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“You’re too dramatic. You look at me, in public, like I hung the moon.”
And Ozai had thrown out a withering glare and replied in a smooth deadpan. “The moon’s been in the sky for millennia.”
“Ah …” Zhao’s eyebrows, more expressive than the whole of Ozai’s face some days, sprung up in triumph. “But the moon’s a Water Tribe spirit, isn’t it?”
“So what if it is?”
“For you, to make you happy … I’d find a rope and wring its pretty little neck.”
*
“Zhao,“ Ozai gasped that night with what could have been mistaken for affection.
He always addressed him as “Zhao.” Endearments obviously never fit them. And only afterwards did Zhao notice that for all their intimacy, Ozai never called him by his first name.
Sparks flew that night. They escaped Ozai’s mouth and singed Zhao’s sheets as if a mere mortal body couldn’t contain such power within it. Zhao never cared about the supernatural until then, when he held Ozai’s trembling, electric frame in his hands and wondered if there was truth to the old legend, saying that the royal family came from the sun spirit itself.
*
“I love you,” said Zhao.
After a moment’s consideration Ozai answered. “That’s unfortunate.”
*
One day, Ozai was betrothed.
Zhao found out through second-hand accounts. By all accounts, she was a pretty girl. She was quiet and an actress. She had a chance at playing the role and holding her tongue with an ease Zhao had never known.
“She’s descended from Avatar Roku,” Ozai told him that night. “So there’s greatness in her blood. The Sages say my firstborn will bring extraordinary honor to our country if I marry her.”
“What if you don’t?” Zhao said, because he hadn’t learned his lines. “If it’s not a strict condition, if your firstborn’s not doomed to be a dunce otherwise, why not take your chances? She can always bear the kid without marrying you …”
While Zhao blustered through his monologue, Ozai at first simply looked at him. At some point his gaze shifted so he seemed to be looking through him, like Zhao had never existed at all.
Zhao brought his monologue to a close. It was a less than graceful exit.
*
Zhao cut his hair that night. Though it once fell down his back, almost matching Ozai’s for length if not for shine, he took a knife to it and hacked off as much as he could without begging for scandal. Nonetheless he got questions.
No, he hadn’t lost his honor. No, he hadn’t lost his mind either. Why would anyone think that?
His family threw almost as bad a fit when he joined the military. They shrieked that he was abandoning a promising career at court, only enhanced by the younger prince’s inexplicable preference for his chatter. Calmly Zhao packed his bags and ignored the din, leaving the night before the royal wedding. Caldera held nothing for him anymore.
*
Zhao caught sight of the two newlyweds together, during one of his trips back to the capital. Pleasantly, Ozai smiled at his wife and the world. It was an anodyne ill-fitting look, too common for his regal features.
Perhaps Ozai’s real smiles, all wit laced with wickedness, were still only Zhao’s.
So Zhao stole from a library and gave ashes in payment, burning away all the unseemly truths in the Fire Nation section. It was a show of fealty to a country but also to a man, a man whose heart might yet belong to Zhao.
He ran from the smoke with a book, clutching visions of a magnificent red moon. There could be greatness in his blood too.
*
One day, Ozai had a child.
Third-hand accounts called it a frail thin thing, without the firebender’s spark in its eye. There were rumors of illegitimacy and Ozai would confirm those if they were true. Bastards must be pruned from the line of succession. Ozai would disown the boy if he could and divorce his wife in the process.
But the announcement never came.
The news kept coming though, about the boy’s academic struggles and lack of propriety and general lack of sense. His fire was late and so weak that it barely deserved the name. By all accounts Ozai’s second-born far outshone his first. Zhao clutched his book and climbed the navy’s ranks, quivering from quiet, devastating rage.
*
One day, Ozai had a crown.
By all accounts it was a masterpiece of poison and forgery in the night, and Zhao’s chest swelled with pride. It was tainted by dangerous hope once he learned that Ozai’s darling wife had likewise disappeared. Whether she’d fled or been exiled or just gotten herself knocked off, Zhao didn’t know. He didn’t care either. There were risks to dancing with royalty, more so when those royals were practically demigods. The weak got burned.
There was a space at Ozai’s side now. So Zhao waited for a signal, some subtle cue.
*
Zhao was at court when the Agni Kai was announced. Old connections, remembering his closeness to a prince who was now Fire Lord, arranged a prime seat for him, just behind Prince Iroh. There was an open seat nearby for Ozai but he never took it.
Then Zhao realized why.
Ozai strode across the arena. Disobeying direct orders, the brainless child snivelled and cowered at his feet, proving the Sages’ prediction wrong beyond any doubt and graciously sealing his own fate. Though Ozai kept his face calm while he lifted his hand, Zhao wore the smirk for him.
The screaming commenced. At first Zhao assumed Ozai would let the boy go after a few seconds’ pain, but he didn’t. He simply kept the flame going, for so long that to any other observer it’d seem excessive.
Zhao knew better.
The arena fell silent and truly, the scene stole even Zhao’s breath away. So Ozai resented the brat just as he did. He resented this walking disappointment who stole him from Zhao in the first place. He resented him and for his inadequacy he poured scorching fire into his face, just as Zhao badly wanted to do.
So Zhao stared down at the arena, filled by the stench of smoking flesh, and saw only a declaration of love.
