unluckyburden

( Cut for length )

Roughly around a century ago, in both the canon and Zuko’s universe, the Fire Nation launched a full-scale war against the other three elemental nations of the world. The initial wave of attacks ended with the genocide of the Air Nomads, with the notable exception of one young airbender, the Avatar named Aang. Or rather, that’s how things were meant to work out. You see, in this universe, the young avatar did not overhear his elders planning to take him away from his teacher, monk Gyatso, and so didn’t end up running away or get caught in the storm that was meant to leave him frozen for a century before arising to bring down Fire Lord Ozai and bring balance to the world. Here, Aang was simply too young and untrained – and still in the Southern Air Temple. Because of this, he was slaughtered along with his people, and the Avatar cycle appears to have been broken.

But of course, fate had other plans.

The news of the Avatar’s death was not widely broadcasted – in fact, according to all records available of that time, he was simply lost. The next avatar in the cycle, a minor noble in the northern water tribe, was so hidden from the world that his or her existence was but a rumor. In any case, upon an attempted invasion by the fire nation about fifteen years after the genocide of the air nomads, the teenage avatar was killed. Whether this was as a direct result of the conflict or not is unknown. The Earth Kingdom was host to the next avatar, but they never even knew it. Born as a young lady of rank in what was nonetheless a small town, in a kingdom where noble women aren’t granted much of an opportunity to learn bending, she lived her life until she was at the point between middle-age and elder, when an attack from the Fire Nation burned the town she lived in, destroying her home and her with it.

Upon her death, the Fire Nation was due to hold the next Avatar. Fate held that it was during this quarter-century that the Fire Nation’s reign of terror would cease, that the seemingly-endless war would finally come to an end, and that balance would be restored. But there was no boy in the iceberg, waiting to be woken up by a lost water tribe girl. And so, with options limited, fate’s hand chose the only course it had available. The next avatar was born, and rather than pursuing the avatar and ensuring that he met the people he needed to encounter in order for the world to right itself, rather than becoming an aid and a friend to the savior of the world, Zuko, son of then-Prince Ozai and Princess Ursa, was left with the burden of the entire world on his shoulders.

The events of Zuko’s childhood and early adolescence remain mostly unchanged from the events of the canon universe. He was still born as the heir to the second-born prince of the fire nation, his father still manipulated people and events to position himself on the throne, his mother was exiled and his sister was both a firebending prodigy and dangerously unstable. At thirteen years old, as in the canon universe, Zuko spoke out in a war council meeting and was subsequently challenged to an agni kai, a fire duel. A joke of one, really - the young bender was led to believe that he would fight the general whose plans he had disapproved of, when it was his own father who ended up as his opponent. This incident left Zuko with a nasty burn scar on the left side of his face, and banished with only one way to return home : to capture the avatar.

As the avatar was long-since gone, no-one expected the disgraced young prince to ever find him, so the banishment was regarded as a permanent one. In both the canon and in this universe, however, this was an untruth.

At nearly fourteen, after months of recovery and fruitless searching on his ship, Zuko, for all intents and purposes, simply ceased to exist. What truly happened that day never reached the Fire Lord’s ears, not even as a rumor. Officially, there was a sudden storm and the ship went down, killing all aboard, including Prince Zuko and General Iroh, the young prince’s uncle who had accompanied him into exile. What actually happened… was a bit more complicated. An assassin, hired by Zuko’s sister, infiltrated the ship in an attempt to eliminate the one thing blocking Princess Azula’s route to the dragon throne: Zuko. This wasn’t an easy task, however, and after several failed attempts (poisoning the fire prince’s tea, arranging for him to fall overboard in full armor when no-one was around, etc), the assassin decided to go with the easier route and just blow up the ship with everyone on it.

This might have worked, had Zuko just been a simple firebender, and perhaps if fate didn’t have so much invested into using this boy to put things right. Instead of exploding immediately, something misfired, and it didn’t go off until Zuko and his uncle were on the ship’s deck. Somehow, in response to this danger, the avatar state woke in Zuko, and he managed to protect both himself and Iroh from the worst of the blast. Iroh was the only one of the two who actually remembered the incident, and it fell to him to tell Zuko the news that shattered his already fragile world. Zuko knew very well that the Avatar was, by default, the enemy of the Fire Nation. The Avatar is meant to balance the entire world, and the Fire Nation overtaking all the other elemental countries is against everything that important person stands for. The simple fact that his father could never consider him anything but an enemy, that all of his hopes of lifting his banishment and going home were for naught – for how could he regain his honor when he was the target of his own desperate search? – combined with the information that Zuko only managed to save himself and his uncle when the ship was destroyed induced a sort of spiritual sickness in the young teenager.

