When they meet on the beach, Zuko has cleaned a place and lined it with rocks to set up boundaries. A nice boxing ring, one might suggest. Indeed, in nothing but crimson pants and his now let-down hair, he looks like a shag-headed teen boy, ready for volley ball or maybe slap-n-tickle with the girlfriend. (Liz, alas, is just plain Too Old for Zuko ( Read more... )

Goldworking is excellent for focused heat-- heating, shaping, setting gemstones, taking heat away to cool and set the metal. It's a hell of a thing. Certainly, Toph, who can bend metal, would do better, maybe. Quicker, definitely ( Read more... )

There are times when Zuko realizes he should have left very much alone. Sitting there, staring at the crown of the Heir Apparent on his desk, he knew that following the clues (and who else would have, could have left them, even from his prison cell?) that had lead him to the truth... yes, he should have ignored them ( Read more... )

When the girls went to Li and Lo's beach house, Zuko lingered without them. Sure, they were 'friends' and all, but -- there were simply things that weren't shared. His sulking was on that list; Azula ridiculed him, Mai feigned (?) indifference, and Ty Lee whined about his aura's stormy gray hue ( Read more... )

He has been coming and going freely now; in the Wardrobe to the bar and back again. It's good to get away to think -- the noisy bar is far better then one might expect -- it has places to escape to, where there are not a hundred attendants waiting to help him dress or dine. (When did doing that on his own become important, anyway?The other trips ( Read more... )

He opened the wardrobe without thinking. He wanted to take his armor off, go to bed, and rest.

But no -- there was a bar beyond the layers of silk, with it's clattering and chattering and the people he missed. (At least, some of them.The doors were shut ( Read more... )

It was a long hallway; not as long as he remembered from years ago -- but certainly, each step seemed like it spanned miles. Miles of tapestry, miles of ornate tile, miles and miles of tense breathing and that stone in Zuko's stomach, cold and hard and weighing him down ( Read more... )

When she says that Iroh might not survive the journey home -- Zuko's decision to stay in Ba Sing Se evaporates like the sea spray. He found himself on the ship, contemplating the clothing that he must don, the knot he will wear again, and the man in the brig's last words. Azula must know that he prowls the ship at night, beneath the light of the ( Read more... )

He was not sure what to say, really. Jin was left behind -- embaressed (and she was such a nice girl it made him feel strangely guilty) and abandoned in favor of listening to Mai laugh through the dark alleys of the Lower Ring of Ba Sing Se ( Read more... )

He stops counting the days after the third; Ba Sing Se is a shadow of itself, but all the same, nothing has really changed. The coup has passed silently. Azula controls the greatest city in the Earth Kingdom. He is part of it all ( Read more... )