Zuko is not used to asking for anything. As a prince he has always been provided for and left without need. When he actually manages to discover an absence in the abundance of all that is considered his, he does not ask for it; the prince demands, orders, and, usually, receives. This is perhaps not the best standard to impress upon a child but the fault cannot be placed on the boy himself; as a prince he's taught, through words and patterns, that everything available can, and thus will, be his. Eventually.
But there's always something, thinks Iroh. There is always something to force a mind into hearing a need and thinking it's a whim. There is always the want for more, for something undeniably real. Leave it to his nephew to complicate that particular truth of life by choosing someone to be that something.
"I cannot," Iroh says, "give you what you are asking for."
"Why not?"
"Because, Prince Zuko, people are not to be passed from hand to hand like sacks of rice. People are people, not things." Many among the nobles and military think differently. Too many. Iroh was hoping his nephew, proud and certain though he is, was not growing up to be one of them. Yet Zuko has asked him…this.
Zuko has asked for Katara.
"You have plenty of servants, prince Zuko. In the future you will have thousands more, along with armies, ministers, and a nation of supplicants. Don't take from your poor, rickety uncle the only person who can brew a good cup of tea to warm these old bones into life."
"Anyone can make tea. You don't need her especially for that."
Iroh does not ask what Zuko needs her for. "But Katara makes the best tea."
The boy fidgets, frowning at the steaming cup in front of him with ire. "She would still make tea whenever you wanted it, I wouldn't care. Or you could both move into the palace," he adds hopefully.
Iroh sighs. "Court air gives me headaches." A disapproving note shades his tone, camouflaging a note of teasing. "And Katara is too young to enter the seraglio."
His nephew's pale skin tinges a compromising pink. "I wouldn't put her there. Ever."
Iroh wonders if "ever" will last past sixteen. "Prince Zuko, why are you asking this?"
"Because—" The boy's hands clench; he looks ready to challenge, to contest, or maybe to simply crack the table in two. Instead, he exhales and relaxes his grip until both palms are flat against each knee. "Because if she were my attendant…then she wouldn't have to be afraid of anyone...hurting her."
Ah, thinks Iroh in enlightenment. The nightmares. Their visits lessened over the past two years but still they come, leaving Katara shaking in their wake. At nine she no longer wakes screaming, as she did at seven, but instead rises to fill a teapot and wait for morning. Some nights she will swallow a draught to leaden her limbs and fall empty into slumber, and some nights the emptiness scares her more than the dreams. Come morning, Iroh will find her watching the sky lighten with a dim hurting in her gaze. It was only a matter of time, really, before Zuko found her too.
"It would not help," he tells the boy and watches frustration return, knowing enough now to recognize the desperation beneath the request.
"No one will bother a prince's personal attendant. No one would dare. Once she realizes that she's safe, that nobody can hurt her, Katara would—"
"—would still have to face what haunts her." But how do you explain this to a boy who is experiencing the desire to protect for the very first time, not in the grand sense of honor and nationality but for the sake of something as vast and inexplicable as friendship? (Katara is, Iroh thinks sadly, the only friend Zuko can truly call his own, instead of a consequence of his status.) There is honor in this.
But there is responsibility too, debt, the guilty charge that stretches invisibly between warden and prisoner, conqueror and refugee; the Fire Nation's fortune is Katara's sorrow as much as it is Zuko's birthright. Katara's fear, the armored monsters that rip her dreams, is the voice of experience.
How does one explain such injustice to a boy? Especially a boy like Zuko, whose soul shines untarnished from his eyes, believing honor is invincible.
"I cannot," Iroh says.
After Zuko leaves, Iroh wonders if Katara will ever grow beyond horrors' reach, and if Zuko will ask again, and whether it is ever truly fair to ask any child to become an adult.