kill me."

Iroh looked around. In this room, isolated from the rest of the ship, they surely could not know what the spirit was doing. "I will tell you what the spirit is doing. It is slowing us down in an invisible way; the waves are easy to push through, and the engines are fully functioning, but we aren't moving as fast as we should be." He looked down and stroked his beard. "We weren't moving at all before Zuko ordered the crew to make port. Ever since then, the water spirit has allowed us to move freely, and the waves have settled."

Sokka's face brightened. Aang looked puzzled. "I don't get it. How is that supposed to free me?"

"I don't know," Sokka said brightly. "But I do know what it means. It means the spirit doesn't want you to be brought to the Fire Nation!"

"If you can't be brought to the Fire Nation," Iroh told Aang, "there is no point in having you onboard this ship. My nephew needs you to be forgiven and allowed to return home. If he can't return home anyway, capturing you was useless."

Aang's eyes widened. He visibly struggled to keep himself from hoping, and failed. "He might let me go?"

"No," Katara argued. "He's crossed the world to capture you. He's not going to give up. He'll find some other way to get around the spirit." She hung her head. "I want to have hope too, Aang. But I don't think we can. Not about Zuko changing his mind."

Iroh laughed. "I agree! Zuko is very stubborn, and always has been." He grew serious again. "But the spirit is stubborn too. We have no way of fighting its grip. Changing course was the only thing Zuko could do. The spirit may be the only being in either world capable of forcing him to change his mind."

"He rescued me," Aang said. "He broke me out of my chains because he didn't want Zhao to capture me. Zhao's not far away. If we can't move, and Zhao catches up, he might take me for himself, and Zuko won't agree to that. He can't keep me here for Zhao to take, and he can't deliver me to the Fire Nation. So he has to let me go!" Aang grinned. "Yeah!"

Iroh nodded. Sokka laughed, then lamented that he wouldn't be able to see Zuko's face. He began to speculate aloud about all the entertainment watching Zuko change his mind might hold. Aang beamed, his hope restored. But Katara said nothing.

Aang looked at her to share his joy, and paused. "Katara? What's wrong?"

Katara's eyes were fixed to the floor, and her face was hard. She raised her head to look at Iroh. "Why are you telling us about this? Why aren't you planning a way to escape from Zhao, instead?"

The flame in Iroh's hand died down, briefly plunging the room into shadow before he noticed and forced it back to life. "I agree with the spirit," he admitted. "I want my nephew to change his mind."

"What?!" Sokka peered at him suspiciously. "Why are you helping him if you don't agree with him?"

"He's my nephew," Iroh answered. That was the answer to all such questions.

Aang smiled. "You and the spirit are my friends?" Iroh nodded once. "Wow! Thanks."

Katara shot him a look. "Aang. You don't know anything about this spirit. It's too early to call it a friend. And if he's with Zuko, he's not a friend either. No offense."

"None taken."

"Aang needs to get to the North Pole as fast as possible," Sokka said. "How long is the spirit going to take?"

"We make port in the morning. If you're correct, the water spirit won't allow us to move any further." Iroh raised an eyebrow. "And Zhao isn't far behind. A couple days at most."

Sokka groaned. "A couple days spent hanging on a wall and being fed like a baby. Do you have any idea how long that is?"

"Hopefully it will be shorter now that I'll be the one feeding you." Iroh stood up. "I can tell you more about the situation as it develops."

Aang gasped. "How are Appa and Momo?"

"The bison and the lemur?" Aang nodded. "They aren't happy, but they are safe and fed. They'll be fine."

"Wait," Katara snapped. She shook her head. "We don't have any reason to wait here and hope the spirit changes his mind. If you want us to be free, why don't you let us go now?"

Iroh shook his head. "If it takes more than a few days or the spirit gives up, I will find a way to free you. But until then, this spirit is the best chance I've seen to change Zuko's mind. There is hope for him yet, but something will have to happen to make him rethink the path he's on. If the spirit doesn't do it, the harsh realities of life will. I don't want that for my nephew. I never have."

"Why should we care?" Sokka argued. "He keeps trying to kill us! There's no reason why we should hang here for days just to help him."

Katara glanced to her right. "Aang?"

Aang stared at the floor as if he could see all the mysteries of life written there. "He'll just keep chasing us if we escape. I don't want to always be on the run like that. I don't want to fight him forever. I used to have friends from the Fire Nation. Maybe..." He closed his eyes.

