Chapter Text
Zuzu is four years old and feeding the turtleducks with his mother when he first realizes he has to hide who he is. The sun is rising, bathing the sky in beautiful hues of orange and pink. He is dismally reminded of how he is only allowed these peaceful morning moments because his inner fire hasn’t ignited yet and he doesn’t need to go to morning practice. Azula has been burning anything she touched since before she was two. Father doesn’t think he has any fire at all; he’s heard the hushed arguments he and Mom have in the hallway outside his bedroom when they think they’ve shut the door all the way.
“Just give her more time!” His mother’s begging voice plays through his head. “She’s young, she still has a few years. My grandfather was a late bender, too. That didn’t stop him from becoming great.”
“Sozin’s line has not produced a non-bending child in three generations. I will not have a fireless daughter for an heir.” His father’s sharp voice plays back with the same response he always gives Zuko’s mother. I will not have a non-bending daughter.
He winces a bit at the word daughter, his tiny fingers picking at the piece of bread he holds as he watches the surface of the pond ripple with the swimming of the turtleducks. Girl, she, daughter, princess, his father calls him. What a lovely girl, the grownups at his family’s galas always tell him. Why was it only boy or girl anyways? Shouldn’t there be more than two options? And why did it feel like they’d already chosen for him anyways?
“You’re unusually quiet, duckling.” His mother’s voice cuts gently through the haze and he turns to look at her, his tiny face puzzled in confusion. “Is there something on your mind?” Her face is calm and happy and she speaks with a smile. She never gets angry at him for asking questions like Father does; he likes that about his mom.
“What makes somebody a boy or a girl?” He thinks he sees Mom’s smile get a bit strained.
“You’re just born as one or the other.” She hesitates, turning back to the pond. “Why do you ask, dear?” His face twists a bit as he sets his bread aside, unsatisfied with her answer.
“I think they made a mistake when I was born. Everybody says I’m a girl but I feel like a boy. We should tell everyone I’m a prince, not a princess. Then they wouldn’t say the wrong things anymore.”
“Zuzu, honey, you mustn’t say things like that.” His mother grabs his shoulder firmly.
“Why not?”
She doesn’t answer for a long time, gazing at the pond before finally turning back to him, the tranquility on her face contrasting with the urgency of her grip.
“It could make people very angry.”
“Like how Father gets angry?”
“...Yes, your father would get very angry.”
“Oh. Okay.”
He turns back to the pond, disappointment apparent on his face, and tosses the turtleducks another piece of bread.
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Zuzu is five years old and feeding the turtleducks with his mother the first time he gets to be a boy. He’s been trying his best to act like a girl, but it’s hard. It feels like he always does something wrong and he’s getting tired of it. He’s tired of people looking at him weirdly when he says he’d rather do boy things with cousin Lu Ten instead of doing girl things with Azula, Mai, and Ty Lee. He’s tired of how strained his mother’s smile gets when he gets too close to asking about things like that in front of other people. He’s tired of the cold disappointment in his father’s eyes that he thought would go away when he showed him the tiny flames he could finally cup in his hands. He’s tired of the suspicious look Azula gets when Mom stops using his girl name and starts calling him Zuzu instead. He’s tired of only being able to be a boy when he’s by himself.
“Mom?” She hums in acknowledgement, and he turns to look at her as he throws the last of his bread. “If I’d been born a boy, what would my name have been?”
His mother freezes and she gives a sad and hesitant sigh, eyes still focused on the water. “I thought we talked about this, Zuzu.”
“I know, I know I’m not supposed to talk about stuff like that, I just-” his voice comes out unexpectedly angry and grows thicker as he continues speaking. “I just wanted to know.” Tears begin falling down his face and he brings his knees to his chest, curling up to try to silence his sniffles. His mother’s arms wrap around him, gently rubbing his back as he cries.
“Don’t cry, my dear, please don’t cry.” Her voice wavers the same way his does.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers once he’s calmed down a bit, “I’m not very good at pretending. I’ll do better, I promise.”
Her hand stops rubbing his back for a second and she pulls away to firmly look him in the eyes. “It’s not your fault, duckling. Don’t ever think it’s your fault.” He nods back to her, tears forgotten in his shock. His mother has never been this forceful with him before, always a gentle and loving figure in contrast to his father’s harsh, angry demeanor. She resumes holding him and they both stare at the pond, the silence only broken by the periodic calling of the turtleducks.
“Zuko,” his mother suddenly states, breaking the quiet that has fallen over them.
