There it was again. That distant knocking. Or perhaps it was footsteps, Zuko couldn't be sure. They weren't the kind of footsteps he was used to hearing around the palace, not the orderly clacking of people going about their normal duties. No, these were sporadic and fast, and it was the middle of the night.
He knew something was wrong, and the footsteps hadn't been the first clue. The alarm went off about a half an hour ago. When it died, nearly as quickly as it had come on, its final note was long, low, and strangled, but that alone didn't scare him. The alarm had gone off before, for normal drills or tests, and the occasional grease fire in the palace kitchen that the cooks were too slow to quell. Typically a staff member would arrive within minutes to inform him of the situation and lead him to a separate location if necessary. They would assure him that everything would be all right, because historically, everything always was. This time no one came.
Maybe they've finally forgotten about me, he wondered.
It wouldn't be absurd. For half his life he'd been cloistered away in his quarters, allowed visits only by his tutors, personal staff, and immediate family. (The latter party visited only when it suited them, and that was only ever infrequently). Yet, usually someone came for him. Maybe this time he simply wasn't important enough to be on anyone's mind. He tended to take up very little space.
At once his bedroom door was thrown unceremoniously open, by whom, he couldn't make out in the dark. The figure stayed anonymous until she stepped forward and he heard her familiar voice. It was his nanny, Preeda. She was babbling, too fast for him to follow. Something about a break-in. Something about men with guns. Something about his father. She looked at him with wild, pleading eyes. He couldn't see his own face, but he was sure his expression mirrored hers.
A number of male voices sounded down the hallway, and seconds later appeared the soldiers they belonged to. There were three of them. They were tall and muscular, and all three clad in Earth Army greens. Preeda whirled around and directed her frantic ramblings at them. She spoke Fire Tongue, of course. As far as Zuko was aware, Preeda didn't know any Earth Tongue. They addressed her with their foreign words, gruff and authoritative, but she didn't heed them. Could Zuko translate what they were telling her? He wasn't sure. He felt a headache forming at the base of his skull. He felt like he was going to be sick.
One of the soldiers drew his gun at Preeda and Zuko's hackles raised, but he was too far from her, and the men were too swift... The butt of the soldier's gun collided with her head and she fell to the floor in a soft heap. They kicked her aside and turned to Zuko. He was suddenly too aware that he wore only pajamas and that he sat upright in his bed with the covers pulled around his body like armor. They roughly pulled him from his bed and barked orders at him in broken Fire Tongue. Their words sounded too square and too heavy. They didn't flicker across their tongues like flames the way they were supposed to. They probably only knew these few phrases, and had probably learned them just for this purpose. They made their way out of the chamber, one soldier dragging each of Zuko's arms. The third trailed a few paces behind and kept something cold and metallic pressed against Zuko's head. They made him step over Preeda's limp form on the way out. They gave him a kick when he tried to get one last look at her.
He wanted information more than anything else. Every time he'd tried to ask a question on the way to his cell he was silenced. (Perhaps "cell" was a strong word. He was kept in an empty, windowless conference room that had long since fallen out of use). The soldier who brought him a meal in what he thought was the morning had only glared at him with narrow jade-colored eyes. No one else had visited him since. He felt like he'd been locked away for at least a day, maybe more, but he had no real way of knowing. He was still in the palace, of that he was certain at least. It should have been comforting that he hadn't been shoved in a car and taken wherever his kidnappers fancied, but it wasn't. It was humiliating to be held prisoner in his family's palace, and furthermore, it seemed to suggest that the entire Caldera had fallen to foreign powers. Perhaps that was why he didn't try to escape. He knew there was nowhere to go.
He heard people outside his room sometimes. Soldiers, probably. Their voices faded in and out of range as they moved around the corridor. This time the voices hovered nearby, and the jingling of keys revealed that they were finally ready for him. Ready for what, exactly, he still didn't know. But it was something.
He locked eyes with the soldier who held the door ajar as several others filed inside. The door clicked shut behind them, and one earthbent a rectangular table and stools in the center of the floor, cracking the patterned tile in the process. Perhaps he was to be interrogated. Obviously whatever intelligence they gathered was limited, or else they would know not to waste their time on him. No one ever told him anything. One of them gestured to the table. Zuko rose cautiously and took a seat, never taking his eyes off his captors. They didn't sit across from him. Instead they bickered privately for several minutes. Zuko stared into the shattered tile as he tried to recall memories of his language lessons. He knew Earth Tongue from books, mostly, and outdated ones at that. He was largely self-taught and he was sure his skills reflected it. But if he could just pick up even fragments of their conversation...
Are you sure... something unintelligible... something about wasted time... wrong man?
Another, a woman, made her reply. He didn't pick up most of it, but noticed she shrugged when she spoke. We can't learn until we attempt? No. We can't know until we try? That had to be it. They wanted to know if they had the right hostage. Well, that depended on who they thought he was. The outside world hadn't heard of him; his father had made certain of that. They probably thought he'd died all those years ago, if they even knew he existed to begin with. Maybe they thought he was his father. Or perhaps they thought Lu Ten was alive, and that they'd managed to capture him. They would probably be disappointed to learn they had only captured a useless excuse for a prince that no one had ever heard of. He didn't know anything, he was never allowed to participate in politics or war, and he didn't stand to inherit the throne. They would probably just kill him when they discovered their error.
Then he heard his name. It was buried in their cacophonous, guttural Earth Tongue sentences, but he was sure he heard it. Prince Zuko. They chattered on after Zuko had stopped listening. He'd made his choice.
"You have the right man."
The room fell silent. Four pairs of eyes blinked cluelessly at him. He must have sounded strange to them, as strange as they sounded to him. After years of disuse, and never having attained fluency to begin with, his words must've been malformed. But, evidently, they did their job. He felt empowered to speak again.