"You're not going to be friends with him," Sokka said. He said it as a statement of sad fact. "You just won't, Aang. He's an angry jerk from a nation that's spent 100 years at war with every other nation. He's not like the people you knew 100 years ago."

"So?" Aang looked away. "I can't just leave someone behind, either. If he needs help and I can help him, then I can't just walk away."

Iroh sighed. Softly, he patted Aang's shoulder. "Thank you, Avatar."

"A few days," Katara said. "You promised to free us in a few days, or if the spirit gives up."

Iroh nodded. "I keep my promises. I will do whatever I have to do to free you." Katara relaxed a little. She didn't seem to trust him, but she was willing to accept his word.

"I can't believe you agreed to let us all hang here just to maybe help our worst enemy," Sokka told Aang. "He hasn't done anything to deserve that!"

"It's not a question of -"

Iroh left the children to their argument. He put out the fireball as he closed the door behind him. He made his way to his chambers slowly, lost in thought. Perhaps he was getting soft, at least when it came to children of this age. Every young man reminded him of Lu Ten, his lost son. Especially Zuko.

Iroh put out the lights and sat in the darkness with the memory of his son for a while.

.

Zuko tossed and turned. He did not have any nightmares this night, but his sleep was very disturbed. He awoke tired at what his timepiece told him was 3 in the morning, and decided not to go back to sleep. He lit the row of candles in his room and sat in front of them, thinking.

He'd never really thought before about what it meant that they were on the ocean. It meant the water spirit was able to do things like this. But he'd never thought it would do something like this, not really. All it did was splash and make trouble and never, ever, listen to what he told it. It was just a nuisance.

But now, it was terrifying. Zuko shivered, and not because of the cold watery feeling sloshing back and forth inside him. Had it been able to do this all along? Turn the whole ocean against him?

If it could cause this much trouble without raising a single deadly wave or patch of ice, what else could it do? The water spirit had access to the ocean back home, if it stretched that far. The Fire Nation was an island nation, after all. What could it do? What would it do? The list of realistic possibilities was much longer now.

Zuko reluctantly allowed himself to think, Maybe I shouldn't go home.

The fire spirit might calm down when they got home. But it might not. It had burned him in his nightmares just as much as the water spirit had frozen him, even though he had their ticket home. Yet the fire spirit seemed not satisfied with that. And why was the water spirit against him now, when it had never done anything like this before?

Zuko buried his head in his hands. He didn't know. He didn't know anything about the spirits, besides the amount of trouble they could cause and how dangerous they were. Uncle had said something about not being a good thing for the Fire Nation to have in it. He'd said that for other reasons, but Zuko recognized that he had been right. I bring the storm with me.

Could he be a ruler, if it meant endangering the people he was supposed to protect? Or would the water spirit level the whole nation before he could even try?

The amount of possible futures Zuko saw before him shrank from one to none. In that non-future, he saw himself, and two dangerous spirits, both of which had injured him more times than he could count. Zuko fingered the faint frostbite scar above one of his kidneys, and looked at his palms, which amazed him with how they still had lines and fingerprints and everything. He was a laughingstock in his family, known as the only firebender ever who had managed to burn himself with his own firebending. That wasn't true...but it still hurt.

In that non-future, he saw himself, a painful death, and nothing else.

Zuko shook his head viciously, sending his hair flying. No! That was not all that awaited him! Uncle looked at him every day and saw something valuable, like the kind heart he had praised earlier, and Zuko was the prince of the Fire nation! Prince. Powerful firebender. Heir to the throne.

Even if he had used up all his luck on simply being born, which he didn't fully believe, he could push through that. He would! He was used to pushing through a world which didn't want him.

Zuko stood. How would a weird, misfit spirit, one who had no right to even exist, get in the way of that? Zuko looked up, glaring defiantly at a water dragon only he had ever seen. You don't belong. You shouldn't even exist. Just GO!

A crashing wave of firmer-than-usual water slammed into the ship. The force of it was enough to send Zuko off his feet. The blow rattled throughout the entire vessel, making every wall groan. No human could have survived it.

He waved, putting all the candles out in case any of them had fallen. He lay panting on the floor in the dark. "You are worse than Zhao," he whispered. "Worse than Azula." He pushed himself up. "Worse than anyone." And there was no way he was going to let such a being get away with ruining his ship, his chances, his very life. Not ever.