Fic: The Beginner's Guide to Lemon Tea, Avatar

Title: The Beginner's Guide to Making Lemon Tea
Fandom: Avatar: the Last Airbender
Word Count: ~6500



The whole thing started with a lemon.

He's sure his uncle could come up with some kind of deep metaphor about life and lemons and making lemon tea, but at the time, it was just his hollow-eyed sister standing on his front porch holding a lemon in her hand because she didn't have anything else. And he's staring at her and she hands the fruit over and starts talking about how she could tell it was of the best crop because of its width and color and he feels the lemon in his palm and he can tell it's rotten but he doesn't tell this to her because that's something you have to learn from experience and she's only got book-learning.

"Who is it, Zuko?" Jin's voice comes floating from the kitchen, soft and sing-songy because he hasn't said anything yet and that's how they communicate; she can tell who's at the door by the way he greets them, low and angry or rumbly with affection or cold, stoic, suspicious as everyone has to be down here, in the meanest dirt of the Lower Ring.

They can't attract attention to themselves. It's been his creed since he got that boy with the hay in his mouth killed.

His sister's eyes go slanty, suprised, and he can see the years flash across her face like she expected to come here and find him exactly as she left him and he's gone and betrayed her by letting his world continue on without her. And he sees it, then; her body is thin under her armor, which doesn't shine and isn't smooth and there are creases on the arms, and now that she's handed the lemon over the only thing she holds with her cracked, empty hands with their blunt, bitten nails is a basket with all her eggs in it.

He's her last hope.

Somewhere, many years ago, a butterfly in the Earth Kingdom flapped its wings and a storm unlike any other brought the Fire Nation to its knees, and now here they are, casualties of the crossfire.

***

Jin takes the lemon and her eyes widen and her eyebrows come down when she feels how spoiled it is, but she goes over to the basin and curves her shoulder so that his sister couldn't see what she's doing, and she cuts out the few edible parts and mixes them with sugar and comes back with lemon tea, but there's only enough for one person.

Zuko thinks of how little there is in their pantry and how much less there is in their purses, and then he thinks of his sister's bones and he lets her guzzle the drink. Her eyes glaze and she opens her mouth --

And Hiro walks in, with her trousers around her ankles, proudly declaring that mommy, daddy, she just went tinkle in the plants outside the florist's place like Wen from across the alley did, and weren't they proud of her? She was a big girl now! And Jin hides her face with her hands and he can hear murmur a prayer of thanks that Hiro got home safely in that state, since she had to pass through the backroad everyone uses to trade black market swords, original antiques from the War, and she goes and hikes Hiro's pants up and buckles them and plants butterfly kisses all over her daughter's face until they're both giggling.

Zuko looks at his sister and she looks at him and she just looks empty like the pantry, like their purses, like the Fire Nation's throne, and then she says, "You made lemon tea."

He wants to hug her then, because she gets it, she gets it, but he can't hug her because it would be like hugging a brick wall; you can't hug a brick wall. If you a hug a brick wall, then it stops being a brick wall and it must find some other identity, because brick walls aren't huggable and that's the way things are.

So instead he says, "We have an extra futon you can have."

***

"If you hadn't been a prince with a secret agenda to overthrow my city and turn the safest place on earth into the deepest circle of hell for all of us refugees, what would you have been?" Jin had asked him once, when they were younger and he had made the mistake of begging in the same part of the city too often and she stole his collection plate until he agreed to come clean with her.

"A juggler," he had snapped, because knew it would have hurt her and it did; her face closed up, and he could see her question why she was bothering, but then she was at it again like his uncle did with tea and firebending; again and again until you got it right. She hadn't gotten him right the first time, so here she was, trying again.

"You could have told me."

"No, I couldn't've," because a secret is a secret is a secret until his sister killed the Avatar reincarnation cycle and sentenced their uncle to execution for treason and he'd gone to hell for love of his family, as if sticking by his sister could make his mother come back and curb his father's ambition and make Ba Seng Se forgive him. It never did.

"Really, though."