“What?”
“I would have named you Zuko.”
“Oh,” he responds dumbly, his voice full of awe. Zuko. He doesn’t know why, but it fits. His girl name has always felt wrong, like when he grew out of his last pair of shoes. Too tight; suffocating. But Zuko feels just right. He knows, from the moment he hears it, that he’s claimed the name as his own, that it will stretch and grow with him through life even if he’s the only one who ever gets to use it for himself. His eyes are red and puffy and they’re starting to sting from his earlier tears but a tiny smile still finds its way onto his face.
“Zuko,” he says, voice gleeful and full of wonder. “Zuko,” he says again, louder, just to make sure it's real. “Zuko,” he says, giggling, smile spreading wider and wider.
His mother’s smile gets wider, too, but her eyes get sadder. “How about this,” she says, turning to him. “When it’s just us two, like this, you can be whoever you want.”
“I wanna be Prince Zuko!” He jumps up, joy in his eyes and excitement on his face.
“Well, would Prince Zuko like to go have his lunch so he can grow up big and strong?”
“Yeah!”
“Excellent, I hear little princes are great at eating all their vegetables.”
“What? No!”
“No?”
“I’m already big and strong, I don’t need vegetables. They’re icky.”
“Well then I guess the great Prince Zuko doesn’t need his dessert tonight either. How unfortunate, I hear the cooks are making lava cakes today.”
“Lava cakes??”
“Mhm.”
“...Maybe princes do eat vegetables.”
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The years after that are hard, but Zuko is happy. He falls further and further behind Azula in his bending lessons. His father grows more and more disappointed with him. Uncle and Lu Ten leave to go join the war. He has to start acting more and more like a girl. He has to get better at pretending.
But it’s all worth it. It’s worth it because at the end of the day, when it’s just him and Mom, he gets to be Prince Zuko. Mom lets him put on boy clothes and use his boy name and play with Lu Ten’s old toys and calls him “he” and “sir” and “prince” and sometimes even “my son.” After a lot of yelling between his father and mother, Zuko is also allowed to start sword lessons with Master Piandao so that he can be like the brave princes and heroes he hears about in stories.
Zuko can get through any failed kata, any burn he receives as punishment, any insult Azula throws at him to mirror the ones that Father gives, any stuffy adult party where he’s expected to act ladylike. He can get through all of it because he knows that later that same day or early the next, he’ll get to be Zuko again. When he’s Zuko, all the stress and fear falls away and he's able to breathe again. When he’s Zuko, everything feels like it’ll be okay.
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When Zuko is nine, everything falls apart.
He wakes up groggily to someone gently shaking his shoulder. It’s hard to see in the dark, and he has to rub his eyes to see clearly, but the figure is familiar. “Mom?”
“Zuko, my love, I’m so sorry it has to be like this. Everything I’ve done, I’ve done to protect you.”
She pulls him into a hug, but he’s still waking up and her words have barely registered in his brain. She’s shaking a bit and she wipes at her eyes as she pulls away but her voice remains clear and calm.
“Remember Zuko, please remember that none of this is your fault. Nothing is wrong with you, it’s this place, these people. No matter how things may seem to change, never forget who you are. You’ll always be my little prince. Okay, duckling? Promise me you’ll remember, Zuko. You have to promise.”
“I-I promise, Mom.” Zuko’s finally starting to wake up and he doesn’t like how wrong everything feels. Something bad is happening.
“Good.” At this, his mother walks to the door, turning to give him one last sad smile before pulling her hood up and disappearing into the darkness of the hallway. After a moment, Zuko gets up and walks over to the edge of the doorway, calling quietly for her to come back. The darkness consumes everything outside his room and leaves him unsure if his mother was even there in the first place. He pads back over to sit on the edge of his bed and begins to cry as he thinks back over what she said. It feels too much like a goodbye. It feels like everything has changed for the worse in an instant.
Zuko isn’t sure when he falls asleep, but when he wakes up and asks about his mother, it’s like she never even existed. He’s met with excuse after excuse from everybody he talks to and quickly learns it’s just better not to ask at all. He has more important things to worry about now, anyway. He’s going to be the Crown Princess. The thought makes him sick to his stomach and his mother isn’t there to help.
In less than twenty-four hours, he’s found out about the death of his cousin, his mother has gone missing, his grandfather has died, and his father has become the Firelord.
“Your father would get very angry.”
“I will not have a fireless daughter for an heir.”
