A/N: Once I'd, written the prologue for Katara it only felt right to write one for Zuko too. After the prologues, the updates will be a little slower. But please feel free to leave me any criticisms you have.
They all told him he was so lucky. To have a powerful father and a beautiful mother. That he was born with so many opportunities, more than the average boy his age. That he could achieve anything, the world was at his fingertips all he had to do was seize it. They had all told him he was fortunate. He was a Prince. Or as close to a Prince as you could get without being born Royal. He had everything that would come with sitting on the top rung of high society. He had the money to burn on whatever he desired, he had the looks, he had the right friends and the good grades, the right last name.
They all told him he was blessed. To be his father's son, to have such a rich and influential man as his constant supporter- that no matter how many trials and tribulations were thrown his way as long as he had his doting father he would be okay. They all dripped honeyed words into his ears until all other words that came before them were trapped, and like bees caught in that honey, those words stung.
Because they weren't looking close enough. If they had bothered to look just a little closer they'd have seen the cracks in the pre-teens' perfect mirror image. Son to a father who didn't want him, abandoned by a mother who had never looked back, and older brother to a sister who wished she was an only child.
They didn't see what his life was like behind the black mirror, they didn't see the constant tirades of abuse from a man with delusions of grandeur, they didn't see a mother who had checked out long before she left or the sister whose hobby was to torment her brother in any way she could.
They didn't want to see the truth. They didn't care to see it. Not even when the truth was as plain as the fresh burn on the fourteen years olds face. An accident they would say. Young boys playing with fireworks. A car crash. Wandering too close to open fire. Anything to absolve the father of his sin, after all, they told him he was rich and influential.
And who would believe the marred Prince when the benevolent King span his truth and opened his treasury for the people? A prince who by all accounts was a brat? No one who could help.
His fall from grace had been a hard one, burned and cast out for simply being born to a man who hated him. Moving from the luxurious lifestyle he was used to a small town on the edge of the world with no one but his ageing uncle and nothing but a small tea shop and cramped apartment.
At first, he was confused, nowhere in his teenage brain could he comprehend what had happened to him, where had it gone wrong? What had he done? Was he not the perfect son? Granted he wasn't his perfect sister, with her perfect grades and skills for analytics, but his grades were good and he did what he was told.
Then he was hurt. More physically at first. The scar was still fresh, so deeply scorched were the layer of his alabaster skin that multiple skin grafts and healing poultices later and he was still left with an angry mattered dead lump of flesh stretched so tightly over his once-promising face. It itched horrendously while healing, so much so that he'd often wake himself up to the sounds of his screams and the feeling of hot liquid on his fingertips. The flesh had no feeling but it could bleed. He had to take a year out of school to fully heal before the muscles in his face stopped aching every time he dared change the expression.
Then he felt the emotional pain. Weak. Pathetic. Unwanted. The words become a mantra to him, he couldn't escape them no matter how hard his uncle would push back against them. Every time he would see his face, the words would slip into his head like those trapped bees ready to sting. Those words he'd absorbed into himself long before he heard any different. Now he added ugly and twisted.
His first day at a new school had gone exactly how he imagined it would. Long pitying stares directed at his scar long before those same pitying eyes would notice there was a person underneath. They saw the gnarled flesh and decided how he got the burn before anyone had even asked. Not that he'd have told them if they had, who were these backwater hillbillies anyway? He was a Prince of high society. How dare they, who live in the middle of nowhere in a godforsaken plot of hell, pity him.
So he snapped. He'd show them what a real tear-away looked like. These people had already decided who he was before they bothered to see who he was. No one ever looked beyond the mirror in the first place and now no one would look beyond the scar. Maybe his sister had been right. The scar just made him look like the disappointment he was. The wasted potential.
The first time had been so easy. He had lashed out at the boy who had confronted him in the hallway, the boy who had found a paid-for article online about him. About the son of a business tycoon who'd been injured in a horrible accident. He had offered pity and even tried to relate, but the confrontation set his temper off. It was too soon. Instead of taking the words of comfort and extended hand of friendship he did what he was taught. Attacked.
He couldn't remember what had happened, he had seen red and when he came too he was being restrained by three grown men. Barking like a madman, even he couldn't recall what he had been shouting at the bloodied boy, only that he was sure it had nothing to do with him and everything to do with himself.
His uncle had pleaded with the school on his behalf, begged them to understand his nephew had been through a lot and he wasn't a bad kid. The other boy's parents were gracious and did not press charges, turned out despite his complete lack of control he had only struck the boy twice before he was pulled away, the school accepted on the condition he took anger management.
He agreed, only for his uncle. He knew he should have but he did not feel bad for the boy he'd hit. He didn't feel bad when that boy left the school either, how dare he pity him.