"A teacher," he told her, thinking of Li and the way the pigs squealed when his swords swished out of their sheaths and they beheaded sunflowers, one for every person they loved who left them because of the war.

She snorted, and he looked at her, and she said sorry and then snorted again, and then she was laughing and apologizing over and over, it was just that, really, him as a teacher? And he gets it, and starts to grin, the slow, steady, growing grin of someone who is beginning to realize that things will go up after they hit rock bottom and that life with this girl may not entirely suck.

***

Smellerbee comes over the next day with groceries, and Jin sings her praises for the rest of the afternoon and the girl is shy but pleased and shrugs uncomfortably, but she knows that Jin's the only person here who would accept charity and sing and dance and laugh about it without once thinking about how poor they are or how much they need other people sacrificing for them.

"I'll help you sell lanterns, Zuko," Smellerbee says to him, smiling calm and easy like she's forgiven him for being a firebender and proving Jet right. "Two people can pester tourists better than one."

"The Avatar's in town, isn't he?" Zuko says dryly, and Jin trills with laughter as their guest shoves her hands onto her hips and goes, "Fine. You've discovered my secret agenda. And yes, he is. We can stop him and say hi, and your daughter can have a chance to meet his son and develop an animosity that'll brew for generations until you start another war. Or we just keep a distance away and throw eggs. Whatever you prefer."

He's quiet for a moment, watching the say Tsuki's soft, wet infant mouth opens and closes around her spoon and then opens again, begging for more zucchini and he thinks about how hard it will be, later, to teach his children the importance of fruit and vegetables if they only have them in the house once a week, and the lemons are rotten and the zucchini is dry and hard and he's mushed it down so his daughter doesn't choke but he knows the gestures were meant well. He thinks this tiny cottage with its three rooms will not be big enough for a family of five (because he stopped thinking of his sister as merely a visitor the moment he saw the way her eyes got all hopeful when he answered the door) and he will have to sell hundreds more lanterns than he is to support them all. He thinks about how hard it will be to get a different job, a better one, because it involves applying and anyone who looks at him closely will know who is he and who will hire a man formerly known as a prince?

He thinks about how, were he still sixteen, he would have gone out without a second thought and endured the way people stared at him and snarled and snapped to show them his spirit hadn't been broken, and he says, "No, thanks. The people remember better who was at the cause of their poverty when the Avatar's around. I think I'll stay here."

Because he's no longer sixteen and his greatest offense will have to be defense if he is to ensure Hiro and Tsuki will grow up in a world that doesn't hate them for his crimes. Because he's grown up.

Smellerbee nods like she's proud of him, and his sister stares at him like she has no idea who he is.

***

"I don't like the way people talk here," she tells him, a week later, and he stops what he's doing because she makes it sound like she believes he has the power to do something about it.

He looks at her, from her skinny bow legs to her hip bones sticking out of her flesh like the window did to its curtains to her face, which had always been like a book even when it was holding the secrets of the world, and all of a sudden he understands what she's doing. She's giving him the only thing she thinks he's ever wanted. She sees him, on his knees cleaning up Tsuki's vomit, in this house with its rotting floorboards and bread crumbs shoved into corners with dead spiders and a bit of broken chinaware, this house that always smells like something has just died, this house where Jin never has time to wash her hair so she always wears it under a scarf and everyone's clothes are falling apart at the hems.

She sees this, and then she gives him trust. She gives him the most potent, most deadly, most powerful kind of trust; the trust someone who has lost everything gives to a normal person. The power of an ordinary man who protects the unprotected knows no end.

They know this. They know this too well.

It wasn't the Avatar who destroyed the Fire Nation, and it wasn't their uncle, it wasn't even the waterbending girl who was so desperate to fix things that didn't need fixing or the earthbender who was so desperate to break things already broken, but instead it was the boy with the boomerang. They'd put all their eggs into Ba Seng Se and he knocked it right out from under them, this ordinary boy with his dripping sarcasm and his belief that protecting his sister is the only reason he was put on this earth, a boy in love with a princess they'd never met and a warrior with slanting Kyoshi eyes that looked at them from Tsuki's doughy, round baby face.

