When asked what they recalled of the night on which the beloved and august Princess Azula was born, most of citizens of the Fire Nation's imperial capital city would speak of the conviviality in every home, the grins stretched wide on every face.
Under the magnanimous reign of Lord Ozai, any citizen could rhapsodize about the joy that swelled in every heart. Reverent awe had poured forth from family members and neighbors who poked their heads from slatted windows to cheer, already aglow as if drunk even before they broke open their stores of rice wine to toast the health and success of the new royal.
Drink flowed as freely as the praise, the revelries of the citizens matched only by the fervent prayers of grandams, worshiping at home shrines, who recalled the great Lord Azulon in the height of his youth, keen-eyed and dashing, a savant whose name the little baby girl would honor. Stoicism was already obvious in her features as wizened midwives cleaned her of the afterbirth and wrapped her in purple-embroidered swaddling clothes to be handed back to her pristine Queen-mother.
What they actually thought was another matter entirely, Zuko gleaned from his time amid rough soldiers and swarthy low-class sailors whose tongues wagged and lolled like those of dogs. That was especially true when they drooled sloppy trails of gin and cheap, acidic beer. A prince had experience at projecting derision and smugness in place of revulsion at the stench and barbarity, even as, admittedly, it affected him over time.
How easy it was to become what you were surrounded by. What you saw and imbibed or felt seeping into your skin, right through your pores, by osmosis.
Stories were bandied about by the uncouth if gregarious sailors who knew as well as he that, while his congenial and generous uncle was one of them, the scarred disgrace that stalked the iron hulk of their ship, barking and snarling at all who passed him, was not, however much he changed.
From those snippets of chatter, it became clear to Prince Zuko that the thing that most of the men recalled was the fireworks.
Everyone remembered the fireworks that accompanied Azula's birth.
While they weren't the thing that stood out in his mind, they had made an impression, even on a two-year-old. Zuko had been asleep at first, tucked into his Uncle's side as they waited outside the Queen-mother's chambers for the midwives and female sages, skilled with herbs and tinctures, to finish their work.
Of course, nature and Azula, stubborn even in birth, had their say as well.
Already a troublesome child, she wasn't coming out until she was damn well ready, which was rather frustrating considering her prior eagerness to be born had led to a premature labour.
Double-minded from the beginning and to the end, Zuko supposed.
Ever a weak and coddled child, he woke wailing at the crack and clap of gunpowder in the sky, as did most of city when the early-morning display was set off. A second that he cannot remember was planned for the evening, but for the second child, another firebender from the energy trails scried by father's sorceresses, Ozai wanted a gunpowder sun to eclipse the dawn.
Even now, through the haze of childhood-amnesia pierced by shock and terror and tears, he could remember how his world had condensed down to his uncle's grinning face and the alien-warm hand that stroked his hair and cupped his cheek to wipe them dry.
Other than with his uncle, he never felt a man's touch like that, for it was unseemly, and seared into his mind like another scar.
Alongside the slightly churlish cousin, mollified in his sulking by Uncle Iroh's arm around his shoulder as the stocky general hefted Zuko to his chest and held him there, they watched the fireworks through one of the palace's windows.
In a cacophony that had him burying his head into the older man's robe, smelling of spice and herbs he was too young to name, and sweat, a hundred shooting star poured up from the ground. In celebration of a new sun rising into the sky, the Fire Lord turned night into prismatic day. Blooms of copper-blue, strontium-red, barium-greens and sodium-yellows that cascaded through the sky roused him from his uncle's side to peer over the thick muscle and suet of his arm.
His uncle's mouth had moved, but all that he could remember after a decade-and-a-half was the sound of coloured-gunpowder cracking, sending shards of glittering fire raining downward, cooling in their descent, and vanishing in the tenebrous sky.
Zuko couldn't recall what he said, but, years later, when he asked his uncle what he could remember of that night, the man had grinned, broad and fat and uglier than anything else that Zuko had ever seen from him. The pull of flesh over a corpse's cheeks, the same way that he looked when speaking of deposing his brother.
The old man set down his porcelain cup, steam and the scent of ginger wafting up from the shivering surface of the greenish liquid, and rubbed his hands together is if trying to warm them.
Strange how old his uncle could look. How much he could look his age.
"I told you that there is great joy in being an older brother. Parents plant the seed and water the earth, but an older brother?" Uncle looked beyond the window to grand bazaar, still under reconstruction after Zuko's Agni Kai, even as the old man planted a knotweed Pai Sho tile on the board between them. "Often he is the sun that the flower reaches towards."
Pondering his next move as, though it was not his natural inclination, he was trying to emulate Uncle's methodical approach to the game as opposed to the lightning advance he'd favoured in their early games, Zuko twisted a Rose tile between his fingers.
"Did you mean that, Uncle?" he asked with a tone of feigned absence, leaning to the side so that he could peer at the board from a different angle.
"Yes." He paused, then, hand to his side as if he felt the ache from arthritis or a deep tissue wound, healed, but his breathing getting caught in scar-tissue. "You know, Zuko, a bounteous field of dandelions can bring joy and wealth. They make a fine tea for cold winter mornings. To that farmer, they can be a blessing."
In a fury on seeing the opening in his own staggered formation, Zuko plopped down the title in a defensive position. He was losing of course. Always did, and he had long since resigned himself to that. Some losses brought stability. There was such a quiet horror at the thought of anything more than that: to shake loose the bedrock of the world by winning.
"To the imperial gardener, they are a curse," Uncle continued at a leisurely pace. A White Jasmine tile blocked out Zuko's attempt at a subtle circumvention of the former general's westward position. The old man, and, yes, Zuko saw truly, Uncle was so very old, stroked his oiled and prim beard, carefully styled now for the radiant ladies who might bless him with their presence in his humble tea house. Their eyes met. "You see, Zuko, weeds and flowers both stretch out towards the sun. The true difference between them is only that one grows where it is not wanted."
Long after his uncle departed, unable to remain in the capital in light of the unseemly implications that the new Fire Lord was little more than his proxy or puppet, Zuko pondered that. Either he was becoming more adept at parsing out his uncle's florid – in this case literally – expressions or there were layers of meaning beyond his ability to perceive.
And Zuko knew, as well as he knew the pitted folds of scar-tissue under his fingertips and how the world hazed into a mist of incoherent colours and shapes when he covered his right eye, just how powerful something unseen could be.
While Azula had long escaped captivity, was actively plotting to undo his rule, it was that evening, the air muggy to the point that Zuko had to strip off his shirt and lever open the window in his chambers in the hope that there would be more than dead air, that he began to write his journals. They could never be shared, of course - not in any conceivable future, but he planted them away in an ornate pinewood bureau nonetheless.
Written and never read would have to be enough.
