Actions

Work Header

and make your heart proud

Summary:

You exist along the narrow border of banished and dead. On the ship, as soon as you’re able to roll off the hard, lumpy mat nailed onto a shelf in the med bay without dying, the sailors yell for you by a name you have not heard before.

Or: Zuko prays at the wrong shrine, runs errands due to blackmail, clobbers someone with an expensive artifact, and gets manipulated into joining the Gaang early.

Notes:

Title from “I’ll Keep Coming” by Low Roar. Seasons and time is a little wobbly until canon tumbles in.

Chapter 1

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

So you’re alone now. No you’re not, you’re only one of the many, the far more than you ever thought possible, splintered remains of lives and families smashed into driftwood by the war bleeding its guts across the land, dragging its entrails through the ash and dust. You’re one of the kids and teenagers rubbing your swollen feet, gingerly wrapping the cleanest scrap of cloth you have over the blisters embedded onto your soles by the bone shaking miles of walking away from the fire that burned you. You’re just one of the refugees hopelessly trying to keep ahead of the armies shredding the farmland countryside into ruins through thoughtless aggression the previous Fire Lords never had. At least, never had to this extent.

Negligence, a man spits, with the dried blood of his youngest child still caked across his left sleeve. You sit to the side, poking the edges of the scar tissue along your nose, as he frantically paces, waiting for the medics to come back out with relief in their exhausted eyes as they tell him the amputation is successful and his child won’t die like the others. The new bastards are all idiots, he growls, that new tyrant most of all. The whole world will starve if they keep destroying the land.

Head bowed, but watching his fists, you place your hands back on your knees, and shift your weight just a bit forward, more firmly on your aching feet. A nurse comes out with wet hands smelling of harsh soap. She says, the operation was successful, your child will live today, but –

You are not alone, but –


You exist along the narrow border of banished and dead. You hear the decree first and see it for yourself on paper when you drag yourself into town two ports down from where you are thrown away. The Fire Nation’s youngest prince is banished. You are the banished prince and the prince is not you.

On the ship, as soon as you’re able to roll off the hard, lumpy mat nailed onto a shelf in the med bay without dying, the sailors yell for you by a name you have not heard before. Waves crash into the side of the ship and you stumble as you carry sodden cloth in baskets big enough to fit yourself. The cooks all talk too loudly and too quickly as you struggle through washing tin dishes and cups during a mealtime rush, three more dishes dropping into the filthy soap suds for every bowl you stack on the drying racks.

The crew barks at you with the name that is not yours, that has no mothers or fathers or sisters or thrones. The first two days, you respond in delayed fits and starts to the unfamiliar sound. The next two days, you respond slowly in resistance, trying to tell them in your higher voice which their salt and smoke scraped throats roll right over that your name is not a hollow, dead shell with no home or ancestors, abandoned by the road, but instead -

The next two days, you respond to the name as if it is your own. And all the days after that, until the crew dumps you on orders at the edge of town with away as the only direction forward.

You still can’t entirely comprehend the word banished and what it means for you, so you stick towards towns with familiar red flags waving in city centers and by flowing water. Hunger leads you on a leash towards a small store on the edges of market proper where you can see soft apricot peaches through the open doorway and smell fresh cooked bing filled with brown sugar and red bean paste. You have no money, but you have your name, and you go into the tiny building to see what you can get.

The only occupant in the room, a girl a few years older than you, glances over at your entrance from the lychee nuts she’s stacking. Her eyes widen and she glances back and forth between your face and something by the door. Turning to see what it is, you see a flier pinned among many others that you’ve never seen before. A flier with a burned face and the words, “By decree of the Fire Lord” and “Banished” and “Prince Zuko.”

Oh. That’s supposed to be your face. That’s supposed to be your new face.

You turn back to the girl in equal alarm. She drops the lychee into a tumbling pile and yanks you through strips of cloth into a musty backroom filled with wooden crates and burlap bags of rice and flour. She’s taller than you and saying things like, “Are you crazy? What are you doing here, you can’t stay in town and let anyone see you. Oma’s tits, you’re a child.”

“Um,” you eloquently say.

She squints at you in the candle flame and what little light makes it past the cloth door. “You’re a mess,” she says with complete irreverence fit for her pale, more green than amber eyes.

That smacks you back to attention and you draw up in anger and say, “You can’t talk to me like that. I’m Prince Zuko, son of –”

“For the love of Agni,” she interrupts and slaps her hand over your mouth.