"I don't like the way people talk here," she repeats, like he hadn't heard her the first time, and she sits on the floor next to him, folding her legs under her like a woman in her own home and not crossing them like a warrior who isn't planning on staying long. She takes a shirt with its thread trailing and finds the glue to taper it off.

"The old ones don't do it, but the new ones do. Like they have the freedom to be whatever they want to be. And they don't, of course. They aren't free to kill people or practice their bending, or take over the Earth Kingdom because they make it extremely easy. Their freedom is limited, but they talk like everything they ever wanted will be delivered to them on a silver platter."

Zuko understands a lot of things, but he doesn't think he's getting this. So he scoops up the slick, smelly, vomit-y towels and goes out back to rinse them in the barrel there, and she follows him, shirt slung over her arm and glue sticky on her fingers and her face takes on that slanty, hopeless look when he pins them to the clothesline to dry on their own power.

He goes to return inside, but her arm snatches out and catches him around the midriff, and when he turns, she presses two fingers to her lips and then blows outward, and there's a flash of bent sunlight and a rush of displaced wind and the towels flutter on the line, completely dry.

"We don't have the freedom to firebend."

And then he gets it, and he sees the rest of the story in her eyes. She was never gonna underestimate Sokka again, she was gonna get the Earth Kingdom back from the Avatar, she was gonna make her father proud and restore her sullied honor, she was gonna have a life and she was gonna become queen.

She came to him for help and found him here with his lemon tea and his wife and his smelly, dirty kids and then there was no more gonna left in her.

***

Jin never did ask about his scar.

Well, not out loud. Her tact might be questionable in some areas of her life, but she knew better there. She just waited until the sun was bright and high above them as they lay tangled in the grass by the creek here in a stolen moment in the aesthetic beauty of the Upper Ring, sleepy and languid and he wouldn't have the energy to get distant with her, and she reached over and brushed the tip of her finger against his puckered flesh.

And he knows what she's asking and he debates pretending he didn't see the question in her eyes, but it's just so much easier to let the words, "My father" slip through his lips, so he did and then he realized that he never had told the story before. He'd just stood back and let everyone else tell it for him.

Her eyes go wide, and then soft again, and she moved her finger from the one on his face to the deep, ridged scar on his chest, asking the same question.

He remembered the look on Smellerbee's face when she ran the sword through his chest that day in the Earth Kingdom palace, remembered the way she said, "This is for Jet" as his whole body spasmed up and around the weapon like a butterfly on a collection board. He remembered the way his sister looked at him and then turned her back on him, shooting a jagged bolt of lightning at the Avatar, who blocked it with a wheel of fire, dismissing him for dead. He remembered lying there long after the battle had moved to a different room, gasping for air and somehow never getting enough despite his mouth being wide open and there being a gaping, sucking hole in his chest. He remembered his uncle's face looming over him, remembered that achingly familiar voice saying, "No, oh, no, Prince Zuko" and he remembered living.

So he says, "my sister" and her eyes grow heavier and she moves to another one, and another, and he can name them all. Father, sister, the admiral, and okay, yeah, that one was the ostrichorse, and she stops after she reaches the blue lines of frostbite in his fingers and he says, "the Avatar."

She had kissed him, then, first at the corner of his eye where the burn was the harshest and the deepest and moving inward along the curve of his cheekbone and then the bridge of his nose, and then she kissed his mouth and she might have been making a promise.

Then again, she might not have, and he would have kissed her back no matter what.

***

It wasn't that hard to find the Head of the Refugee Placement Department; one only had to know where the best tea shop in Ba Seng Se was. Or, well, the second-best, because the best tea shop had been closed for years, on account of the owner being brother to the Fire Lord and dead and all that.

"I want to reopen my uncle's shop," Zuko says without preamble, and the man looks up and his eyes take on the unmistakable sheen of fear those who fled the war always get when faced with a firebender, and he keeps his hands in his lap to hide the fact they were shaking and only long practice keeps his heart from beating right out of his chest and his face from betraying how desperate he is.