He takes the part of himself that remembers the freedom of being Prince Zuko, the part of himself that wants to scream and shout about how he’s not a princess and never has been, and locks it in a tiny little box at the center of his heart. Prince Zuko won’t survive here anymore. He stands perfectly poised on the steps of the palace beside his sister as his father is crowned Firelord. He feels a mask slip over his face and a cold fire surround his heart. He doesn’t know if it’s there to keep the box safe or to prevent its contents from escaping.
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Zuko is falling and nobody is there to catch him anymore. Being Crown Princess is hard. People pay a lot more attention to him, which means there’s no room for errors, though he still ends up making a lot of them. His father also starts paying more attention to him, which is confusing because he’s always wished that his father would stop ignoring him but now that he has he wants nothing more than for those judging eyes to go away. Through all of these changes, he’s still remained a constant disappointment. He’s not good enough at firebending and it dishonors their whole family, Father tells him.
There’s a higher emphasis on the rest of his education now, too. He learns about the proud history of the Fire Nation and how his great-grandfather, Firelord Sozin, defeated the Air Nomads in a grand battle. His tutors also tell him about how the other nations are barbaric and dishonorable, and how the Fire Nation is spreading its glory to them and making them more civilized.
The worst thing he learns is that there are people like him in the other nations. Girls who think they’re boys and boys who think they’re girls. There are also people who fall in love with other people of the same gender. He hates the way his tutors speak about it, the words sound so harsh and they’re always spoken with disdain, a disdain that he’s obviously expected to share.
He walks away from those lessons confused and full of questions, but he doesn’t have anyone to ask them to. People like him are supposed to be sick in the head and delusional, but he isn’t delusional, is he? His mother would have told him so. He feels like he’s a boy, but he’s had crushes on actual boys, like the gardener’s son Lee and that boy who Lu Ten used to have over all the time before he left for Ba Sing Se. He's supposed to like boys, isn't he? Or does it only make him more heathenous and delusional that he doesn't like them in the way girls are supposed to?
His brain must be wrong. He’s supposed to be a girl because he was born a girl, but he feels like a boy instead. He pushes his doubts away and resolves to try to fix himself. If he tries hard enough, maybe he can be a normal girl. He has to, because he’ll never be a boy.
So he throws himself into being a proper lady, tries to wear extra feminine clothing and play with the dolls he gets for his birthday and not flinch when he looks at himself in the mirror to see someone who doesn’t look like him. He reminds himself that it’s shameful and dishonorable of him to think that he’s a boy. He tries to forget that Prince Zuko ever existed. He ignores how he goes to bed feeling more and more unhappy each day, how he always thinks of the name “Zuko” before any other.
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He is eleven when he finally admits that it isn’t working. Almost two years of trying, trying so so hard, and he still feels exactly the same on the inside, still has the same urge to scream every time someone refers to him as a girl. He’s always going to think he’s a boy, no matter how much he reminds himself he isn’t. His brain simply can’t be fixed. He just needs to accept that he’s never going to be normal.
He gives in and indulges in all the urges he’s been pushing down. He dresses and acts as boyish as he can without garnering suspicion for it. He responds to the feminine names and terms they all call him while still allowing himself to be Prince Zuko in his mind.
He does all these shameful and dishonorable things because nobody else ever needs to know how messed up and delusional he is. Nobody needs to know that he daydreams and entertains the fantasy that he could someday be an actual boy and wear his hair in a man's topknot and walk around shirtless. Nobody can know even if he wanted them to because by now he’s well versed on all of Sozin’s laws and he knows he’ll be banished or publicly executed or worse if anyone ever finds out what he is.
People take notice. The palace staff comment fondly, almost teasingly, about how he’s becoming such a tomboy. Azula begins teasing him too, though none of her jabs ever land quite right when telling him he’s too masculine makes him happy, rather than offended. She offhandedly calls him Zuzu one day and it quickly becomes her favorite nickname for him when she sees his reaction. He can’t tell if she’s being cruel because the reminder of their mother pains him or if it's her own twisted form of sisterly kindness because there’s no way she can’t tell how much he prefers Zuzu over his birth name.
It feels nice to have some freedom for once and stop restricting himself. He feels like he can breathe a bit easier now, like the mask he wears is protecting instead of smothering. And even though it never truly left him, he embraces the name Zuko like a long lost friend. Sometimes, when he’s alone, he still whispers it to himself—just to have the novelty of hearing it out loud.