It was at these accursed anger management classes that he met a girl. Pretty enough with brown hair and brown eyes, she wasn't taking the classes, her mother ran the community centre they were being held in. He had been completely combative, refusing to talk during the group sessions and occasionally giving unwanted commentary on other peoples experiences with their anger. She seemed to find him funny, seeking him out after his classes were over. He was under no illusion she found him attractive, his reputation as a volatile bad boy had been solidified now and girls seemed to like that about him.
She was a preacher's daughter because of course, she was, guys with reputations like his were magnets to girls like her. Girls with constant rules and regulations and promise rings and Sunday school badges. She was an only child and that part about her seemed to sting him more than it should have. His sister was technically an only child now too.
She had ideas of changing him, making him good for her, reforming him into a man she would marry one day. He had no such delusions, but she was pretty and was showing interest in him and despite his outward hostility he had to admit it was nice to have something somewhat normal in his shit show of a life. With the not so gentle persuasion of his uncle, he took her out for one date, it was nice but nothing special. Somewhere along the night, he was starting to see she was liking the attention of being with him more than actually being with him. He was okay with that. It wasn't like he had many other options anyway.
They dated for a fortnight before her father found out, and like he expected he wasn't happy about it, his image had become even further skewed from the truth. Suddenly he was some ultimate player with a kill list. It wasn't true. He was barely sixteen and hadn't been with a girl that way. She rebelled against her father, to her this was some clandestine love story and he'd do anything to be with her, to him this fling wasn't worth the headache. But regardless, he was still a teenage boy with raging hormones and this girl had all but thrown herself at him. She was his first but he got the feeling he wasn't hers.
Once her father had found out, she was sent to live with her aunt, and his reputation took another Swan dive into the reputable. He didn't have time to feel bad for what had happened because the next thing he knew he and his uncle were on their way back to his father's. This time his grandfather, a man who hadn't lifted a finger to help him, was ill.
Had it not been for his uncle during that time he may well have lost his sanity. His sister was as awful as ever, making consistent remarks about his scar and his father all but ignored his presence, save for the very public funeral in which he was presented to the media. He was numb at this time and when his sisters apathetic yet pretty friend threw herself at him he didn't stop her. He'd spent a month or two with her, her lack of emotion and persistent boredom seemed to be the salve his aching soul needed at the time, she didn't seem to expect anything from him and he didn't want anything from her. She had been the second girl he'd been with. Again, he wasn't sure he was her first either. Not that it mattered to him. He just didn't want to feel.
Arriving 'home' had presented itself with a new host of problems. Now not only was his kill list as long as his arm but it included some girlfriends of boys who didn't particularly like him all that much. He didn't fight the rumours, there was no point in it. He wouldn't be believed anyway. These people had decided who he was the moment he arrived here and he couldn't change their minds, not with his scar and his temper.
The same boys had decided those rumours were true and they would make him pay for it, or at least they just wanted to give themselves a reason to attack him, and they did. At first, it was some made-up story of how he'd beaten the hell out of some out of town kid, then it was about his made-up kill list, next it was rumours of him being sent to Juvie for pummelling said out of town kid. The lies he could deal with, laughable in their imagination, but the truth he couldn't bear. Articles began to show up of him with his family at the funeral of the 'beloved' statesman grandfather and suddenly the taunts began.
They were too close to home, cut too deeply and tore the numb haze away from his soul and eyes, again he snapped. The first boy to throw a fist sorely regretted it as did the next, the other four had managed to escape but not unscathed. He had beaten two of them badly enough to need hospital care, by the time he had been pulled away, so did he. His uncle had arrived to see the boy cuffed to a hospital bed, his good eye blackened and his lip burst. But he didn't see his nephew that day, he saw a feral boy who was deeply hurt, and so did the courts. He was let off with sixty hours of community service and a deferred sentence.
When he was truly at his lowest, he met her. The girl with brilliant blue eyes and annoyingly persistent need to fix broken toys. She was new to the town and like him didn't seem to fit in all that well. She had an older brother in his year, but he was the extroverted class clown that just about everyone seemed to love. He didn't. But the boy didn't seem to be all that deterred by his obvious hostility, instead, he was pretty persistent on them being friends. He wasn't, but if he was being honest with himself he was a funny guy and didn't seem to mind all that much about his reputation.
Or didn't until his sister seemed to take the same interest in him. At first, he wanted even less to do with her than her brother, she was too empathetic and those mesmerising eyes saw too much. He didn't want her pity either, he'd managed to turn these towns peoples pitying eyes away from him, it wouldn't be too hard to turn hers away too. Especially when she started making friends with other girls.
Or so he thought, sometimes he'd catch her watching him and rather than turn away she'd smile at him, he would greet her with a customary scowl but the girl was nothing if not stubborn. Sometimes she'd even try to start a conversation with him, at first he tried to ignore her existence but found that hard because despite how irritating she was, she was beautiful. Naturally so.