His identity clicks in the councilman's head, and he knows even before his lips start moving that they're going to form over the words "I'm sorry" and he doesn't want to hear it so he gets to moving and saying I'm sorry I wasted your time and I'm sorry I ever dared to hope but then the man's eyes slide past him and the words die stillborn on his lips as they curve into a smile of warm welcome, and when Zuko turns he finds Ty Lee standing there like the years had never happened and he decides destiny is the cruelest thing he's ever faced.

She's dressed in the robes of an Upper Ring aristocrat, and she's leaning on the arm of a man who has to be the councilman's son, and when he stands she lets go and flings her arms around him and yes, this really is Ty Lee because she crushes every bone in his body and near about breaks his eardrum when she squeals, "Zuko!"

She stands back and she looks at him, eyes flicking over the patches in his clothes and although he scrubbed and scrubbed there's still dirt under his fingernails and a bit of Tsuki's banana on the soles of his sandals, which are covered with the dust of the Lower Ring, and then to the councilman, and he can see her putting two and two together even as she smiles wide, vapid and shallow and he realizes they're both playing parts.

Then she's sliding into the cushion next to him and chattering, "I haven't seen you since we overthrew you and your sister! You know, I know it doesn't help now, but in retrospect you really should have told us that you were on our side the entire time because it would have made life that much easier for us, not having to worry about how to deal with you when the time came for us to take back the Earth Kingdom!" And she's lying through her teeth in the most spectacular way possible because he stood by his sister until the very last moment, until she surrendered and disappeared off the face of the earth and he had to deal with Ba Seng Se's hate all on his own.

So he says, "thank you" with his eyes and she says, "no problem" with the curve of her lips and thoughtful consideration comes into the councilman's face.

"He says he wants to reopen the Jasmine Dragon," he goes, slowly.

Ty Lee's eyebrows go up. "Really? That's wonderful news! I loved that place. I thought you didn't like tea-making, though."

And the ball's in his court, so he chuckles and says, "I must confess, after the ridiculous amount of it I drank the night my wife was in labor, I've kind of lost my taste for it." She gets the same surprised, slanty-eyed look his sister did, like she's just now coming up with the sum of the years of his life she's missed out on, and how much of a scattered picture of him she has. "But my uncle was a good man and his tea was even better, and he'd weep if he knew that it was being kept from the people of Ba Seng Se."

And the councilman is beginning to look a little wistful, and Zuko hopes so hard that his chest near about splits down the middle.

***

When he gets home, the sun's down and nobody's bothered to light the lanterns yet, so that's why he doesn't immediately recognize the figure up on her tiptoes and peeking into their window.

Everything he ever knew about firebending and swordfighting come back to him in one fell swoop, every practiced movement and every possible cadence of his uncle's voice, instructing him, and every 'try again' that fell patiently from his mother's lips, and it was exactly like tea-making was, he realized. You never truly forget. His swords make only the softest of swishing sounds as he removes them from their sheaths, but she hears him anywhere and when she turns to face him, he feels absolutely ridiculous.
"Come here," Jin whispers, choosing to ignore the weapons in his hands and beckoning him closer. He comes, because he can't not, and she crooks her finger and points, "Look."

He tilts his head to get a view of their home through the curtains, and the first thing he sees is the dirty laundry still heaped up by the back door, unsorted and he might imagine he can see the flies buzzing around it, and the dishes are still piled in the sink basin and dinner hasn't been started because their pantry is empty again. The next thing he sees is his sister, kneeling on the frayed woven rug and she's got Hiro and Tsuki with her and he can hear their voices.

Tsuki, she's chattering and revving around in circles, and his sister wasn't watching her because you will always know where Tsuki is because she talks so, and she wasn't going to get lost because she'd tell you where she was. And Hiro's got her face all crunched up and her legs splayed every which way in that flexible way kids only have until they're three, because his sister has three fingers up in her face and she's going, "How many fingers am I holding up, Hiro?"

"Nine," the girl says confidently, and gets an angry shake of the head in response.

