Hey, look, it didn't take a full year like chapter 10 did! Just 3 months! Too bad no one's reading anymore lol.

It took three days for Zuko to admit, if only to himself, that the Waterbender might perhaps have made a point that was possibly somewhat worth thinking about a little bit, maybe.

It was true that Zuko's usual approach (that is, doing the exact same thing but more of it) had not been bearing much fruit. With every failure his father only grew more disgusted, and humiliating him in front of an audience was one of the few things Azula would never bore of. Beating her was impossible — but how else was he supposed to become worthy of his father's respect?

He couldn't focus on besting her in another arena; if he tried to learn another craft, it was as good as admitting that his bending abilities were weak enough to be worthless. If a Fire Lord could not bend, the flames of war that burned in the throne room, first lit by Sozin himself, would go out.

That was why his grandfather had sent Lu Ten to war — non-benders had to earn their place in the royal family. When they had learned where their older cousin was going, Azula had said that he was lucky the nation was at war; honor was more quickly earned on the battlefield than anywhere else.

That's why it was so strange that the Crown Prince followed his son to the Earth Kingdom. All royals technically had military authority, but no bender in the royal family had gone into battle since Sozin. Even he had only gone on the day of the comet. But Iroh had thrown palace life away, and thus earned the overwhelming support and respect of almost the entire nation through his feats on the battlefield.

And then Lu Ten died, and he lost it all just as quickly by disappearing for over a month. People had feared that he had become one of the few men to ever successfully desert the Fire Nation — until he reappeared, without a word as to where he had gone. Only his status as the crown prince, and Azulon's pity for the death of his son, had kept him from facing any severe consequences. After Azulon died, he gave his younger brother the crown without protest, alienating most of his remaining supporters in the process.

Zuko knew his uncle was weak. That's why his father had to become Fire Lord, because their people needed a strong ruler. But Iroh's sentimentality (not to mention his checkered past) meant that he was the only person Zuko could safely reveal his plan to.

"Uncle, are you still friends with that swordmaster?" Zuko whispered.

"Oh, you mean Piandao?" said Iroh, at full volume. "Of course! He is an excellent Pai Sho player."

"Shhhh!" Zuko hissed, glancing around his uncle's courtyard garden for stray servants or guards. His father did not like to be reminded of successful deserters. The fact that he was still living in the Fire Nation, and that no one (not even the army) could do anything about it, just added insult to injury.

Iroh slurped his tea loudly for a long moment. He smacked his lips in satisfaction. Then he slurped his tea again.

Zuko sat through almost a full minute of this process before he exploded, "Is that all you have to say about him? That he plays Pai Sho?!"

"Well, you did tell me to be quiet," his uncle parried cheerfully. "If there's anything else you want to know about him, you'd have better luck asking the man himself. He's very… stoic."

"...He was Lu Ten's sifu, right?" Zuko asked, picking intently at a hangnail. Iroh went still beside him.

"Yes, he... my son was one of his first students." He put his teacup down, but made no move to refill it. "Why do you ask?"

"I… I want to learn swordplay!" Zuko exclaimed, finally meeting his uncle's eyes. Iroh's expression was twisted into an unreadable expression.

"Where is this coming from, Zuko?"

"I, um… there's this girl—"

"Ah, a girl," Iroh said, grinning widely. "Is this the same young lady you mentioned earlier? An understandable motive, but I doubt Piandao would take a student for that reason alone."

"Not that kind of girl, Uncle!" Zuko yelped, ears burning. "She's annoying and rude and — rrgh, stop grinning like that!" He drained his tea, ignoring Iroh's wince at the blatant disregard of one of his favorite blends. "I just asked her for some advice, and she said something that… that made me think."

"Advice on what, exactly?"

"That's not important," Zuko said, ducking his head again. He didn't want his uncle to know that he was asking for help from the Water Tribe prisoner, and saying it was about beating Azula might make that a little too obvious. Katara's spar with his sister was still widely gossiped about, several days later, which bizarrely seemed to amuse Azula rather than annoy her.

"She said I should rethink my approach, so I thought that… if I can't become as good a bender as Azula, then maybe I can try to master something else, instead."

Iroh refilled Zuko's cup, brow furrowed pensively. Zuko tried not to fidget.