*
After Ozai’s coronation, Zhao’s career took off like a projectile from a catapult. Up, up he went, amassing more ships than a captain should strictly have had and obtaining an entire harbor for his own use. It was all plausibly justified, requested through official channels, with painstakingly careful letters to higher-ups that combined the actual facts with pitch-perfect flattery.
Really Zhao had always known how to make his case. It’s how he made a prince notice him in the first place, out of the hundreds of other pretty people at court. Ozai had had his choice and he’d let plenty of others flit in and out of bed without caring.
Zhao was the first to stay.
Even if he wasn’t physically staying on Caldera at the moment. He couldn’t be, since Ozai had given no indication that he was meant to leave his post in the south. There were a hundred plausible justifications for that. Zhao was an effective captain, ruthless and perceptive with a rather unique creative streak. Perhaps Ozai thought him too useful to remove from the battlefield ...
Or perhaps Zhao instead needed to prove himself further. Ozai likely couldn’t risk showing favor to a new partner, politically speaking, until Zhao made an even greater name for himself. And there was the possibility, however strange it might sound, that Ozai thought himself forgotten. It had been over a decade, after all. He might have doubted whether Zhao’s loyalty could last so long.
(It lasted. Zhao meant to carry his torch for the rest of his life.)
Rumors swirled around Zhao’s rise, that surely he must be sleeping with someone high in the hierarchy to make such dramatic progress. He never contradicted the stories. In public he merely laughed. In the safety of his mind he held them close.
*
Fire Nation Navy ships were booby-trapped as a matter of course. After so many years on ships of varying designs, any sailor would set off a few triggers. Zhao, prone to an occasionally dangerous curiosity, set off more than a few. He had trapped himself in several corners and dropped himself down a few trapdoors and on one memorable occasion set off a bomb in his own face.
He was oddly reminded of those mishaps, when he saw the prince again. From the right angle Zuko’s face was almost Ozai’s, the same cheekbones and jawline and supernaturally gold eyes. From all other angles his face was still Ozai’s, but in rather a different way. His determination was clear from every scowl. It would have been admirable if not for the traces of defeat buried below it.
“You can't compete with me,” Zhao snapped, roused to strangely potent anger by the boy’s mere presence. “I have hundreds of warships under my command and you? You're just a banished prince. No home. No allies. Your own father doesn't even want you.”
The poison flooded his mouth and Zuko flinched at that last sentence, clearly struck to the core. Then Zuko launched his impassioned, pitiful counterargument. Zhao heard it out, entirely unmoved.
“If your father really wanted you home, he would have let you return by now.”
With that one sentence he crushed all of the boy’s juvenile delusions. They were pathetic. Embarrassing to even witness. Zhao was glad to be above such displays of desperation himself.
*
Zhao would never admit it but the Agni Kai took his breath away, if only for a second. Zuko towered over him in a perfect fighting stance, prepared to set Zhao’s face on fire this time.
“Do it,” Zhao demanded, if only for a second.
(If only for a second, he thought the Sages might’ve been right all along. Perhaps he needed to accept defeat, at the hands of a true Fire Nation champion.)
Then the boy faltered, betraying custom, sacrificing what scraps were left of his honor. He snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. He let Zhao live. He proved himself weak and feeble and Zhao lunged to finish the job Ozai had started …
Prince Iroh got in his way, of course; Ozai had complained assiduously of his brother’s talent for doing exactly that. Zhao let them both leave his harbor alive. Then he promptly retired to his quarters to address a missive directly to Ozai, relaying his son’s shameful performance in yet another duel and the return of the Avatar. The hawk flew off. With an adolescent’s eagerness Zhao awaited his reply.
*
Ozai’s reply came weeks later in the form of a notice that Zhao was now an admiral, one of the youngest in history. The letter was written not by Ozai but one of the palace’s many secretaries. It followed the standard template for announcing promotions.
Though initially jarring, the stilted, impersonal language grew on Zhao after the tenth reread or so. Of course a Fire Lord would have to resort to indirection; he was under scrutiny all the time from the court surrounding him. No matter. Zhao heard the real feeling below.
*
For his Fire Lord, Zhao broke into the Northern Water Tribe with a vision of fire and an empty sack. He remembered an offer once made in jest, and for his Fire Lord he reached into a sacred pool. While the eclipse’s reflection reddened the waters like blood, he held tight to the fish, struggling and quivering in his grasp.
(He’d felt power like this once before, when Ozai trembled so similarly under his hands.)
“The Fire Nation will for generations tell stories about the great Zhao, who darkened the moon,” he declared. He flew high on his own power, on the proof of greatness in his own blood, on the knowledge he was about to win Ozai’s attentions forevermore. “They will call me Zhao the Conqueror, Zhao the Moonslayer, Zhao the Invincible ...”
*
Zhao lost. As the moon relit itself in the sky, he wondered if Ozai always knew he would. And though Zhao could have fought the ocean’ grasp, struggling and writhing like flopping fish in a net, he for once chose the graceful exit.
The last thing he saw in this world was Zuko, with a face that would never be like Ozai’s. With surprise Zhao watched Zuko reach for him in a way Ozai never did.
*
Generations afterwards, the Fire Nation tells stories of a shadow of a man who wanders the Spirit World, having long since failed to die. Some unnatural drive keeps him running in circles, begging for news of the Avatar. Some claim he’ll talk further, to anyone who pays him any notice. He’s chasing the Avatar, he says, because the Fire Lord wishes it. He wants nothing more but to make the Fire Lord happy.
By all accounts, he’ll never stop.