Zuko remembers the one and only time he and his sister ever discussed math, back when he was seven and she was five and he looked up from the problems their tutor was having them do in the ornate, spacious library with the books that were more, "Don't touch" than they were works of literature, and he went, "When do you give the ten back that you borrowed when you subtracted seven from sixteen?" and she got the angry, pinched, you're-an-idiot look she always wears and he never asked again.

Now all she says is, "No. Three fingers. I have three fingers. And you have ten," she reaches out and holds them up, touching them one by one. "And you have one belly button," and she makes a soft, tickling jab at Hiro's belly and she squirms away with a giggle, "And your sister has one belly button. And you have two ears and two eyes and just one nose."

But when asked, still with three, Hiro still says she was holding up nine fingers and one belly button.

His sister just shrugs and then goes, "Give me five!" and the little girl does, slapping palms because she knows five, even if she doesn't know one, two, three, or four yet.

And then Tsuki has got her feet under her and her arms are pinwheeling and then she's standing and looks so very surprised, like she isn't sure whether she's going to walk or fall or fly.

***

"Do you ever want to have kids?" Jin had asked him once, and he looked for her face among the blankets they had wrapped around them to stave off the bite of the winter wind to see if she was serious.

Most of his memories of her are in soft pastels, innocent, playful colors, but this one is cast in the same sharp, stark charcoal the rest of his life was.

"No," he answered, flatly and in a tone that brooked no argument because he had decided that the morning after he woke up with bandages on his face. He wasn't going to pass these defunct genes onto some innocent life that had done nothing to deserve it. The Fire Lord's blood was marked with murder and corruption, and who wants that hovering over the head of an infant? His resolution was helped by the fact that, at the time, he believed girls had cooties.

But Jin's voice sounded so quiet and lost when she said, "oh" and curled up closer to him in the back of the open-ended wagon they're stealing a ride and warm blankets from because the local enforcement had kicked them out of the Middle Ring for begging there once too often.

"Did you want to have kids?" he backtracked, and his breath came from his mouth in a cloud of mist and he couldn't feel his toes but that's the way things were these days.

"Yes," she replied without hesitation. "I thought it would be mean, at first, to ask a child to live like this, but I still want to meet our son or daughter. Someone who's half you and half me, who will love us unconditionally and never expect anything more from us than to just be its parents." And he felt her fingers clutch on nothing but handfuls of cloth, like she's imagining she's holding an infant already.

"Assuming we can find a house and some permanent form of income and some way of protecting them from prejudice," he went rationally, because old habits die hard, and hated himself the moment her eyes went dark and sad and all images of babies flooded out of her head. "When do you think you'd be ready to have children?"

He thought for a moment that she wasn't going to answer, but then she pressed herself into his side and murmured so softly he asked her to repeat it, "How about in seven months?"

***

"I can't cover all your eyes at once, so I'm going to employ the honor system and hope you keep them shut," he tells them as he opens the door of the carriage and takes his wife and his sister by their hands and tug them out, and they come, Jin lurching inexpertly on the carriage steps and Hiro clutching to her tunic, tiny pink tongue stuck out in the concentration it took to keep her eyes screwed shut, but his sister doesn't falter once and Tsuki's eyes are open wide with wonder and she goes, "oooooooo" very softly, and he leans close to inspect the sliver of white he can see in his sister's eyes, and he snaps his fingernail against the side of her head and there's the motion of her rolling her eyes under her eyelids and then she makes a point of squeezing them shut.

He flicks a gold coin at the carriage driver, but he hasn't had a gold coin to flip in years and so it just sort of arcs pathetically, but the driver catches it and pockets it with an understanding smile.

Leading them by the hand, he pulls them up the porch steps and through the airy, open front door and then drops their hands, puffing fire into the lanterns hanging in various locations around the main parlor.

"You can look," he says, and their eyes snap open in the same movement and Hiro just looks confused but Jin shrieks and his sister is floored.

It's a big house, with enough bedrooms for all of them and a kitchen and even an entirely separate room for dining and for laundry, and there's a sort of dojo thing on the side that he and his sister can use for firebending, because they're in the Upper Ring now and nobody judges them by their eccentricities and they can make changes here and isn't that, really, what they always wanted?