"You are seeking Prince Zuko, yes? I am him."
Plainly they hadn't expected him to understand their language, let alone speak it. It left them dumbstruck. The first of the soldiers to recover, a tall, bulky man, was the one who rounded on him. He placed his sturdy fists on either end of the table and towered over Zuko.
"Well, Prince Zuko, I bet you think you're clever, don't you? Should I just send my translator home then?" He sneered. Zuko only understood about half of that, but he knew when someone was jeering at him.
He turned his attention to the woman, whom he'd identified as the translator.
"What is going to happen to me?" He asked, returning to the safety of his native language.
"Don't look at her, look at me!" The brawny soldier spat, gripping Zuko by the chin and angling his face away from the translator. Zuko said nothing. He only returned the soldier's mean gaze.
The soldiers talked amongst themselves again, and Zuko was too exhausted to listen in. He felt his headache returning. Whatever they were concerned about, they must have resolved it. The beefy soldier released his grip on Zuko's face and took a seat at the table. The translator woman joined him. The other two remained posted in the back, their large machine guns poised in their hands.
When the soldier spoke again, he was no less menacing, but he was a good deal calmer. It was some kind of rehearsed speech. A few beats later, the translator started in. Zuko chose to listen only to her, as it hurt his head to try to grapple with them both. But he kept his eyes trained on the large soldier the entire time.
It turned out Zuko was being given a choice. At least, that's how they phrased it, but it wasn't a choice really. The alternative was that they would kill him, as they already had done to his father and uncle. He would be spared under the condition that he would be coronated as soon as possible, and then use his powers as Fire Lord to enact the will of the Earth Kingdom government in the Fire Nation. Of course he said yes. What else could he say?
They made him repeat it all back to them.
"You will do as we say."
"I will do as you say."
"You take order from us now."
"I take orders from you now."
"You will not attempt to escape, resist, or undermine us."
"I will not attempt to escape, resist, or undermine you."
He meant it all, he supposed. It's not like there was any other choice. The soldiers turned to leave. There was no telling how long he would be alone again.
"One more thing?" Zuko asked. They faced him, suspicious.
"You said my father and my uncle are dead. Where is my sister?"
His question was fed through the translator, and an answer was regurgitated.
"You will find out, but only if you cooperate."
They left before he had a chance to ask about Preeda.
He used to dream of his coronation day when he was a kid, before he was disgraced and locked away. In his dreams he was regal and commanding, and he wasn't anybody's puppet.
Katara decided it would be in her best interest to work through lunch that day. Her head was throbbing and she resolved that the best thing for her would be to get home early, tuck herself into bed, and treat herself to a long-night's sleep. Until then, she had work to do. She slid the cursor over to her email and hit refresh yet again. She was currently waiting on an audio file that her dad promised to send her for her podcast this week. When they spoke on the phone the day prior she reiterated to him that she had an upcoming deadline for the episode and he assured her that she would get it first thing in the morning. She should have known that Hakoda was notoriously late for most things.
She had assumed he would be timely because this was an important episode for him. Apparently not. The focus of this week's International Hour was the Southern Water Tribe's independence movement. It made sense to have the chief's input even if he hadn't declared his stance on the issue yet. Hakoda had begged for her to run a segment on the Southern Tribe ever since she began at the Earth Kingdom Public Radio, and she finally relented. Yet when he found out the topic she wanted to cover, she noticed him dragging his feet. On a personal basis, she disagreed with the Northern Tribe overpowering its sister tribe and she just assumed that her father agreed with her, even if he couldn't say it.
She heard the soft ding of an email coming in. Finally. Without missing a beat, she put on her headphones, clicked on the audio file, and hit play.
The file was a mess. After two beats of static, she heard what she assumed was the muffled voice of her father. The audio crackled, and she could hear her father moving about. The file was definitely recorded on his smartphone, as it was nothing like the smooth audio that came from the equipment in the office. To make matters worse, he clearly had his fingers over the speaker for the entirety of the recording. The mumbled words of her father dragged on for minutes. She listened, hoping that he might have noticed his mistake, or at the very least, readjusted his hand at some point in the recording. No such luck. He guffawed as if he said something funny, started to talk again, and then without warning, the audio cut off.
She knew the file would be rough. This was her dad she was talking about. She had hoped that it would be at least in good enough condition that she could pawn it off onto an office intern and they could clean up the inevitable background noise. But this—this was unusable. They were going to miss the deadline to post this episode, there was no way around it.
It looked like her headache was not going away anytime soon. She needed a break from her computer anyway. She got up from her chair and headed to the break room for some Advil.
The office was inordinately quiet for the usual lunch time rush. The interns huddled around one of the tables, eyes glued to their phones— that wasn't really new, she supposed— but looking around, it was what almost everyone was doing. She edged past the silent group and took her medicine from the cabinet.
Cheng, her boss, stuck his head out of his office. "Hey Katara, can you come here for a moment?"
"Sure, yeah, one second." She responded as she poured herself another cup of tea to take with her.
"Now, please?" Katara looked up in surprise. Cheng was normally a laid-back type. She considered him more of a friend than a boss, honestly. This sort of urgency was so unlike him. She flipped through her mind for a reason why he might be upset. There was no way he already knew about the failed audio file, but even if he did, it didn't warrant this kind of a reaction.
She maneuvered around the group staring at their devices, and made her way into the conference room. She sat her tea down on the table and looked up at the paused TV screen. Pictured was a young man dressed in fire nation finery. He looked as if he was on the verge of tears. Underneath his image was a banner that read: "Fire Nation falls to the Earth Kingdom"
Yeah. She was definitely not going home early.