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For once, Zuko did as he was told.
He left.
He had waited through the night, wondering, thinking, plotting, a foolish budding hope that if he just found the right words, the right expressions, the right movements, he could convince them blossoming in his chest.
But Zuko had never been able to find the right words or the right expressions. There was a reason his best work had been done silent and masked.
And all his foolish hope burned with the girl.
He knew they would be coming for him. He was too dangerous, too unknown, an ember in the forest just waiting to spark into a raging wildfire.
He had offered to be their prisoner, had offered to do anything to prove that he had changed, but he found himself unwilling, in the light of a new day, to be tied to anyone’s bidding.
He had been tied to his father and the man had burned his face. He thought he had been tied to some destiny to help the Avatar, and the boy had spurned him and the spirits had laughed.
Zuko would not be tied to anyone, not anymore.
So he left.
He saved them first. These children who knew nothing of war and yet everything. These children who trusted easily but also never.
It was his mistake, after all, that brought a horrible man to their doorstep. So Zuko had helped them. The man hadn’t listened to his words – of course he hadn’t, Zuko was too bad at them. Better he never speak; his words were nothing but dead embers with no spark left to light even themselves through the darkness.
Zuko had thrown himself upon the man and for his troubles he had been thrown from the cliff.
It was no matter. Zuko had fallen before.
For a brief, crushing second Zuko had thought about letting himself fall. Could this be how he helped the Avatar? Not by teaching him but by allowing this act – to save him from a monster Zuko had unleashed – to be his final?
But Zuko found he did not want this act to be his final, in the end, and he grasped for a vine, a root, a purchase in the rock. He found one and began to climb.
By the time he had nearly reached the top, the fighting had died and cheers – too high, too loud, too young, always too young – permeated all around him.
The children and the Avatar had won. They needed no more help from him to save themselves.
Zuko had been left on a precipice. He could try and embrace the destiny he thought was his, finish the climb and throw himself upon their mercy in the hopes that they would agree this time to accept him.
But that action was bold, and bold actions require hope and the budding green of that had already been burned up inside him.
So he climbed down. It was a surprisingly simple, easy action.
It had taken him years upon years to learn the lesson – all the important ones always did take Zuko too long to grasp – but he had finally learned to understand when he was unwanted, unneeded.
Zuko left.
He visited the ruins of the Sun Warriors.
He hadn’t needed to, but he did so anyway.
His uncle had told him about the civilization that lit the first inner fires, always with reverence, always with respect.
Zuko had never given his uncle respect and it was too late to start now. Uncle was gone and Zuko knew he would never be able to find him. Not if Uncle didn’t want to be found.
Zuko couldn’t give his uncle respect; all he could do was give it to the things Uncle had respected.
So he visited the ruins.
And discovered there was not much ruined about them.
It shouldn’t have been as crushing of a surprise to discover his uncle had lied to him. Everyone else had done so.
Zuko, who was bad at speaking, bad at thinking, bad just bad, was not worthy of the truth. Even from those that loved him.
His mother had taught him that when she left him alone in the den of a monster with only a few cryptic words that made no sense in his bad mind. It was not a surprise that it had taken him five years to learn it.
Zuko did not speak when the warriors grabbed him. He bowed low to them – these strange people with rough words and hands, strangers who should be dead and yet lived, these strangers who would probably kill him to keep their secret.
Zuko would not blame them for that, would not deny them the right to protect their own.
So he bowed low, not quite on his knees in full supplication but close enough and did not speak.
They wanted to kill him and Zuko braced for the blow. They wanted to kill him, this boy who had foolishly thought his destiny intertwined with the Avatar’s. They wanted to kill him; the spirits were laughing at him for his foolishness.
They wanted to kill him, this Child of Agni who could burn the world down if given the chance. They wanted to kill him, but it was not their choice to make.
They shoved fire into hands and bade him to go to the Masters.
Zuko stood upon a stone platform with the beating heart of the first fire in his cupped hands and forced his eyes to stay open as the two last dragons – two more lies from his uncle, two more things that should be dead but weren’t – breathed scorching flames towards him.
The Masters did not want to kill him. The Masters did not want to kill him, this boy who had no capacity for understanding it but still tried to seize his own destiny. The Masters did not want to kill him, this boy who the spirits watched so closely.
The Masters did not want to kill him, this Child of Agni who stood wrongfully scarred before them and still held the flame of the world so delicately in his hands.
They blew fire over his body and bade him to understand.