All of what Zuko had once been was burned away in the throes of fever, and he could recognize neither friend nor foe. Even his uncle was a foreign presence, causing the ill avatar distress. Moving him was a risk, but allowing him to go untreated would have surely led to his death. In the end, with no other option, Iroh brought his nephew to the home of the Sun Warriors, a hidden culture of firebenders that protected and concealed the last pair of dragons left in the world – and their unhatched eggs. Even with their aid, Zuko would likely have died during this time. Fortunately, Zuko had more than just mortals looking out for him. At some point, when no-one was around to watch him, Zuko had wandered off – a frantic search revealed him sleeping in the very nest of the two dragons, Ran and Shao, curled up around the equally asleep form of a newly hatched dragonet. When asked about it later, Zuko would insist that he had followed a young boy about his age to the cave – a boy who matched the description of an air nomad.

This was Zuko’s first interaction with any of his previous incarnations, though he didn’t know it at the time. Bonding with his animal companion – the little dragonet, who would end up with the name Gin – gave Zuko an anchor to hold onto, allowing him to begin recovering from the harm dealt to his spirit. It would be a long recovery, both physically and spiritually, but not an impossible one. To both aid in that and to prepare him for the tasks that lay in store, Iroh and the sun warriors began working with Zuko, attempting to help him improve his firebending – an essential step before he could begin learning the other elements. Surprisingly, the young bender took to the sun warriors’ style much more readily than he ever had the more widespread forms of firebending, and his improvement was rapid. He spent a great deal more time meditating than before he fell ill, as it helped to heal his spirit as well as improve his bending, and during these sessions he began meeting the spirit of Aang, finding the cheerful spirit to be a better friend than any living human could be.

The next few years of Zuko’s life were filled with nothing more than training, travelling from place to place with Iroh and his dragon, Gin, and learning under the grand masters of the white lotus. With no living air masters and precious few scrolls on airbending hidden away, it seemed as if there was no-one to teach Zuko. Well, no-one alive, anyway. Zuko did get training, but it was from the most unexpected of sources – the spirit of Aang, by this time revealed to be the long-murdered Air Nomad avatar. For the spirit of a boy killed at the young age of twelve, Aang was a surprisingly good teacher, and by the time Zuko was sixteen, his training was coming along fairly well. His spiritual wounds were still healing, and he was counseled against getting into any actual combat unless it was absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, Zuko’s sixteenth year was when things began to go sour again, and not just on a personal level: even though there were no rumors of the returned avatar to cause the Fire Nation to speed up their plans, some key events still had to happen, and happen they did.

Zuko’s sixteenth year heralded several major world events: the second Siege of the North, the fall of the Ba sing Se, and – most dreaded of all – the return of Sozin’s Comet. And, since Zuko in any given timeline has some of the worst personal luck ever known, he was smack in the middle of each of them. In the canon timeline, Fire Navy Commander Zhao killed the physical form of the moon spirit, causing the ocean spirit and Avatar Aang to wipe out the entire Fire Navy sent to attack. It didn’t happen quite this way in Zuko’s universe. There are too many small differences to go into accurate detail here, but it’s important to keep in mind that dragons don’t do too well at the poles, and an Avatar separated from his or her animal guide is very volatile indeed. The moon was still harmed, and the ocean still rampaged, but Zuko had a little more control than expected, so the loss of life was not quite so great as in canon. Still, it was a horrific night which circulated rumors and tall tales that crossed the world – and it was this incident which started vague rumors of the Avatar’s return.