"Prince Zuko… I admire your competitive spirit and willingness to try new things, but… learning something for the sake of being better than another person can never lead to true mastery."

"It's not just that," Zuko admitted quietly. "I just… I just want to find something I'm good at. Something I learn because I enjoy it, not just something I have to know to be a good heir."

When he looked up, his uncle was smiling. It was small, and pained, but it was there.

"Come with me. I have something I would like to give you."

Iroh's rooms were large and opulent, like any room used by the royal family, but they were much smaller and plainer than where he had lived before the current Fire Lord had ascended to the throne. One of them was used to store Lu Ten's old things, because Ozai had decided to give his nephew's old chambers to Azula. (Zuko had stayed where he was before his mother had left, partially because a childish part of him believed she might come back to him in the night and partially because he had not been offered better accommodations.)

His uncle gave him a cushion to sit on, then vanished into what Zuko thought of as his shrine for his son. He sometimes wished that his father had kept something similar for his mother, but Azula claimed that he had allowed her to burn Ursa's things as a training exercise. Zuko tried very hard not to believe her.

Iroh returned a moment later, carrying a long, thin, wooden box. He set it on the round table he used for Pai Sho matches, and gestured for Zuko to sit in one of the two chairs. Zuko obeyed hesitantly, not liking the somber look on his uncle's face. It reminded him of how he had looked in the time surrounding Ursa's disappearance.

"These are twin dao blades. Should Piandao agree to teach you, I shall give them to you."

"But Uncle, those are Lu Ten's! I can't take those!"

The Dragon of the West raised a hand, stalling any further protests in his throat. "I'm not giving you these for no reason, Prince Zuko. I want you to learn a lesson from these blades. Though they are separate, they are still one weapon; however, each must be a complete sword on their own. You cannot be a part of a greater, more perfect whole when you are wholly reliant on another in order to define yourself. That is a lesson that I learned much too late." He lowered his head and clasped Zuko's shoulder, his palm warm through the fine material of Zuko's clothes. "Do you understand what I am trying to tell you?"

Probably not. "Uh… yes?"

Iroh made a sound that was half chuckle, half sigh. "It is all right that you don't. It took me many years, and the only person I was ever able to teach that was myself. I hope, for both our sakes, that Piandao can teach you better than I can."

Zuko blinked. "Well, yeah, probably. You don't even know how to use a sword."

His uncle laughed for real this time. "Then it's funny that the only gifts I ever seem to give you are blades, isn't it?"

Zuko shrugged. "Better than a doll."

Zuko hadn't intended on visiting the girl again — even if she might sometimes accidentally say something useful, in between all the complaints. He felt a prickle of discomfort when he remembered that she hadn't been given anything for the pain — Agni knows how snappish he got when Azula burned him, and he'd never been hurt as badly as she had been. But then again, he wasn't a dangerous, disrespectful Water Tribe peasant. (...Even if she was technically a princess, or at least as close to a princess as the backwater South could get.)

But it turned out that her advice worked. He had written a long, embarrassingly earnest letter to Piandao, which Iroh had sent along with a short, mysterious missive of his own. It contained a Pai Sho tablet, of all things. When Zuko had asked what on earth he was sending a game piece for, Iroh just winked and assured him it was part of an inside joke.

Come to think of it, when and where had his uncle even met Piandao?

Zuko shelved that thought as irrelevant and quickened his pace. Never mind all that, Piandao had agreed to take him on as a student! This was momentous! Piandao almost never took students, especially after his "willful retirement," as Iroh so delicately put it. But he agreed to teach Zuko! Zuko, not Azula!

He'd been over the moon when he first heard, but it's not like he could brag to anyone. His father didn't know what he was learning and from whom; Iroh had told him that he was taking the prince on a training trip, like they both had when they were young men. (Azula, being a girl, had to go to finishing school, instead. She was not happy about this; Zuko had the bruises from their last spar to prove it.) He could maybe brag to Mai — knives were one of the few things she seemed to care about — but he was under no illusion that whatever incriminating information he let slip to her wouldn't go right into his sister's ears.

So. Waterbender it was.

Katara would never admit it, but a teensy, tiny, miniscule part of her regretted speaking so harshly to the Fire Prince. Not out of guilt, or anything dumb like that! Ponytail deserved everything he got! It's not like she cared that she made him mad, or that his face had looked so ashamed and upset. Nope, not at all.

