The seasons turned, marking times deepened by Zuko's secrets.
Azula soon returned from the Royal Fire Academy for Girls, sharper and crueler than when she left.
In the original timeline, her return would have signaled the beginning of Zuko's torment. But Zuko, comfortably settled as the young prince, found her antics boring. While she terrorized the turtle-ducks, he was in the war room.
His education had shifted. No longer content with standard tutors, he sat at the feet of the most dangerous men in the nation. But his favorite hours were spent with his uncle, General Iroh.
Iroh had been on leave from the front lines of trying to conquer Ba Sing Se, having just returned. He adored Zuko and still saw a tenderness in the boy that Zuko was careful to simulate.
"Tea's not just hot leaf juice, nephew," Iroh said one afternoon, pouring a steaming cup of jasmine. "It is important that you wait for the water to accept the flavor."
Zuko took the cup, blowing the steam away. "Like lightning..."
Iroh paused as the teapot hovered in mid-air. "Lightning?"
"Lightning is the cold fire," Zuko said, parroting a lesson Iroh hadn't taught him yet in this timeline. He played it off as a child's intuition. "It requires a clear mind and a lack of emotion."
Iroh couldn't quite relate the ideology to tea until Zuko finished, "The water is like yin, and the tea leaf is like yang. Like learning lightning, one must separate them and be at peace."
"Haha!" Iroh laughed. "You are wise beyond your years, Zuko."
Zuko then sipped the tea. It was excellent. Far better than the bitter sludge the palace chefs brewed.
He liked Iroh and the man's philosophy. Not because he helped Zuko throughout his perilous journeys, but because he never gave up on the boy. Even after Zuko betrayed him once.
Of course, Iroh was not the only one to notice Zuko's mature mindset. Azulon himself had begun taking a great liking to his grandson. The old man was a withered hawk, sharp and unforgiving, but he allowed Zuko to do something that not even Azula could: sit in on council meetings.
And unlike the old Zuko, this Zuko remained silent throughout.
"Your son listens," Azulon told Ozai one evening. "He does not speak to hear his own voice, and he speaks only when he has the answer."
Ozai, usually dismissive, began to look at Zuko with a strange expression. The boy was becoming useful.
Summer arrived, bringing a humid, stifling heat to the capital. To escape it, the royal family retreated to Ember Island.
It was a paradise of ash-gray sand and red sunsets. For Azula, it was a stage to show off her sandcastles and destroy everyone else's. For Zuko, it was the perfect cover.
While the family slept, Zuko slipped out of the beach house until he found a cave secluded in the cliffs, far from the prying eyes of others.
Inside, he stood in the center of the cavern. Now was the perfect moment for him to attempt combustionbending.
He hadn't before due to his mother ordering the guards to keep a strict eye on him. No thanks to his tendency of running off when no one was looking. Only in his bedchambers was he at least able to spend those months meditating on what he learned from Gyu-Seng.
The concept was simple: channel chi to the forehead, compress it until it sings, and release it as a beam.
As such, Zuko closed his eyes. He then visualized the energy rising from his stomach, bypassing the heart—the seat of fire—and moving straight to the third eye chakra.
He pushed and strained, yet nothing happened. Just a headache that throbbed behind his eyes.
"It's that stupid tattoo," he muttered in frustration.
Without it, it was too hard for him to find the focal point on his forehead. The chi simply kept dispersing once it got to that area.
Zuko paced the cave floor, trying to think. He didn't have the time to find a tattoo artist who knew the occult designs of the combustion benders. Neither was he going to be able to visit Gyu-Seng again for some years.
No, he needed a workaround. After a moment, he stopped pacing.
'Why the forehead?' he thought.
The forehead was indeed where the 'mind's eye' was located. But chi flowed everywhere. For instance, he had already learned chi-blocking, having been forced to learn the meridian lines of the body.
And what he knew from that was that the pathways in the arms were the most developed in a firebender.
So he looked at his right hand. If he couldn't shoot from his head, he could try to shoot it from his hand.
He therefore took a deep breath before grounding himself. Then he drew the energy from the raw electricity of his nervous system. It quickly funneled down to his shoulder, then through his elbow and into the wrist.
When he put his palm out, the air around his hand began to warp. A high-pitched whine, like a tea kettle about to scream, filled the cave. Then he released the lock.
BOOM!
The world turned white as he was thrown backward before slamming hard against the limestone wall. His ears then rang with a deafening tinnitus.
He gasped, clutching his right hand to his chest. It felt like he had stuck his hand in a blender. When he looked down, his fingers were smoking. The skin was red, raw, and blistering. Blood trickled from a split in his cuticle.
"Ah!" he gritted his teeth.
Genuine tears ran down his cheeks. The physiological shock pricked his eyes. Pain. Real, searing pain.
For a moment, the overlay of Zuko vanished. The palace, the bending, the politics—it all fell away. He had almost forgotten who he was: Alex, a rich kid from a high-rise who had never so much as broken a bone. Yet here he was lying in a dirty cave, smelling his own burnt flesh.
"It… hurts," he wheezed.
But as the shock faded, a dark, manic grin split his face.
That's right. He was indeed Alex, Alexander, the one and only person in this world that knew virtually everything that was supposed to happen.
So he ignored the throbbing in his hand. The fact that an explosion had happened told him he had simply used too much power and hadn't controlled the chi correctly. The mechanic was also off.
But say he changed the concept? For instance, something he recalled back on earth that didn't quite exist here was a gun.
Using his left hand, he extended his index and middle fingers, curling the others into his palm. Then he extended his thumb.
There was a bit of hesitation as he thought. If he could limit the exit point to the tips of two fingers, he could force the chi into a narrow, pressurized channel. That would prevent it from exploding like it had before.
Though, this was just a theory.
His legs began to shake; he didn't want to get injured again.
Without a moment's notice, he channeled his chi and fired.
Bang!
On the cave wall opposite to him, there was a crater the size of a dinner plate. It was smoking and black, cracked deep into the stone.
He had done it!