He'd learned from her brother that their father was ex-military and they'd moved around a lot as kids, he'd told him that now his father worked on the powerlines and although the money was good he just wished they could settle. He felt that too. The desire to belong somewhere. Never feeling at ease when you sleep at night or not entirely trusting the streets you walk alone. He could sympathise.
But that still didn't mean he wanted to befriend the girl. As it turns out he had no choice, she managed to get a job working a few hours a week at his uncle's tea shop. It had been his fault for refusing to help out. Now he had to deal with her in school and at home.
But as the weeks wore on he warmed to her, once he'd gotten over his initial annoyance and truly spoke to her, he realised she didn't look at him with those same pitying eyes. That her eyes were looking at him, not the scar or the reputation. But at him. She bothered to ask him questions about himself, not about his past, but his likes and dislikes. What he did for fun, what music he likes, his favourite colour. Questions that were inconsequential but normal. She began to chip away at the ice wall that had formed around his heart.
And soon she was spending days she wasn't working at the tea shop, they would study together, she had often complained how her brother was the smart one and she had to study to keep her grades up. He had laughed that day. Not because he was reminded of his genius sister and himself, but because she seemed to land too close to home without even realising she was doing it.
She told him he had a nice laugh and for the first time in his life, he felt his chest flutter. And once he started falling for her, he couldn't stop. He'd never felt anything like what he'd felt for her before. Around her, he wasn't the scarred kid with the bad temper, he was her friend with the bad temper. Albeit, she had a temper too and they could clash, but it never lasted too long.
After two months of battling with himself over whether he should just kiss her or not, whether she could find him attractive or whether she would even want to date such a mess, he did. If it could have been called a kiss, more like a sweet brushing of lips. He had decided he could pretend it was accidental if she didn't want it. But she did. She pulled him to her and kissed him back. Her lips were clumsy, but he just found that cute. He'd have time to teach her.
For the first time in his seventeen years of life, he felt normal. He felt wanted and he felt like a teenager. She was far too beautiful not to gain attention from other boys, her overprotective brother was an effective deterrent when he was around, so was his own scowl, but it was her sharp tongue and the ferocious protective streak that kept unwanted attention away. The easiest way to earn her ire was to insult him or insinuate she was too good for her boyfriend. On more than one occasion he'd caught this spitfire of a girl with her figure in some boys face daring him to say whatever insult he'd come out with again. They never did.
He loved her. He'd realised.
He didn't want from her what he had gotten from the other girls, she was too important to him. Their dates were fun, their kisses soft and when she told him he was handsome he believed her. He was careful with her, he didn't want to rush anything she wasn't ready for and when she was ready and gave herself to him, he knew he was her first.
On one of the nights they had been together, he had woke up screaming again, his fingers flew to his scar. He had thought then she would leave him, what fifteen-year-old girl wanted to date such a broken mess of a boy, especially one as beautiful and fun as her. But she didn't. She didn't hesitate. She soothed him. Placed a gentle kiss on his scar and promised she wouldn't leave him. That was the one time he didn't believe her. He couldn't believe her. They always leave.
He was right not too. Less than two months after they started dating, she came to him tears pouring from her beautiful eyes and told him the news he had expected but tried to ignore. She would be leaving again. She clung to his shirt and sobbed her apologies into his chest, his heartbreaking with each strangled cry from her. But what could he do? He didn't want to lose her, but he had no choice. Her father wasn't like his, he was a good man. If he was moving his kids again he had a solid reason too. It hurt. So he held her. He kissed her deeply and comforted her the only way he knew how. They made love again, this time it was desperate.
Each kiss was drawn out longer than it needed to be, each grip was tighter and each gaze was more intense… They whispered words of love to each other and they knew they meant it. But when morning came, he let her go. Clean break. They had too. It was already painful enough. And then two days later she was gone from his life. And he felt that numb again. The ice was back and it was thicker this time. His uncle had offered comfort but he didn't want it. He just wanted her. His first love. He cried for the first time that night. Alone in his room, in the bed, he'd held her for the last time.
Why did they always leave him? What was wrong with him?
Two years later saw him standing in a college library with his arm suspended over a textbook, he'd been absentmindedly staring at before he'd decided to just grab, gazing into those same beautiful blue eyes he thought he'd never see again.
"Z-Zuko?" Her soft voice wouldn't have even registered if the room hadn't already seemed to have disappeared around them.
"Ka-Katara?" He had replied through a dry mouth.
A/N: I know this one was longer than the previous chapter but I found writing Zuko a lot harder than I did writing Katara. There was just so much more to unpack with his story and character than with Kataras.
I did leave those two years for Zuko blank on purpose.
Please R&R.