Incised, you bat her hand away from your face as she hisses, “You cannot do that. You’re a kid, your name will kill you, either from the Fire or Earth army.”

You glower at her, even if that lights up the left side of your face with pain. “It’s my name.”

“It’s the name of a soon to be corpse,” she says and no wonder she’s stuck here on the edge of town among muddy streets with cracked and dented tiny buildings and no customers if she has an attitude like this. You should never have set foot into this shack, even if she frustratingly has a point you don’t want to ever acknowledge.

“Use a name that’s more generic. Like mine, I’m Rin, there are a million Rin’s. There’s five other Rin’s in this very neighborhood,” she says.

“I’m not using Rin.”

Rin shrugs. “Then what about Yi? Is that good enough for you?”

You growl but don’t say no. It’s better than what the sailors called you.

“Alright Yi, get out of here.”

“Can I have some food?”

“Do you have money to pay for food?”

“No,” you admit, with the annoyance of this whole encounter curdling in your throat.

“Then get out of here, before the guards arrive and throw you into a prison. Where there is no food either.”


“Name?” the clerk drawls without even glancing up from the stained paper before him.

You panic, tripping over the Yi Rin shoved into your hands and say Lee instead. The clerk pens in the wrong character, but before you can correct his mistake, he’s already moved on with a bored “Next?” The person behind you shoves at your shoulders when you don’t move out of the way fast enough. Great, you’re Lee now, and not even with the symbolism you wanted to mean.

You’re so hungry, you can barely think of anything else. All your festering indignation has corroded into rusty dust and it’s everything you can do to unsuccessfully forage and fish for what you can eat that won’t waylay you with cramping indigestion for a day or come back out the wrong end.

With nothing to barter with and no coin, you can’t afford anything legally and you refuse to beg. You cannot use your name, so you swallow it instead so that the knowledge that you are Zuko, you are the son of Fire Lord Ozai and Lady Ursa, feeds you instead because you refuse to beg and you refuse to starve to death.

Which leads you here, in line with dozens of others, toiling for hours carrying heavy packages into a warehouse, and getting cheated out of your wages. Your weakened arms and legs shake each night from the work, your back painful with knots, but you’re able to sip a thin broth each day when you wake up and when you go to sleep and you stay alive long enough for the battlefield to reach the edge of town, forcing you into the wilderness again.


You must live, so you must eat. You must eat, so you must work. You must work, so you must find a job.

You can’t find a job.

You sit on roofs, pressing your palms onto hot clay, feeling the curves of the shingles and their half-worn off glaze pressing into your calves. People mill through the market below you. Their attention plods along from stall to stall, addressing faces, watching coins, embracing hands. Not even the children look up. The northeastern vacant fields are better for cloud gazing than the cloth strewn corridors of the markets. As long as you bring a plum or a fresh blossom for the tiny shrine at the base of the lone tree among the field’s grass and thorny flowers, the earthen stage beneath the oppressively wide sky invites all to linger.

The hat on your head and your short unwashed hair itches. You sit on roofs, basking in the unfiltered sunlight laying its reassuring palms upon the back of your hands and your neck, watching the people below you. You watch, trying to carve a hollow from the hunger lodged hard in your stomach and your throat just large enough to slot in the motions you must repeat and perfect so that you in your muddy clothing and oil-clumped hair and smooth fingers can blend in and get a job and eat.

You always were clumsy and too slow to learn your katas and the movements of your sets. These lessons and instructions are no different, for all your heightened desperation to stop making mistakes, to stop failing.

A breeze brushes its fingertips along the branches and leaves of the trees lining the street and peaking from their courtyards like teenage gossips chattering over their walls. There must be water nearby, where you can wash yourself.

You must work so you may eat. You must eat so you may live. You must live so you may return.

Home.

You think.

“Banished for life,” sneers the memory of the poster lurking at the very back of your mind. “No redemptions.”

You turn fourteen in a town you do not know the name of.


The shrine rises abruptly among the scraggly trees growing prickly and shrub-like against the hot wind blowing from the great Si Wong Desert. You’ve been heading south, away from the northern hemisphere almost completely controlled by the Fire Nation and where winter hunkers down with a deep vengeance. The charcoal of large fires thins out as you travel, away as fast as you can on your own two feet or hitching on rides. You need every scrap of luck and good fortune the spirits dignify to give you, crumbs for the poodle monkey under the table, so you always offer what you can when you encounter a shrine. Especially those falling into disrepair, forgotten in the churning mud of the war.