Zuko stood upon a stone platform with a rainbow of flames dancing all around him and he understood.
Fire was not destruction. Zuko was not destruction.
Fire was not made of rage. Zuko was not made of rage.
Fire was life. Zuko was life.
Fire was not beholden to anyone. It burned and it burned and it burned as it alone wished.
Zuko was not beholden to anyone. He burned and he burned and he burned as he alone wished.
Zuko understood and the Masters left.
Zuko did not speak as he walked down to the warriors with understanding burning inside him. He did not speak and they did not speak.
They watched as he left with contemplating, silent eyes, but he did not look back.
Zuko was done looking back.
He left and he did not return to the Avatar. That boy did not need him, he would find another to teach him the secrets of the flame. Maybe he would even come to the ruins and learn it from the Masters.
Zuko thought he would but he would not be the one to take him.
He was okay with that, in the end.
He did not return to the Fire Nation. Perhaps they did need him, his people who had lost their way, who had lost the understanding of their inner fire, who used their flames to destroy and to rage, but they did not want him.
Zuko would not go where he was not wanted. It would be someone else’s task, to teach the Fire Nation what they had lost.
He went to the Earth Kingdom, to the people who had nothing but had given Zuko everything they could anyway. He went to the place where had first started to find himself. He went to the place where he was needed and the place learned to want him.
He didn’t speak. Words were unnecessary, superfluous. Words tangled meanings and strangled intentions.
Actions didn’t. So Zuko acted and did not speak.
He bought a mask too, because expressions were just like words, and it was easier to act when his face was not speaking for him.
It wasn’t blue – blue was for the lost child he had been; it was for the boy who clung to a fallen mother, who clung to a Nation that did not want him and to a father who despised him. Blue was buried under the waves of a far away lake, like so many of his people buried under the waves of the northern ocean.
This mask was red – red for the flame of life blazing in his chest, red for the blood spilled uselessly in a hundred years of ceaseless, foolish war, red for the first sighting of Agni every morning as he broke across the dark blue of Tui's domain.
Red for the boy he was becoming, red for the boy who let old sorrows go and did not cling so tightly to things that did not wish to be clung to.
Blue was for revenge. Red was for renewal.
He wore the mask as he danced through tiny, underfed but undefeated villages along with a dark cloak that trailed behind him as he went.
He did not bring destruction; he did not steal; he did not hurt.
He lit fires that had deadened in their grates, he lit fires where there was no wood to chase the cold away. He brought in food where there was none to be found – fish and meat caught and dried with bursts of rainbow fire, nuts and berries and edible leaves carefully found and cleaned.
He brought medicine to the sick – herbs for fevers and poultices for burns and draughts for dry, hot coughs. Some of these things he knew how to make himself, others he stole from those in red who did not act well.
He only stole from those, the people who were Children of Agni just as much as he but to whom the meaning of the flame was lost.
He drove out the people who hurt others. In those times, red mixed again with blue in a justified, righteous anger that raged more fiercely than anything else but only burned the rot that had settled on this land when his people had forgone Agni’s path.
It did not matter if the person who hurt was red or green or blue, it did not matter if the person hurt was red or green or blue. He protected and fought them all.
A small girl in a green dress with terrified tears streaming from her eyes running from a green-clad man with anger in his, he protected her.
An old man in a red robe, bowed by age and hardship, pleading with a red soldier not to strike him, he protected him.
A dark haired, green-eyed young woman cringing away from red soldiers trying to grasp her in the dark, he protected her.
A bright-eyed young boy in a ragged green shirt baring his teeth – the front two of which were still missing – at red soldiers from behind his fearful mother’s skirt, he protected him.
Young teens, barely the same age as him, huddled around each other fearfully as a green-clad warrior wrote their names in a long ledger and handed them dull swords, he protected them.
He did not hide his flames, like had done when he was blue and not red, he did not fight with swords although he still had them strapped across his back underneath his black cloak.
He displayed them proudly because they were nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing to be afraid of, because he did not treat his fire as destruction.
And slowly, slowly, the Earth Kingdom learned. They learned the understanding, the truth.
They learned fire was life, not death. Creation, not destruction. And everywhere Zuko went, they learned that was what he was, too.
Slowly, so slowly he did not notice it, things began to crop up. The next time he stopped at the village where he’d saved that little girl, a small meal lit by candles and incense waited for him. A village where he’d left food put up a tiny, roughly hewn wooden statue in the center of their meager home.
The figure was shrouded in darkness. The only color on the figure was two splashes of red – one across the figure’s face and one in its cupped hands.
