Somehow Zuko doesn't understand, and Iroh doesn't know how he doesn't, but he clearly does not.
The boy leans forward, his arms folded over the railing of the ship, nearly all his weight supported by the metal railing as he gazes unsteadily across the ocean. He looks as if he might drop at any second, and Iroh almost regrets letting him out of bed already, but short of physically restraining Zuko there's not really anything he can do.
He also knows that it would do more harm than good. Zuko cannot handle physical contact right now.
Iroh reached forward, back in the boy's cabin, to help him sit up, and Zuko stopped.
Stopped moving. Stopped breathing. Unscarred eye wide, terror written clearly across the parts of his face that remained untainted by fire that Iroh knows was meant to do more than burn and scar and maim.
He's alive, though. Battered, burned, and scarred, but alive.
Iroh watches the careful way his nephew holds himself and notes the slight but steady tremor running through his frame. Notices the way even his good eye doesn't quite focus as he turns his head in his uncle's direction. Hears the quiet yet devastating desperation in his voice.
"I'll find him."
It begins in a rasp, turns into a croak, and ends in a coughing fit. All Iroh can do is watch as the boy hangs on to the railing for dear life as he chokes on the declaration-his throat is ruined from the heat and the smoke and the screaming.
Zuko finally drags himself back upright.
"I'll find him," he repeats, hoarsely, but more carefully, and Iroh sees the truth of the matter in one blinding, heartbreaking flash of clarity.
Zuko doesn't not understand because he cannot understand. He is thirteen years old, and his father has permanently disfigured him and banished him from his home with orders not to return without the Avatar on pain of death. He'll find the Avatar-must find the Avatar-because the alternative is to live the rest of his life in exile, stripped of his honor, his shame displayed clearly across his face for all the world to see.
It is an impossible task, but Zuko does not understand that it is impossible because if he understands that it is a task he is meant to fail then he has to understand that he is not meant to return, and standing here beside him Iroh realizes that this already battered, nearly broken boy most likely does not have the strength, either in body or mind, to confront this truth.
His nephew is even more fragile than he currently looks.
He's sagging against the railing now, what little energy he had apparently used up. There is despair in his eyes, and shame, and hopelessness, as if he suspects but cannot allow himself to fully accept that his father wanted rid of him. That his father tried to kill him. That he can never go home.
And Iroh abruptly realizes that Zuko does not understand, cannot understand, because the understanding will do what the burning hand held against his face, what the flames and the agony and the infection that set in after could not. The understanding will destroy him.
Zuko wavers, on the edge of a precipice. On the edge of understanding.
Iroh shifts half an inch closer, distracting his nephew. Zuko cannot hide his fear. Iroh sees nothing cowardly in the way he braces himself and turns to face a man he can barely see.
"We will travel to the ends of the earth, if we must." Iroh says, and he knows they will. They will spend the rest of his life on this impossible task, if that's what it takes to keep the child in front of him from shattering completely.
The Avatar has been a symbol of hope before, Iroh thinks. And right now Zuko needs hope more than anything.
Disclaimer: Avatar: The Last Airbender does not belong to me.