You dig through the bag you stole a month ago and pull out your last apple and the thin knife you didn’t steal. After cutting the fruit with the dulling blade, you set the pieces in the cracked bowl at the base of the illegible words painted on the weather damaged statue, the offering made all the stronger by your permanent hunger. Sucking on the thin layer of juice on your fingers, you step back, taking in the sagging roof, the smell of dry disrepair, and the hole in one wall with a frown.

There’s no telling who this shrine is supposed to be dedicated to. So you bow your heads and send out an open prayer to deities and the spirits and the guides of your mother and uncle’s tales, for the blessings of safe travels as you flee south and east, that you may find food and shakily rebuild your bending in the secrets of dawn. Then you sling your bag back onto your back, double check the wrappings on your arms and calves, and walk away, thinking little more of the shrine.


“You’re one of those Fire Nation scum colony street rat brats, aren’t you?” the man in front of you sneers. The smell of smoke clings to his patched-up clothing and his yellow teeth. You silently narrow your eyes at him as the foot traffic in the street automatically opens a bubble around you two that everyone ignores exists. He chews on a wad of something putrid and says, “Answer me boy. You have arsonists for parents, I can see it in your piss eyes.”

Frequently, the Earth Kingdom frankly disgusts you. “That’s not how it works,” you start to say.

He spits the leaves he’s chewing onto your shirt. Your jaw snaps shut with a crack and your hands itch towards the swords you skipped meals and haggled for literal hours over sheathed at your back.

“Fuck off,” you sling at him, and step to the side, disengaging. He steps back into your path. The crowd around you shifts, from one cautious color to a more nervous, a more anticipatory one. Eyes hook claws onto your rags.

You breath in heavy through your nose and breath out harsh the same. Banished or not, you are Zuko, you are the son of Ozai and Ursa, you are of Agni’s line and you are nobility. You bite down hard on the obsidian core of you – your swallowed name and your tattered honor.

Scowling at his Earth Kingdom bulk, you hiss, “I said, get out of my way.”

“No,” he says and launches pillars of rock into your gut with a slide of his foot.

Fortunately for your pissed off, hungry body, especially your aching arms, the opium his smokes and the leaves he chews have long ransacked his strength. He petulantly fights, sweating and shaking, against your blades. The clearing in the crowd widens and wavers as you push him towards a wall and out of your way.

You close in on him, the way you figured out how to strike back at the fifth Earth Kingdom asshole taking issue to your existence and the colors of your birth. The forms taught to you by the palace tutors live in your head, but fighting stances taught to royal princes aren’t enough on their own for months of dirty fighting and back alley brawls.

The man goes down with a punch to his neck. Not enough to even knock him unconscious, but enough to shock and wind him.

Breath cycling through your lungs in deeper bursts, you glare at your opponent slumped upon the ground and against a dark stone wall. With disgust, you brush off what you can of his spit, then transfer your glower at the whispering townspeople.

“Show’s over,” you yell at them.

They part before you as you stalk away, now angrily searching for somewhere you can do laundry earlier than you anticipated. Asking around tugs you into five different directions until someone finally points you towards a small stream more rock than water.

You follow the sound of mallets beating on cloth upon flat stone, then veer slightly off, eschewing company. Among your worldly possessions, you only have about one and a half outfits; you’re loath to setting your half-naked, distracted self among so many strangers, especially after you just fought one of their neighbors.

The water flows cold over your hands entangled in the cloth of your shirt. Still not entirely sure how to go about laundering, operating solely on the few glimpses you caught on the ship and at other creeks like this one, you scrub at the dirt and the stains. You’re far enough upstream from the town’s women that you cautiously heat the water around your hands rubbing against each other. Eventually, the soap’s foaming comes up as a clean white.

You pull the shirt out of the water, wring what you can, and flap it in the air a few times to get some of the wrinkles out. Since the sun’s making its way into afternoon and you want some more distance between the town and where you make camp, you slip the wet garment on and raise your ambient temperature to dry it while you carry your bags in your hands and conclusively leave town.


At first, you’d been desperate to use you flame, then you quickly became sorry for ever wishing so. Your apprehension lasts all of three days when you miscalculate your depth of vision, your balance, and your feet’s silence and then it’s light fires and claw yourself into an escape or die upon the blades of a dozen guards from breaking into the estate of a landowner with far more clout than you realized.