But as his freedom grows, so does his hatred. Zuko hates, and he hates intensely. He hates that he can’t just be normal, that something that’s so simple for other people is so hard for him. He hates his weakness for giving in to his delusions. He hates what he is. He hates that he can’t even say the word for it out loud. He hates that he still dreams of running away to a place where he can be an actual boy. He hates that he thinks of himself as a he instead of a she. He hates his mother for leaving. He hates his father for not understanding.
He hates, he hates, he hates.
Maybe if he hates long enough and hard enough, things will just fix themselves. Maybe if he lets the loathing consume him it will finally destroy the part of him that he locked inside that tiny box within his heart, and then he won’t have to worry anymore.
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When Zuko is twelve, two things happen that make it a little bit more bearable. The first happens when he walks in on Ty Lee kissing Mai’s cheek. He enters a room in the library to return a scroll he’d been using for his lessons and freezes in the doorway as he takes in the scene before him.
Ty Lee and Mai are on the seat of the bay window, sitting incredibly close to each other. This in itself isn’t too unusual for them; Ty Lee has always had a lack of awareness for the personal space of others, and Mai has always seemed to be the most tolerant of it in their group. They’re also holding hands. Again, not unusual behavior for two girls who are close friends, even if one of those girls is as shy as Mai. No, what gives Zuko pause is the blush on both of their faces as Ty Lee moves her head away from Mai’s cheek, her lips relaxing from what couldn’t be anything other than a kiss.
Both of them freeze when they notice him, two pairs of wide eyes meeting his own, all three of them collectively holding their breath. For a moment, Zuko is willing to just dismiss it as a gesture of affection between two friends, but the tension in the room and the severity of their reaction and the blush on the girls’ faces tells him it’s something much more important and suddenly everything clicks in his head. He’d never considered the possibility that he could ever meet somebody else like him, someone considered… dishonorable in that way. His mouth flaps open and closed like a fish as he tries to process the new information.
“You… you’re-”
The girls spring apart from each other. Mai stares pointedly at the floor and runs her hands through her hair, trying to detangle knots that don’t exist. Ty Lee jumps to a standing position, a strained smile on her face that reminds him of the one his mother used to get when he said something too unladylike at dinner.
“Hey there! We haven’t hung out in a while, it feels like it’s been ages since we’ve seen you!” She laughs awkwardly, eyes glancing from the scroll in his hand, to him, to Mai, and then back to him again. “Returning a scroll?” she asks him, her voice desperate.
“Huh? Oh, uh, yeah. Yeah, just…” Zuko shakes his head and blinks rapidly, still a bit dumbstruck. He walks over to the opposite wall and returns the scroll to its proper place before walking back over to the doorway, turning to stare dumbly at his childhood friends. The room is still full of tension as they both awkwardly try to stare at anything in the room but him.
“You were kissing.” He states it like an observation, no question in his tone.
Ty Lee rushes forward and covers his mouth with her hand, leaning out into the wider library to make sure nobody is around. She steps back with a wild panic in her eyes, uncovering his mouth, and laughs nervously again.
“That’s- that’s not what we were- That would be crazy! And immoral, of course. Mai just had an eyelash on her cheek. I was blowing it away, right Mai?”
“Mhm.”
“I know what I saw.” Zuko narrows his eyes in thought before turning around to check for himself if the library is empty. Ty Lee and Mai aren’t exactly like him, but they’re similar enough. Their shameful acts would all be punished the same way, regardless. Maybe he doesn’t have to be alone anymore. It might be a rash decision and he should probably think it through a little bit more but the idea of being less alone in his struggle makes his heart throb with a longing that he can’t ignore.
“We shouldn’t talk about this here. Let’s go to my room,” he offers, determination in his eyes.
Ty Lee swallows heavily, turning to look at Mai. They have a silent conversation for a few seconds before she turns back to him and nods. The two girls follow him silently as he takes the familiar route back to his room. He makes sure the space is devoid of any maids or servants before closing the doors and locking them. He sits at the top of his large bed before gesturing for the girls to join him from where they’ve awkwardly stopped just inside his doorway. They reluctantly take their seats and they all form a circle on the bed, sitting cross-legged. As usual, Ty Lee is the first to speak.
“Listen, it really isn’t what you think it is. We don’t have to make a big deal out of it or anything-”
“I’m not going to tell anybody.”
“You- you’re not?”
“No.”
“Oh.” A lot of tension seems to bleed out of her shoulders and he sees Mai relax a little, too. “Um, why not? Not that I want you to tell anybody or anything I just…” her voice trails off, unsure what else to say. Zuko curls up into a ball, bringing his legs to his chest and resting his head on his knees as he wraps his arms tightly around himself. It’s his turn to be nervous, now.
