Pro-Bending Circuit | Round Four

Team & Position: Laogai Lion Vultures, waterbender

Character: Former General Iroh

Fear: Zuko losing his way.

Prompts Used: (word) potato| (emotion) contempt | (restriction) Third Person PoV

Bonus: Use of my element (water)

Word Count: 3,499

Summary: General Iroh was a more ruthless, prideful man when words on crimson paper tore his greatest fear from the obscurity of thought to grim, stark reality. Even after the hard won wisdom — a result of losing his son — his path is not easy to tread when his nephew makes all the wrong choices.

Do Not Fear the Waters of Change, Prince Zuko

The spirits did try to warn the Crown Prince of his fate. The Blue Dragon tells him this years later.

There was a vision. Passed from the wisdom of age to the stupidity of youth.

The Crown Prince's delight was dizzying: it is his destiny to take the great Earth Kingdom stronghold of Ba Sing Se. He would go to that barren, barbaric wasteland and bring down its mighty walls. To its people, he would bestow the finest blends of ginseng and jasmine. Traditions of starlight, festivals of fireworks that tear apart the nothingness of the sky and paint it the colour of his people. The best the Fire Nation has to offer.

The Blue Dragon agrees, its infectious savagery like whisky to a downtrodden man, or a woman to a lonely one.

The Red Dragon merely shakes its noble head. It speaks, now, with his son's voice. But distant. Echoing through all the time and space between them.

- o -

General Iroh, Crown Prince of the Fire Nation, eldest son of Firelord Azulon and Firelady Ilah, was the pride and joy of his people. He commanded the respect of even his enemies. Great lords of the stoic Earth Kingdom nobility were quick to treat with General Prince. Better to accept his admittedly fair terms than to burn under the fire of his breath.

The Dragon of the West, they called him.

He led his men in battle with ferocity and pride. All of them— from flag bearer to commissioned officer— wore the Flame of the Prince, Iroh's personal sigil. Wandering artists began following his battalions to vie for the chance to capture even a moment of the prince's prowess. Iroh delighted in portraits of his breath of fire, the gleam of his element clutched in each fist, the dark nobility of his armour. Even the terrified faces of the earthbenders he crushed underfoot tickled him. He made the arrangements quietly. And the best of the warrior paintings began arriving in the Fire Nation capital.

Though cunning in thought and ruthless to his foes, the general was everything amicable and warm to the soldiers around him.

'Steady now, Lieutenant.' He cast a critical eye over the younger man's stance. 'Remember your basics: power in firebending comes from the breath.'

The shirtless officer clenched his fists and breathed deeply. The semicircle of fire he wielded like a fan forced the spectators backwards as they roared with his success. The Burning Circle was an advanced move of the Crown Prince's creation.

General Iroh applauded loudest of all.

'Masterful,' he proclaimed, clapping the grinning man on his back. 'If only you were as skilled at Pai Sho…'

'None of the officers will play you anymore, will they?' Lieutenant Kanji smirked, pulling his shirt down over his head.

'Something about not wanting to be any further indebted to the Crown.'

Kanji shook his head, a spreading smile colonising his face. 'You don't fight fair, general.'

Iroh brushed at the front of his uniform, as though it wasn't immaculate already. 'Effective strategy is a long game, Lieutenant.'

'A very long game, if this siege is anything to go by.' Kanji held open the front of Iroh's pavilion. 'Nearing six hundred days now.'

The general hesitated in the doorway, half his mind on a letter to his niece and nephew that he wanted to finish before Ming arrived… Agni knew he never got any work done with that woman around.

'Do you miss home, Kanji?'

'I miss my wife,' the man allowed, pulling his pipe from his pocket. 'I miss spring in the capital and her rose water perfume.'

'And cherry blossoms in the Royal Gardens?' Iroh smirked, raising a brow. 'Or the soft sigh of water over the creek bed? You have a poet's heart. It's wasted on a solider.'

Kanji laughed, full-throated and without shame. 'And will you be partaking in your favourite pastime? Tea and… Pai Sho with Mistress Ming?'

'General Iroh, sir!' The panic in the boy's face was exceeded only by the blood along his neck, as though the crimson of his uniform had reached upwards to stain his skin. He was young. Far too young. Younger even than Lu Ten… and wearing the burning stallion insignia of Lu Ten's division.

Dread leapt at Iroh like the cold, stony fists of Ba Sing Se's Dai Li. No.

The boy clutched a crimson scroll.

- o -

'His death is an insult to you and to the Fire Nation! Killing an heir to the throne? The peasant filth must be punished!'