The rumors did not pick up quite as quickly as they did in canon, as Zuko actively kept a much lower profile than Aang ever did, and so the continued existence of Zuko, let alone his identity as the Avatar, didn’t reach the fire lord’s ears. Such anonymity could not hold for long, and unluckily for Zuko this happened at one of the worst times for him – the fall of Ba Sing Se. Used to travelling secretly to various places, Zuko actually had quite a few acquaintances and even friends scattered throughout the world. Visiting those who made their home in Ba Sing Se was far from easy, especially when he had a dragon the size of a small dog that he was forced to conceal. However, even with the constant threat of the Dai Li looming over the people’s heads, the fortress city was the first place Zuko went after the disaster at the north pole, and he spent a great deal of time simply lying low and piecing himself together again.

Then Crown Princess Azula was given her first major mission outside of the fire nation – to bring down Ba Sing Se in any way possible. The paths of fate coincided, as they did in canon, when Azula and her small party of infiltrators snuck into the city… and ran into Zuko as he was helping his uncle with the new teashop the former general had opened. (Iroh’s love of tea is something that transcends all timelines, and fate was doing its best to keep things as close to the original course as was possible.) Though the former prince was discovered alive, the fact that he was, in fact, the Avatar, was not revealed to the Fire Nation until the walls of the city fell. In a desperate bid to save his uncle from his capture at Azula’s hands, the sixteen-year-old Avatar threw everything he had into his attack, including all four elements. Still, even a decently-trained Avatar had minimal chance against the combined skills of Azula and her companions, Ty Lee and Mai. It was only through a combination of luck and surprise that got him, his uncle, his dragon, and a few others out of Ba Sing Se when it fell. It wasn’t a total loss, however – Gin managed, by a stroke of more luck than skill, to bite off the last two fingers of Azula’s left hand, and the dragon, at least, enjoyed the feeling of victory that day.

The most important event of Zuko’s sixteenth year, however, was the return of Sozin’s Comet. Had Avatar Aang lived during the summer of the comet’s return, he would have faced the Fire Lord for the final fight that helped to bring about the end of the one hundred years of war… in this universe, however, things went very differently. In fact, the return of Sozin’s Comet is the one thing that set off spiraling changes, rewriting all history from that point on. Fire Lord Ozai, rather than being pushed to become the Phoenix King and destroy the entire Earth Kingdom to remake it in the image of fire, instead used the comet’s flames to attack both the Earth Kingom and the North Pole yet again. Zuko did what he could, but no Avatar could be in so many places at once. He was, however, in very many places scattered close together. Fire Lord Ozai was not brought down that day, and huge portions of the world… burned. The return of Sozin’s Comet went down in history as the day with the most loss of life, and land, and home after the absolute destruction of the Air Nomads one hundred years before. But it was also when the first seeds of hope began to be sown, as the order of the White Lotus, working with the Avatar, saved as many people as Zuko could reach. At last, rumor truly began to spread – the Avatar had returned to the world.

However, many – a great many – people believed that the Avatar had returned… too late. For these people, who had lost everything in the Firestorm, the fact that the Avatar would only show his face after so much had been lost to them – and a Fire Nation Avatar, at that! – caused them to be less than grateful to Zuko’s attempts to aid them, and led to a great deal of difficulty as Zuko began to try and heal the wounds of the war. That isn’t to say Zuko was without allies, however; he met a great many people during the following years who became his allies, and friends, along with those who would oppose him. He spent the next three years again traveling the world; this time to gather together those survivors who still had will to fight, those who still wished for balance, and with the White Lotus to assist him, the world began to inch back out of the iron and flame grip of the Fire Nation. Not a small portion of this time, however, was spent either running from or feuding with Azula, who never forgave the permanent harm done to her at Ba Sing Se, and vowed to bring down the Avatar – personally.

Now, at nineteen, Zuko is a fully trained, fully prepared Avatar. With Gin at his side and the world at his back, he is, at most, mere months away from striking against the Fire Lord, and reclaiming the ashes of the world. It is from this point in his timeline that I am apping him: Zuko was preparing to meet up with Azula once more, to finally take her out of the upcoming fight against her father. Hopefully without outright killing her, but unlike previous times against her, Zuko has finally realized that killing her might be what is necessary for the good of the world, and that fighting her without a willingness to strike her down, regardless of their relation, should it be required will do nothing but needlessly endanger himself and his companions. And that is the one thing that Zuko isn’t willing to leave to chance.