“I’m… I’m like you guys.”
“You- you like girls?” Her eyes widen and she leans forward, whispering as if the whole world is listening in.
“No, I’m- I’m like you in a different way, I-” He sighs, closing his eyes and hiding his face behind his knees. His hands are shaking and he feels lightheaded. This is the first time he’s ever said it out loud, knowing the full implications of his feelings. “I’m supposed to be a girl. I- I am a girl, I mean. But I’ve always felt like… like I should have been born a boy.”
A startling silence follows his declaration and Zuko only realizes he’s crying when a tear drips down his face. “I don’t know, it’s stupid. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be bothering you guys with this, it’s my problem, not yours. I just… I just wanted you to know that I won’t tell on you. Because I know how it feels, how scary it is.” He sniffles, hurriedly wiping a hand over his eyes. He looks up when he feels the mattress shifting as the two girls come to sit closer to him.
“It’s not stupid.” Ty Lee says confidently, wiping some of the stray tears from his eyes. “Maybe… maybe we can all keep each other’s secrets. Like a pact.” He hears Mai give a small hum of approval from off to the side.
“That sounds nice," he mutters, suddenly feeling exhausted.
“Let’s swear on it,” she says, holding her hand out in the center of their little circle and raising her pinky. Zuko and Mai’s tiny fingers follow a second later, still a bit shaky.
“We’ll protect each other.” Ty Lee hooks her finger around theirs with a hopeful smile. Zuko giggles when Mai’s face turns red again.
“Is this why you don’t get angry when Azula calls you Zuzu?” Ty Lee turns to him, oblivious to Mai’s plight.
“Yeah,” Zuko hums, unfurling himself a bit to play with his hands, “I- I know I should be honored to be named after my great-grandfather, he was a great man, it’s just…”
“…too girly?” Mai supplies, speaking real words for the first time since he found them.
“Yeah.” Zuko pauses, hesitating.
“You can tell us anything, we won’t judge you. We all made a promise.” Ty Lee smiles at him reassuringly.
“I have another name, a special one my mom gave me. What she would’ve named me if I was a boy.” They both stare at him encouragingly, patiently waiting.
“Zuko. It’s Zuko.”
“Hmm. Zuko. It suits you.” Mai says, the corners of her mouth upturned in a tiny smile. Ty Lee agrees.
After that, they don’t really talk about their secret pact again, even though Zuko is still full of longing to discuss his problems with somebody who will actually understand. They all know that saying anything more is still too risky, too scary. But they do grow closer. Zuko now considers the girls not just Azula’s friends, but his too. On the surface, nothing has really changed. Underneath, however, Zuko is filled with immense relief. He finally has somebody who knows the truth again, who he can trust not to tell on him.
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The second thing happens a few months later: his Uncle Iroh returns home.
Formality demands that they host a family dinner to welcome him back from his journey and it’s awkward, to say the least. Zuko has memories of his uncle from childhood, of course. Most of them are pretty fond, too. It's just… weird to see him back. So much has changed in the years he’s been gone and Uncle Iroh feels a bit like a stranger to him. His hair is grayer and he’s gotten fatter in his travels. Zuko spends the whole dinner avoiding eye contact with his father, trying to stop Azula from kicking his shins underneath the table, and listening to his uncle’s vividly boring descriptions of different Earth Kingdom teas.
He is sitting by the turtleduck pond the next day, where he often finds himself in his free time, when he hears footsteps approaching from behind him. He tenses up, expecting to hear Azula’s sharp voice begin teasing him. All of the staff know better than to disturb him while he’s here, Azula is the only one who ever does.
“May I sit here?” he hears an unfamiliar voice say instead. He looks up, a bit startled, to see his Uncle Iroh standing there, a patient smile on his face.
“Uh, yes. Yes, of course.”
Zuko scoots over a bit to make room as the man sits down. He awkwardly turns away to avoid eye contact, unsure what to say or if he even should be saying anything. From what he can remember from his childhood, as well as what he observed at dinner last night, he can gather that Uncle is a more forgiving man than the Firelord. But the ex-general is still, for the most part, a completely unknown variable in Zuko’s life. And that makes him nervous. He doesn’t want any more judgment from his family; he already can’t handle Father’s.