The Blue Dragon is furious terror and lashing fury.

The Red Dragon merely winds the warm length of its body around the general's frozen ankles. Iroh is the ice of the northern benders he studied in his youth. Cold terror and numb fury.

- o -

Iroh abandoned the siege the very next day. His office as general soon after. He did whatever he could to keep the horror at bay, the crushing weight of his son's absence. He drowned it in drink in sleazy Earth Kingdom taverns. He drowned it in women in fine Fire Nation brothels. He drowned it in all the tears he'd wept.

But the cost of sorrow stacked up around him like coin in the royal treasury.

So he wandered.

He met two dragons, great masters of fire and energy. Life, they told him, firebending is life. Their red and blue hides the same vivid shades as the dragons that haunted his conscience. But Ran and Shaw told him nothing of his lost son, whose destiny had been cut so unfairly short. They spoke only of life and light. The Blue Dragon of his mind's creation wanted to slay them, to end the curse of the dragons— whose decline had mirrored his own life. Instead, Iroh resolved to protect them. He would spread the word that he'd slayed them, the last two dragons living.

The Sun Warriors applauded his decision and for some months, he found an uneasy solace in their ancient city.

Until the call of his homeland pulled at his grief like the tide. And so he washed up again on the volcanic soils of the Fire Nation capital.

'Azulon, Firelord to our nation. You were our fearless leader in the Battle of Garsai. Our matchless conqueror of the Hu Xin Provinces. You were father of Iroh, father of Ozai, husband of Ilah, now passed. Grandfather of Lu Ten, now passed.'

Iroh drunk deeply from his sake.

'Grandfather of Zuko and Azula. We lay you to rest.'

No one in the capital's Flaming Lady Tavern noticed the former Crown Prince drinking quietly in the corner, reading the old newspaper. His beard had grown wild, his eyes more so. He had that look, that contemptible veneer, of a man trying to escape his fate. But a man heavy with the knowledge that he cannot.

'As was your dying wish, you are now succeeded by your second son.'

Ozai's portrait was smug as ever and Iroh's lip curled with a sudden swelling of scorn for his younger brother. He knew exactly how his birthright had been stolen from him. Ozai's thirst for power, his dissatisfaction with his place in the line of succession, was as clear as the polar oceans to the south. Iroh could just see it, the tall, proud figure kneeling before their father. He could hear the snake's voice— wheedling and small— as it stated Iroh's failure in the siege, Iroh's failure to have a living heir apparent.

The newspaper crumpled and tore in the fury of his grip.

'Praise and disgrace cause fear,' he whispered to himself even as his heart galloped and roared.

The rest of the article was little more than a sycophantic ode to Iroh's treacherous brother. Though the ending was somewhat disconcerting: Princess Ursa would be retiring to the countryside without the new Crown Prince and the princess.

Why would Ursa leave the palace and her children?

Some of the gravel grinding at his heart soothed at the thought of his nephew and niece. He hadn't seen either one of them for years, spoken to them only through the distance of letters and secondhand descriptions from Lu Ten. The children would be lonely without their mother… and at the mercy of their father.

Perhaps it was time to reenter the politics of his homeland…

- o -

'Zuko brings shame to the esteemed position of Crown Prince,' the Blue Dragon disparages. 'You were a far superior, more honourable heir. As would Lu Ten have been after you.'

'But Lu Ten is dead,' the Red Dragon points out. It is quiet dignity next to the Blue Dragon's brash scorn.

It occurs to Iroh that the Blue Dragon's voice sounds more and more like his brother.

- o -

He chose to accompany his nephew after the boy's foolhardy Agni Kai. No, after the boy's abuse at the hands of his father. The voice of the Blue Dragon echoed strongly in that moment, more a ghost of his past ambitions than a decree of his own thoughts. Zuko's pure, innocent dignity in that meeting— his true embodiment of all the Fire Nation claimed to be: honour, pride, intelligence— had diminished the Blue Dragon to the darkest, hateful corners of Iroh's mind.

But if he were honest with himself, Former General Iroh chose to follow his nephew into exile because of the dead son the boy so resembled. Zuko's eyes, even after his maiming, pierced Iroh through for how alike they were to his son's.

But for all their physical similarities, Zuko's banishment made him as unlike Lu Ten as water was unlike fire.

Gone was the shared easy nature of his son and nephew. One to death. The other to a mad father.

As Zuko ranted of destiny and having Ozai restore his honour, Iroh grew into the relative comfort of being distant. He learned that one cannot force an old head onto young shoulders. He could lead his nephew to water, but he could not make him drink. The boy would not be turned from his quest. The boy would not see his mission as anything other than his divine duty. The boy was scurrying like the slave-son Ozai thought him to be.