She was willing to admit that two days of just lying in bed doing nothing, without any distractions from the pain, or her growing dread, were starting to wear on her. Akimasa was making noises about sending her back to the dungeon cell soon, as soon as she could move her arms without starting to cry. Her father would give into the demands of the Fire Nation as soon as he heard her life was being held as ransom, and then if the Fire Lord didn't kill her, Hama would.

But that didn't matter to her as much as what the Firebenders would do to her tribe. She was the last Southern Waterbender, and she had failed them. Her foolhardy honesty had doomed her tribe, her family, the most important thing to her and her people, when they would never do such a thing to her. Sometimes the guilt was so overwhelming that she wished she had died in the arena, before she had had a chance to do something so foolish.

Her thoughts had grown so bleak that it was almost a relief when Prince Perky Ponytail slammed the door open. Almost.

"I'll be fine, so stay outside," he ordered impatiently to the guard that stood outside. She made a face at his self-important tone, even if she was grateful that she didn't have to have a skull-faced guard staring at her. A whole parade of servants had already found excuses to come around to gawk at her, and she wanted to relish what little time she had left outside a cell without a guard to remind her of what awaited her.

"Prince Zuko!" Ro twittered, and was summarily ignored. Doctor Akimasa didn't even bother to look up from the medical scroll he was reading.

Zuko bounded up to the bed beside her and sat, bouncing up and down on the mattress. He was grinning widely at her, and Katara felt her stomach flip in what she was determined to write off as indigestion. She may have had a weakness for cute boys, but not Fire Nation boys, and certainly not Fire Nation princes.

"I did it!" he declared triumphantly, face glowing with excitement. His voice was so loud that Akimasa twitched in annoyance at his desk.

"...Did what?" Katara asked, in spite of herself.

"I took your—" he cut himself off to glare at Ro. "Go make yourself useful if you have nothing better to do than eavesdrop."

Katara snickered. Pompous snobby attitudes were a lot funnier when she didn't like the recipient of them, and Ro had been liberal with the verbal put downs as of late.

"My apologies, Prince Zuko, I would never," Ro said, sickly sweet. Katara could feel her anger and humiliation; it was delicious. The apothecary's apprentice flounced over to bother her master.

She turned to Zuko, and murmured, "Took my what?"

"I took your advice, and I got accepted as Piandao's student!" Zuko whispered, amber eyes sparkling.

"...who?"

The Fire Prince deflated a little bit. "Right, you don't know who he is. He's a really famous swordsman, and he chose me as his student! He almost never takes them."

Katara wrinkled her nose. "What does learning new ways to hurt people have to do with the advice I gave you?"

Zuko's face fell, before it hardened in annoyance. "You said to change my approach!"

"The real problem is your goal," Katara said. "You can't just pick and choose what I say and call it taking my advice."

His mouth opened and closed like a fish for a moment, just long enough for Katara to brace herself for another spoiled prince tantrum. Then he slumped a little bit, and said so quietly she could barely hear, "Well, maybe now I have more than one." His voice got louder. "But fine. I don't want to listen to a peasant, anyway."

He stood, and made to leave the infirmary.

"No!" The words were tumbling out of her mouth before she could stop them. "Please don't gp."

The prince stilled, genuine shock distorting his features. He slowly sat back down.

Katara found herself uncharacteristically tongue-tied, her face warm with discomfort. "I, uh… when do your lessons start?"

"...I'll be leaving for his village soon, so probably when I arrive," Zuko replied, squinting at her.

"...Oh." He was leaving, just like she would be leaving the infirmary for her cell, only brought out for the princess's amusement, or interrogations, or…

The door slid open once more. "Hello, I've come to visit Miss Katara—"

Zuko whipped around, rising to his feet in response to the voice.

"Oh, my," said Iroh mildly, but his grin looked anything but.

I always headcanoned Lu Ten as a non-bender, so I thought "why not." Worldbuilding in established universes that don't need worldbuilding is my passion.

Zuko will be taking a leave of absence during his training. As much as I want nothing more than to write him and Piandao interacting, I don't have the time or the patience for it. (Well, I say that now, but detours are my second unnecessary passion.)

I hope you enjoyed it!