“You used to come here with your mother every morning, I remember. I would see you two sitting out here together, feeding the turtleducks. Ursa always had to stop you from eating all the bread before the ducks could get any,” his uncle speaks first, his voice wistful and full of amusement. Zuko looks over at him in shock, but his uncle is looking at the pond, his eyes a bit glazed over. This is the first time he’s heard somebody truly talk about his mother in three years. After she vanished, everybody acted like she’d never even existed in the first place.
“I am sorry that I couldn’t be there for you when you lost her, and that I didn’t return home after, even when I had the ability to. Losing Lu Ten… it made me a different man. I needed time to figure out what that meant.” His uncle blinks, seeming to come back to himself, before turning to look at Zuko. “But enough about me, I want to know about you. You’ve grown so much since the last time I was home.”
And so they speak. Uncle asks him questions about his life and Zuko gives him short, closed off answers. It’s the most confusing conversation he’s ever had; his Uncle actually wants to know what Zuko thinks and what Zuko’s interested in, not just how well he’s performing. It brings back memories of old conversations he had beside this pond and for just a second he thinks he can hear his mother’s delicate laugh gently ringing out over the water—a sound he thought he’d forgotten.
Uncle comes back the next day and the day after that and soon Zuko starts coming to the pond after his lessons already expecting to see the man sitting there, waiting for him. He remains cautious at first, scared that it will only be a matter of time before Uncle sees that he’s just a disappointment, that Azula is clearly the better sibling; only a matter of time before Zuko says something stupid or wrong and gets hit for it.
But the weeks begin to pass and turn into months and there are still no signs of aggression or discontent from the older man. On the contrary, Uncle has started bringing tea to their little meetings. He even gets a Pai Sho set to teach Zuko after he admits he doesn’t know how to play. Uncle doesn’t even get angry when Zuko forgets the rules of the game, not even when he forgets more than once.
His answers to Uncle’s questions are walled off and protective in the beginning, distanced from himself and seeking to please what he thinks the other wants to hear. It’s a tactic that most shallow nobles don’t see through at formal occasions, which is the only time he’s ever really needed to make conversation before. It keeps the box at his heart closed and the people around him away from it.
Still, Uncle seems to see through his defenses because he gives Zuko the brightest smile he’s ever received the first time he asks the man a question back. Uncle keeps waiting patiently at the wall around Zuko’s heart, just like how he waited patiently for over six hundred days at Ba Sing Se. And Zuko’s kind of grateful that his stilted and distanced behavior hasn’t driven his uncle away.
Sometimes Zuko even forgets himself and begins rambling on about a play he’s seen or a book he’s read. It’s something he’s prone to doing because no matter how hard he tries he can never quite contain his emotions. He always apologizes after, but Uncle usually dismisses him with a wide smile and strange proverbs he doesn’t quite understand.
Sure, Uncle’s proclivity for calling him “princess” and “niece” all the time sends waves of a feeling almost deeper than disgust through him, but he’s familiar with that particular emotion. He’s not used to it, per say, but it’s been a part of his life for most of what he can remember. Zuko’s been doing his best to appear as the girl he’s supposed to be for years, and that feeling of disgust has been a constant throughout all of it. It’s normal for him, and he’s kind of just come to expect it. He hates it and it’s always jarring, but he expects it.
Zuko has had to silently endure things much worse than that, and having these small meetings with Uncle is giving him much more than it’s taking away. He never quite lets his guard down when he’s with the older man, but he doesn’t ignore him or avoid his visits either. Honestly, he probably looks forward to them more than his uncle does. He tries not to let it show, but Zuko desperately missed having peaceful moments by the pond like this. Sometimes, when it’s quiet enough and the sunshine hits his face just right, it feels like he has his mother again.
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With what is probably some of the only good luck Zuko has ever had, these two developments happen right when he really needs it because he’s starting to notice that he’s growing. His face is getting softer and his body is getting curvier in all the wrong places and he hates it. They aren’t even things that other people will be able to notice yet but Zuko notices and he knows it will only be a matter of time before he looks distinctly feminine and then there will be no avoiding the fact that he’s supposed to be a girl.
Having two positive things happen to him so close to each other is enough of a distraction that Zuko thinks he just might be able to get through it. He daydreams. He fantasizes that maybe one day he’ll be able to trust Uncle enough to tell him the truth and then Uncle will be able to do something about it. Maybe one day Mai and Ty Lee will be able to call him Zuko outside of whispered moments when they’re alone. He fantasizes that one day the Fire Nation will allow him to be a boy and still let him live.
Years later, Zuko will look back on this hopeful time in his life and laugh.