As the weeks became months, and the months fattened to years, Former General Iroh became resigned to the futility of Zuko's mission. Days he whittled away to the tune of games and music. Tea plantations opened just to service his tastes as he began purchasing foreign brews by the pound. In getting to know his nephew, he found an honest contentment he had not felt before. Beyond the call of nation. Beyond duty to the Firelord. Beyond the role of Crown Prince. With Zuko and the crew aboard their retired service vessel, Iroh found some measure of peace.

He learned to laugh at the small failures of their mission.

He found he kept the crew's spirits up— especially after one of his nephew's fits of rage— by merely sharing with them his passion for music.

Zuko began meditating on Iroh's words. It made the Former General very mindful of what he said. And slowly it began.

The transformation he didn't know he'd been hoping for.

In quiet moments, Zuko's countenance became overwhelmingly that of his cousin.

- o -

The Blue Dragon and the Red Dragon do not talk to one another. Only to Iroh.

There are times he wishes to be a spectator to their observations and quips. Instead of the centre of some ghoulish whirlpool.

- o -

Iroh felt his former life stir with disdain when his niece tried to shoot Zuko full of lightning on board her garish vessel. The girl thought herself invincible in all her precise, calculated menace. But Iroh saw her attack in the long seconds before she struck.

He and Zuko escaped without pursuit and the hissed words of two guards had him marvelling at how far he'd come. 'The Potato of the West,' his people had begun to call him in their contempt. Once, it would have enraged him. But as he fled down a dusty Earth Kingdom road, the imagery rather pleased him.

Until they stopped.

The old fear crept into his bones at the tired sorrow on his nephew's face. The boy crouched beside him, knife in hand.

Zuko never cried, not even after waking up in the aftermath of his father's lesson seared into his face. His eyes were dry as he raised his blade to the phoenix tail atop his head. Dry but burdened with all the weight of oceans.

The hair cut without resistance.

Iroh could think of a hundred reasons why his nephew silently decided to rid himself of the traditional updo. To better disguise himself as an Earth Kingdom commoner, to send a message to his sister, to grow out his hair to hide his scar, to throw off the destiny his father was forcing on him… But Iroh knew better and that old fear turned his stomach.

Zuko believed himself the honourless creature Ozai marred him as.

He was marking himself as a fugitive.

- o -

'You could have saved Lu Ten, you know you could have if you'd been there.'

Iroh doesn't respond. He's bowed over a photo of his son on a lonely Ba Sing Se hillside.

The Blue Dragon scoffs and looks away. 'Zuko's the Blue Spirit. He's going to get himself killed. Every decision he makes brings him closer to that fate.'

Diminished and tiny, the Red Dragon rests its head against the teardrops on Iroh's knee. 'Water is the element of change,' it reminds him.

- o -

That he might lose Zuko in a way as permanent and bereaving as Lu Ten's death, paralysed Iroh. It was the paralysis that gave new life to the Blue Dragon, its slippery pessimism slunk through the former general's veins.

It laboured his words, though he strove to keep them light. 'So, the Blue Spirit. I wonder who could be behind that mask...'

His nephew sighed with all the weight of Ozai's expectations. 'What are you doing here?'

Did he really not understand yet? Hadn't he told Zuko what the boy meant to him back in the icy tundra of the north? A son to fill the gaping, jagged hole in Iroh's chest. And a father to shine a light on the darkness of destiny. The Red Dragon shifted within him and a sense of hopelessness trailed down Iroh's spine. He is so lost.

The way out of a thorn bush was not an easy or kind path. 'I was just about to ask you the same thing. What do you plan to do now that you've found the Avatar's bison? Keep him locked in our new apartment? Should I go put on a pot of tea for him?'

Zuko bristled at the dry tone in the old man's voice. 'First I have to get it out of here.'

'And then what!? You never think these things through! This is exactly what happened when you captured the Avatar at the North Pole! You had him, and then you had nowhere to go!'

Indignant and proud, a younger, more confused Ozai glared at him from his nephew's eyes. 'I would have figured something out!'

The Blue Dragon— swollen with Iroh's cold fear— roared within him. 'No! If his friends hadn't found you, you would have frozen to death!'

'I know my own destiny, Uncle!'

In that moment, Iroh wondered at his own pacifism. Surely his brother could not be allowed to continue to torment the boy like this. It was an evil beyond his slaving hunger to conquer the world. It was a deliberately cruel manipulation of a child's love for his parent.