After that unmitigated disaster, you begin training every morning as if you still have instructors correcting your constant mistakes and showing you new forms.

In short, your bending’s a mess and you can’t even use it often, being in enemy territory. Somewhere along the way, perched on one of the great coins strewn embedded in the dirt on old battlefields, you consider being … a bit more spontaneous with your bending. Try anything new and unexpected that can give you an advantage. This thought carries you from one penniless town to another.

The towns rise like broken bones piercing through skin: painful and ghastly and beyond your capabilities to fix or address. They’re pieced together from broken scaffolding and half-built homes, empty except for the dust within them and the dirt upon the skin of the washed-out survivors. From hard eyes and tense shoulders, hands gripping improvised weapons and the thought always, where’s my money, where’s my food, where’s my family.

In the first month of your unmooring, you thought in twists of frustration and confusion about why these people continue fighting, why they continue refusing the glories of your nation’s technology and progress and advances. The resources your tutors tell you in their broad strokes, of food and wood and metal, the foundations of your glory.

In your second month, you cross paths with an army you smell – unwashed bodies and blood –  long before you see and the trail it drags behind it: burned fields, broken organs, the salt of tears smeared into every wound in the people’s hearts, doomed to stutter around deep scars. The words of your tutors quiet under the roar of exhaustion and hunger.


The hand before you – you think it’s a hand, there are long thin jointed things like fingers gathered together at one end like a palm, attached to a thin arm disappearing into a gray sleeve – holds out slices of an apple.

“Thank you for the offering,” the mouth on the being with the hand holding the apple slices says.

You glance from the fruit to the face. Three of its eyes blink. The fingers close over its cargo and slide back into the sleeve. You lick your lips, trying to work past the sticky cotton mouthed feel coating the roof of your mouth and your tongue. “You’re … welcome.”

The being – the spirit? – smooths its other hand over the lacquer wood, low table between you. A silent wind you cannot feel against your skin ruffles blades of almost purple grass and the sky glows the thick orange of a sunset after a storm. The spirit says, “I have not received an offering in many years, abandoned and forgotten. A debt repaid; we offer an exchange.”

A pure white porcelain plate molded into a long oval appears on the table, bearing a fresh, just caught fish longer than your arm. You haven’t seen a dish so delicately garnished and seasoned with a clear golden sauce drizzled over the pale fish skin since the last grand New Year’s banquet at the palace, over a year ago.

The spirit serves you, as you watch, hungry and enraptured. Fish flesh parts into white pieces under the stiletto thin flash of the knife shimmering like the skin and scales scraped into a pile on the side. Spindly fingers press ornate chopsticks into your hand, guiding you out of your stupor towards your serving.

“Thank you,” you mumble, and lift your first piece towards your mouth. The fish practically seems to melt over your tongue in flickers and waves of flavor from something citrus, star anise, peppers, and white vinegar. Tears almost well in your eyes as the longing for home and its soba noodles and its moon peach tarts and its seared urchin squid slams into you with all the force of an earthbender’s battering ram. You say again, “Thank you.”

The spirit watches you silently.

The golden light shifts towards green as you eat more of the fish, setting thin rib bones to the side as you move down the body towards the tail. The click of your chopsticks against each other or the porcelain bounce loudly into the silence pressing down upon your ears. You only eat a little bit of the fish, the rich flavors quickly overwhelming after months of subsiding on dried, tough meat and pilfered or scavenged fruits and nuts, helped along occasionally by broth more water than anything else and days old rice.

Was that teapot there before? It lifts in the being’s grip, filling two teacups almost to the top in a way that has you nervous about reaching out with your limited eyesight and tapping your fingers against the warped borders of your depth of vision without spilling a single drop of the fragrant drink. “May we remind myself,” the spirit asks, “of who you are?”

You manage to pick up the cup, hot porcelain against your fingertips, and tell them, “I’ve been going by Lee, but I’m Zuko. Prince Zuko.”

The syllables rest unfamiliar and flat on your tongue, like a river pebble you could skip across a pond. A row of eyes blink at you.

“Prince Zuko?” the spirit says. “You are not Prince Zuko.”

Your head snaps up from watching the ripples in your cup to the shifting bones of their face, and incredulous, you say, “What?”

The leftward voice of the spirit says, “You are not Prince Zuko, son of Fire Lord Ozai and Lady Ursa, heir to the Dragon Throne. You are You. You have been You and you will be You.”

You frown harder, the cup between your hands cooling and leaching your heat. You tell the spirit, “No, I am –” You choke on a stone lodged in your throat.