Other villages followed suit once the unspoken barrier had been broken by the first.
A small hearth was built in a Northern village where he had chased away the cold, a piece of the flame he’d given them burning merrily and warming any wary refugee with no place to go as night descended.
A small statue of a red-faced figure delighting a small child with a whimsical fire trick popped up in a village where he’d saved their children from the draft.
He never spoke, but the villagers did and their whispers carried across many winds to places both close and far from where he traveled.
A figure, silent, always silent, brought salvation to dying villages. It brought food to the starving, warmth to the cold and weary, medicine to the sick, peace to the war-torn.
Some claimed it was a spirit, torn from its burned forest or ripped from its boiled lake and determined to stop the red-colored savages who had desecrated its land.
Others whispered it was Agni himself, tired of his children engaging in senseless fighting, wishing to bring back the warmth and gentleness of fire that predated the ceaseless war.
No one thought to correlate the Man in Red, as the whispering villagers began to call their mysterious figure, with a scarred, mute refugee who traded simple labors for simple foods and the chance to sleep on a bed of hay in a decrepit barn.
Zuko did not mind this. He did not mind the simple foods and modest lodgings. He did not mind the whispers; as much as he did not trust his own words, others could speak just fine even if they did not so much as glance against the truth.
The winds brought other whispers too, and he found that he did not mind those either.
The Fire Lord, the would-be Phoenix King, fell. The Avatar had risen up, on the day of the comet, and struck the dreadful man down.
Zuko had silently rejoiced at that, gladdened to hear that the Avatar had realized his own destiny completely.
The would-be Fire Lord, the Crown Princess, fell. Madness, driven by the spirits themselves, had claimed her and her own once-trusted companions had been the ones to bring her down.
Zuko hadn’t rejoiced at that, pity for the monster who had once been a girl welled too much inside him to rejoice at that.
He could have told her, had she asked, that companions bought with fearmongering words would easily betray with actions.
A new Fire Lord rose up. The Dragon of the West took the throne at last, an action nearly as overdue as his conquering of Ba Sing Se, which he had finally done in the name of the Earth Kingdom, not his own.
Zuko had rejoiced at that. Uncle was alive and well. He too had finally realized his destiny and he would teach their nation the truth of their flames.
A funeral was held, for the previous Crown Prince, for the fallen Prince Zuko who had used his last breath to save the Avatar and his companions in an attempt to right the wrongs of his family. A boy whose body had broken so thoroughly it had been lost, a boy whose ceremonial urn stood empty within the family shrine, no ashes to be claimed.
Zuko did not know how he felt about that. It was a pain to his uncle, he was sure; his uncle who openly and famously wept at the sight of the red and gold urn paraded somberly through the streets.
It was even, supposedly, a pain to the Avatar who had spoken of the prince’s final act of courage at the top of the Western Air Temple in a solemn, carrying speech delivered on the steps of the family shrine.
Zuko did not want to be a pain to anyone and part of him urged to return home, to be a boon to his uncle’s bleeding heart, to be a salve for his nation’s soul, torn asunder by a century of vicious bloodshed.
But then he saw a small child whose belly was bloated from famine, a girl with haunted green eyes and a raised scar twirling across her arm, and he knew he could not.
The Avatar, the Avatar’s companions, his uncle. Each of them had realized their destiny. Each of them were working to restore a balance that had long been lost. Each of them was working to regain a trust long forgotten.
Each of them had a grandiose destiny, a massive fate that would shape the future of entire nations.
Zuko had once thought his destiny lay in the big picture too. But Zuko had been wrong.
Zuko was not meant to restore faith, not meant to rebuild crumbled nations.
Zuko’s destiny lay in the small. It lay with a child who did not know when their next meal would come. It lay with a man learning not to fear the fire that had once taken everything from him. It lay with the family who had lost two children to the war and were desperate not to lose their third. It lay in villages torn apart and just barely beginning to regrow.
Zuko may have been wanted by his uncle’s side, but he was hardly needed. Not yet, at any rate. Not when his uncle had such powerful allies by his side and his own strength to keep him firm.
But in these little villages, he was not just wanted, he was needed. And he would not turn his back on these people who hadn’t had someone at their side in far too long.
One day, perhaps he would return to his homeland, to his uncle. One day, he would get upon his knees and speak once more, to beg his uncle forgiveness.
But today was not that day.
Zuko donned his red mask as the last of Agni’s light faded from the sky.
And the Man in Red began its rounds.