The Red Dragon calmed the violence of the old man's thoughts. 'Is it your own destiny, or is it a destiny someone else has tried to force on you?'

'Stop it, Uncle!' Zuko turned his back. 'I have to do this!'

'I'm begging you, Prince Zuko.' The Red Dragon wrestled the Blue, their claws renting great wounds in their scaly hides. 'It's time for you to look inward and begin asking yourself the big questions. Who are you, and what do you want?'

Iroh was no longer in the habit of lying to himself. He saw clearly Zuko's struggle like a mirror to the hardships of his own life. Iroh would trade all the tea in the world to save the boy from the hard lessons he would have to learn.

- o -

'You no longer think of him as Lu Ten.'

'No, no I do not.'

'... You love him more than you loved your son.'

'I am capable of more love now than I used to be.'

'You're a disgusting old man.'

'I am what I am.'

- o -

Zuko makes a decision in the Crystal Catacombs of Ba Sing Se.

The Avatar falls.

Iroh cannot look his son in the eye.

- o -

'You brought this on yourself, you know. We could have returned together. You could have been a hero!'

'Lost.'

- o -

'You have no right to judge me, Uncle. I did what I had to do in Ba Sing Se, and you're a fool for not joining me.'

'I was a fool.'

- o -

'You're not gonna say anything?'

'I've said everything I can.'

- o -

'You're a crazy old man! You're crazy, and if you weren't in jail, you'd be sleeping in a gutter!'

'Destiny is a funny thing, my nephew.'

- o -

'I brought you some komodo-chicken. I know you don't care for it, but I figure it beats prison food.'

'Your presence is more revitalising than a Firelord's feast.'

- o -

'I admit it. I have everything I always wanted, but it's not at all how I thought it would be. The truth is, I need your advice. I think the Avatar is still alive. I know he's out there. I'm losing my mind.'

The Blue Dragon stirred.

- o -

'Please, Uncle, I'm so confused! I need your help.'

The Red Dragon squirmed and a tear escaped Iroh's eye.

- o -

'Forget it! I'll solve this myself! Waste away in here for all I care!'

'Water is the element of change, Prince Zuko.'

- o -

The Red Dragon roared its triumph as Zuko stammered an apology in the camp of the Order of the White Lotus. It grew and as it did, a calm trickle of warmth spread through Iroh's chest as though he were about to firebend.

His nephew may have the weight and responsibility of a man, but he felt a gangly boy when Iroh pulled him into a hug.

'I was never angry with you.' Only the truth of Zuko's humility could blind him to that fact. 'I was only sad because I was afraid you'd lost your way.'

The boy sniffled and Iroh clutched him tighter. My son… 'I did lose my way.'

'But you found it again,' he reminded him, grinning now. 'And you did it by yourself. And I'm so happy you found your way here.'

The Red Dragon dribbled smoke from its nose, the happily burning core of Iroh's mind.

- o -

Years later, Iroh would sit in the gardens of his childhood— greyer and much fatter than the man who raised fire with his breath during the rule of the comet— beside his nephew's mother and talk of the past.

'How did you get over the death of your son?' Ursa asked quietly, holding her daughter's doll tightly between pale fingers.

Iroh pictured Lu Ten, his smile, the crease in his brow when he was puzzled. 'I'm not over it,' he confided, welcoming the familiar pain like an old friend. 'I will never be over it. As parents, we want nothing more than for our children to be safe. Unfortunately, this world is an inherently unsafe place. So many dangers, so much to fear. No matter how hard we try, we can never keep our children completely safe. Better to teach them— and ourselves— to see with unclouded eyes.'

Trembling tears painted her cheeks. 'I try to stay positive. Honestly, I try… but it's all just a mask. Deep down, all I feel is fear.'

'Ursa, the fear will always be with you. Always.' Iroh thought of Zuko, the nephew he thought of as a son, disappearing into the sky with a waterbender. On his way to face his sister and his destiny. He remembered the icy spike of fear in each breath, even as the comet's energy ran hot through his blood. 'You must learn to see it with unclouded eyes.'

'Uncle.'

From behind the hibiscus, Zuko appeared with a tea tray in hand.

A fear of a different kind— of bitterness and hot leaf juice— turned the old man's countenance.

Iroh is such a great character in canon, but we see so little of the man he was before the wise and funny, tea-loving uncle. I got really into his characterisation in preparation for this story and anyone who's done that knows what a rabbit warren headcanon creation can be! I had to eventually just sit down and write the damn thing but the planning Word Doc was something crazy like 6,000 words!

Hope you guys enjoyed it!