Coughing, you try again, “I am –”

You gasp for breath, hands at your throat, coughing and coughing around the block, eyes widening, warm liquid spilling over your fingers and onto the light-sucking matte of the table surface and onto your lap as the drink spills from the dropped cup. You wheeze, “I’m, I’m, I am –”

“You are You,” the spirit repeats. Light glistens off the sauce poured over the half-eaten fish flesh. You cough and cough, hunching over, gagging around the thin bones in your throat, the blockage in your windpipe suffocating your voice, your name. “And you are only You.”

You look up, horrified. The fish in the plate begins to breath with half its gills. Its eyes twitch and its exposed spine shudders. The sauce slowly turns red with blood. The spirit’s needle thin green fingers reach out from the billows of its sleeves to pick up the stiletto knife once more, cutting pieces from the writhing heart with swift slices that click against the porcelain plate.

With the voice of five, the spirit says, “You have eaten from our plate. You have eaten from our flesh. Just as you have eaten parts of our one, you have become parts of our one. While you are parts of our one, you cannot have any human given name.”

Oh no. What have you done?

“Did you take my name, where is it, give it back.”

“We are not You. You have given your name. Have You not offered and prayed for the exchange, for safety and food and your flame? We cannot simply give a name back.”

“Then I want a different exchange,” you demand with a desperation unbefitting of Prince –

Your thoughts screech into screaming noise and you crumple with wet hands gripping the mass of pain that is your head. You grit your teeth, shutting your eyes from the pieces of beating heart on the gory mess before you, and say, “We struck no bargain. I demand a different exchange.”

The spirit sighs, a gust of hot sand lacerating your fingers. “Deal making?” it says with the volcanic pressure of an oncoming eruption. “Very well, a debt to us from You. We will give you work so you may pay. That is your only deal.”

“I work for you, and you’ll give my name back?” you say with equal anger over this trick, this trap you flung yourself headfirst into.

“Your work for your name,” it agrees with bristling hair and fur.

“A loan,” it says and a mask of wood lands in your lap, leering up at you. “A name from spirits.”

A debt too.

The spirit rises with three of its hands clawing at the air and its joints and its joints and its joints snapping and popping as it straightens above you, a looming shadow of sea green and dried blood brown, of purple bruises and black abyss. It howls, “NOW BEGONE.


You choke as you awaken, gasping for breath and gaging on the taste of something putrid and dead between your teeth. You roll onto your side in the lifting darkness of dawn approaching. Something clatters to the ground due to your movement.

Frozen and fearful, you set your hands upon the dirt and open your eyes, groping in the dim for what fell. You find it by your hip, something wooden, something with smooth ridges and curves, something very much like –

You sit up, clutching the mask in black and blue and white. Ribbon unspools onto your knees, a strong sturdy black cotton that won’t fray easily. Staring into its eyes, you sit paralyzed, unable to get up, unable to do your morning exercise or your meditation, pin down by a wooden stake carved with all your mistakes driven through your chest.

“A debt,” says the memory of the spirit from what decidedly wasn’t only a dream.

A debt, you now bear a debt, to regain – “No,” you say, voice rough and scraping along the raw walls of your throat.

“No, no, no, this can’t be – I can’t have – this –”

You were just dreaming, it was a dream, how could you control the contents of a dream twisting out from your grasp into its own solo dance. You spring up in a desperate scramble, shoving the damning mask deep into your bag and scooping everything up, onto your back and strapped to your side. No, drills into your head as effectively as the woodpecker chasing its meal. No, echoes in your mind as effectively as the army bugle you run from.

Dawn rises as you crash through the forest, just to be away from that awful visit, as if distance will change the mistakes you made: the apple, the shrine, the war room. You burst out of the trees upon a wide river and stumble to a halt, chest heaving and with absolutely no control over your breath.

The flames of Agni blind your eyes, reflecting off the wind-rippled surface of the river. Your feet sink into the soft grass on the wet riverbank. The eyes of silent birds and deer press against the palms of your hand, the flesh on the underside of your arms, the scars on your chest, the tan on your back.

“My name is –” you croak. The mice and fish watch your locked knees, the tension in your neck, the squinting of your eyes. You try again louder, sucking in gasps of the waking world, not the dream, what couldn’t be the spirit world, it couldn’t. “My name is –

You fall to your knees and choke on your tears.

Notes:

pop team epic meme of the spirit trashing Zuko's day