"What is this, Zuko?" Jin demands, holding onto a squirming Hiro as she tries to escape to go check out the backyard, and he can tell by the look in her eyes that she's praying to every god she knows that he's not yanking her chain.

"This is home," he says quietly, and out of the corner of his eye he sees his sister sit down, hard, and Tsuki bounces in her arms and makes a startled noise, so she's put down and she crawls off to inspect the wallpaper, miraculously clean and he doesn't think she's ever seen something like it before.

Jin touches his arm, familiar and always gentle, and he sees the same reluctance to hope in her that he's had since birth.

"I reopened Uncle's tea shop, and I didn't tell you. I'm sorry, but I thought that if I said it out loud, it would all go away somehow."

And Jin's gone all bubble-eyed like she's trying to figure him out, and Hiro does escape then, moving lurchy-squiggly like a child always does when she's trying to look at everything around her and run at the same time, and a grin starts at the corner of Jin's eyes and her mouth and then she's laughing so bright and loud that the walls ring with the sound, and she throws her arms around him and he scoops her up and they spin in place, and the dam in his chest just breaks and he thinks happiness could kill him, and Jin wheezes and says, "Hug me any tighter and I'll snap in two!"

So he puts her down and she leans up and kisses him and he kisses back, and then he kisses her again for the sake of it and her eyes go all bubbly again and then she's saying like she never thought of it before, "We have new neighbors! I have to meet them!" and dashes out the door because that's what Jin does.

Nothing can wait for another moment.

His sister has moved two rooms over by this point, and she's on her knees next to the banister, running her fingers around the curve beginning at the base that's always supposed to symbolize something but no one figures it out because they're never down there to get a good look.

Things are suddenly very quiet without Jin there, and when he tries once more, "This is home", like he isn't sure whether it really fit on his tongue, the sound seems unusually loud but she doesn't flinch because his sister never flinches.

She twists her head to look at him, and he doesn't remember when she stopped wearing her armor on her at all times and stopped tying her hair up in a way practical to a firebender, because it's falling all across her shoulders in a sheet of black, and she could have been anyone he'd met out on the street if not for her lamp-like, golden firebender eyes, and he sees the grand palaces of their childhood, elegant courtyards and impressive displays of opulence and strength wherever he turned, and he sees them as she sees them too, and then he sees her let them go. Just like that. Everything she's worked for her entire life and she just lets it slip away because she's got all her eggs in his basket.

"This is home," she agrees.

It's quiet again, and when there comes the strangled squeak from the kitchen, sounding exactly like a baby sucking for air it can't get, she's on her feet in the heartbeat that he skips for the fear that's choked it.

There's Tsuki, on her back on the tile floor, legs jerking and starfish hands flailing and her eyes so wide with surprise and with confusion, and he catches a glimpse of a wormroach leg sticking out from between her lips before it disappears and she makes that squeaking noise again and he can live through all the wars he wants, there will never be a sound quite so scary as that.

And then his sister has her in her arms and her fingers in her mouth, searching and fishing around and she can't find anything because her fingers come out sticky with saliva and then they're sliding up Tsuki's arm, and pressing, and her voice sounds so far away, like an animal lost in the dark and reaching, "She's not breathing and her pulse is too faint."

To his immortal shame, Zuko couldn't bring himself to move his legs. It was as if he had grown roots right there and attempting to uproot him would be like pulling the Avatar's weeds. His sister's chanting, "get help, get help, get help, get help" even as she's turning the baby over and Tsuki's lips are going blue and black and they shouldn't, should they? He feels Hiro's hands close around his legs, and she's hugging him and her whole body's shaking with fear even though he's positive she isn't sure what's going on. But she can sense something's so very wrong because she's a child and children do that.

Tsuki goes limp.

All at once.

His sister moans in the back of her throat, letting the infant slide to the floor and her hands grasping at midair like she could find the answer there.

