[Theme no. 41] [Avatar] Lucky Seven

Title: Lucky Seven
Series: Avatar
Theme no.: 41. Scenes from the Narcissist café
Character(s)/Pairing: Zuko
Rating: PG
Notes (if any):



1 Zuko knows he’s lucky to be born. He was three months too early, and if he hadn’t been so undersized, he would have been tainted by bastardry.

(There had been whispers of that all the same.)

Azula was born the day the diviners had predicted, strong and healthy and crying out her arrival with fully-developed lungs.

2 Zuko hadn’t been able to breathe on his own at birth, and he knows it took the midwives three or four tries to get him to start.

(In the beginning there was breath, and breath made fire, and fire is the source of all things.)

3 No one had actually expected him to be able to firebend, and though he later tried to tell himself that his father’s shock was pride, a little part of him (the same part that wanted to answer the Avatar’s stupid question about friendship with a resounding yes) knows that his father was furious.

Azula was to be his father's heir because he couldn’t bend, and she could. But then Zuko could bend, and suddenly, like that, Zuko was the heir.

(And later, when Ozai became Fire Lord, there would be too many questions if two second borns became Fire Lord in succession, and Ozai is many things but a fool is not one of them.)

4 It takes Zuko longer to learn his letters than anyone else at the Peer’s School (or, as Azula likes to call it, the Royal Academy for Girls because they’re all girls – or at least, they should be, as Zuzu is a girl’s name).

Mai is the only one who doesn’t laugh when he stumbles through their reading assignment and for that alone he likes her best.

5 Zuko’s firebending does not come naturally to him, and no matter how many exercises his tutors put him through, he will never catch up with his sister – let alone surpass her.

6 He remains undersized, and this is why Azula calls him little brother.

7 When he is twelve, Uncle leaves his self-imposed exile and returns to court. His grayer and sadder than Zuko remembers, and he thinks of Lu Ten, the shining prince who would give him rides on his shoulders and let him pull on his ponytail.

Zuko never thinks of his mother. He can’t, and so he won’t, and he tells himself that it’s better not to love anyone except the Fire Lord because everyone else dies.

(But if he could dare love someone, it would be Uncle.)