"Three fingers!" Hiro goes suddenly, and he thinks of belly buttons and stealing tens in order to subtract and their library at home with all the knowledge they could never learn no matter how much they read and his sister showing up on his doorstep with a breed of expensive, but rotten lemon and he thinks that she's all book-learning and strategy and checkmate, but how very little experience with the real world she's had.

But she's moving, she's taking Tsuki's chin and tilting her head back and then she takes three fingers and puts them on her chest and pushes one, two, three, four, five and then she leans down, hair falling all across Tsuki's clothes and skin like black ink running down paper, and she breathes, one, two, three, four, five. And then she repeats. Push five, breathe five. Push five, breathe five.

Textbook.

Push five. Up and down, up and down.

Breathe five. Up and down, up and down.

Please, oh please keep breathing.

Textbook.

He remembers his sister at their father's birthday dinner, the way she sidled on over to the fish take and then scooped out a squitten, letting it flail and mewl in her hands before she set it alight, and it screamed, high and piercing and she looked so confused when everyone surged to their feet, yelling at her to stop and scolding her for harming an innocent thing, and she asks, isn't this what you do to the people in the air temples and the earth kingdom and the water poles? Burn them up and listen to them scream? So what made this squitten so much more important than them?

He remembers the look she had on her face when she burned the squitten alive; he saw it thrice more. Once while he screamed and screamed and screamed in that arena, up until his father grabbed him by the hair and slammed his head down on the rock, knocking him senseless and when he woke up he was missing half his face and the rest of his life, and again when she blew a hole right through their uncle's chest and yet again when she did the same to the Avatar.

He remembers the way she grinned when she ground the heel of her boot into Lord Feng's face as he squirmed and kicked on the steps in front of the throne.

He remembers how meticulous and calculated she was in battle, like everything was a math problem and if she got it right she would see their father's lips quirk up.

He remembers every cruel thing she's ever done.

He remembers, and then he sees her, on her knees and putting her mouth over his daughter's snotty nose and lips, in and out, in and out, and three fingers on her chest, pushing and pushing and then hunting for a pulse and then she says, "Breathe, Tsuki."

And she does.

All at once.

And then she's throwing up, and up comes the wormroach with all the real-life Tsuki vomit, all over his sister's face and hair and suddenly he can move again and he grabs his daughter and all but crushes her to him, checking her eyes for signs of damage and getting a faceful of rosy-cheeked screaming and he doesn't think he's ever heard such a beautiful noise and he just holds on.

He holds on.

***

He hears her get up in the middle of the night and he follows her, and she stands in the backyard next to the bird fountain and the sundial and he comes up behind her and he says, "You saved my daughter's life."

She spins around, and then her arms are snaking around him and she's burying her face into his chest and her hair still smells like vomit and he isn't sure what to do because... well, he's never hugged his sister in his entire life. Ever. The closest they've come to it involves one or the other (usually him) with their face being ground into the dirt and them kicking and biting and scratching, or all of the above. So he does what comes naturally; he puts his arms around her shoulders and cradles the back of her head with his hand and hugs back.

And he has no idea when they switched places.

But here they are, and now she's the one who needs the security of family and somewhere to belong, and he's the one who has the ideal everything, and somewhere in the middle she needs to hear and he needs to say, "I need you, Azula."

Tomorrow she'll have a fever and won't be able to get out of bed because she's done something that's so fundamentally against her nature that her body has to adjust, but that doesn't change the fact that, "You're a hero," he murmurs.

"Hiro needs a new shirt," she replies, voice practical and to-the-point but she isn't letting go.

"There isn't a hole out there that we can't fix."

"It's not a hole," she pulls back and her grin is devious and almost happy. "She set fire to it."

***

"Are you happy?"

Zuko looked at Jin, and then he looked at their house. It was only standing because it was so tightly squeezed in between two other buildings, and shingles were dripping from its roof and he could see the wormroaches crawling in between the floorboards from here, and their neighbors were an unsavory bunch and the neighborhood was even worse, but the place was theirs, together, his and hers.

He stroked the bottom of his daughter's foot, just to see her reflex sleepily, and Jin giggled.

"Yes," he said, and that was all.