i have no title and i must post

At the intersection of crack and tragedy, I have this fic idea about Zuko getting time looped during the day of his Agni Kai.

The first few loops are painful and traumatic. (Well, they're all painful and traumatic, but after the first fifty times... even getting half your face burned off by your own father gets old.)

After a while, he manages to stay awake long enough to hear Iroh crying at his bedside, begging for Zuko to stay. Pleading with the spirits, please, not him too.

(And then it takes more time for him to realize who visits him after Iroh falls asleep. She doesn't say anything.)

Zuko makes a Plan.

In the mornings, he tracks down Iroh or any experienced firebender, and he learns. So what if he isn't good? He'll make up for it the same way he always does: with hard work. He has the time.

(One of these days, Uncle won't have to spend the evening crying to the spirits.)

He gets better. Far better than he has any right to be. Iroh is thrilled on the days when he manages to catch him and not one of the other masters. Every time, the other masters barely tolerate him until he shows them. Iroh is always patient and kind.

Middays are reserved for Azula. A sister is a sister, and maybe... maybe Azula just needed somebody after Mom left.

(Zuko got that wrong, too. He's pretty sure he died the first time, and this is the spirits punishing him for being a bad son, a bad brother, a bad prince. He'll get it right, eventually.)

And at sunset, he still tries to plead with his father. Ozai will never hear him, but he has to try.

(A few hundred burns to the face can make you hate a man.)

But no matter how hard he tries, he can't beat Ozai. His skills improve, but his body doesn't - it will always be thirteen, with undeveloped chi paths he can barely break through to, and Ozai is a man in his prime.

Until one day he fights so well that Ozai halts the battle. He has the old general (after all this time, Zuko has completely forgotten the general) brought up, and orders Zuko to give him a mark of shame. To prove himself a good son and a good prince.

He stands above the general and looks at his tears and his shaking hands and his panicked eyes and he understands.

This time, Zuko earns his scar with pride.

(And when Iroh cries at his bedside, he reaches out and squeezes his Uncle's hand: I'm here, I'm not leaving.)

(And later, when Azula comes in with her soft steps and doesn't say anything, Zuko cracks open his good eye and gives her a smile.)

(And when he and Iroh set out the next morning, it is with purpose.)

(They leave behind a princess who knows that her father is not invincible.)

I haven't got the spoons for writing anything long, so I'm just throwing my ideas out here in little snippets. This little snippet turned out a bit long, but...

This is super dark. I've tagged all of the dark stuff, and if I've missed a tw, please tell me. I don't think I did. There are no graphic descriptions.

ATLA AU: Aang defeats Ozai. Aang loses everyone.

Aang has just defeated Ozai. He looks out to the horizon, and sees a number of airships crashing down. He mourns the possible loss of life (even though he can see many crews huddling on the tops of the airships, surely there were some who didn't make it) but ultimately, he's at peace with it.

He sees one particular airship go down rough. Well, he thinks. Time to go rescue people.

He secures Ozai to the rock and even though the man is a monster, he promises to come back and that the former Fire Lord will be treated humanely.

There are bodies in the wreck, and he offers some words to Agni on their behalf, because that's who he is, and he remembers that Fire folk need to be guided on their way to the Sun. He remembers the words from a hundred years ago like yesterday, because for him, it was. Well, yesterday and a year.

But when he finds three bodies, huddled close together with a burst steam pipe near them and the room slowly filling with water, Aang finds that he doesn't have any words at all.

Okay, so.

Imagine if at the end of the series, Zuko goes to Ozai's cell, blah blah blah, "you should count yourself lucky that the Avatar spared your life", "why are you really here?" and then...

"Because you failed, Father. I control the Fire Nation. I control the Avatar. And that means I control the world."

And then we cut to the scene in the Jasmine Dragon. Zuko is serving tea. Everybody's having fun. But then the view zooms to Zuko, who's watching them with a very peculiar expression. Nobody's paying attention to him. There's a musical sting... and the moment just ends. Zuko goes over to complain about Sokka's artistic skills along with everybody else. Roll credits.

I think this could be, like, a neat AU. I think we as a fandom don't do enough with Evil Zuko when it comes to AUs and crackfics.

Further Excerpts From The Fire Nation Royal Palace Servants' (Unofficial) Handbook

Or: More Revisions To Normal Protocol After The Ascension Of Agni's Exalted Flame, The Dragon Of The Sun, et cetera, Fire Lord Zuko

Part 1:

7. If His Majesty offers you advice regarding martial arts, camouflage, theatre, or any other subject which he is commonly known to be well-versed in, accept it gratefully. If His Majesty offers you advice on emotional matters, listen politely and then disregard it.

7.1. If His Majesty uses the phrase "silver sandwich", you are entitled to a longer lunch break. So you can take a longer bite out of your silver sandwich.

7.1.1. Please do not vandalize the handbook, even if you think it's funny.

7.1.2. Especially if you think it's funny, Chikao.

7.2. If you share something tragic with His Majesty, and he replies "that's rough, buddy", it means he empathizes with your situation.

7.2.1 Alright, maybe he did need to learn that it's not a great way to respond to tragedy. But "rough like the boulders that crushed my father?" was a bit much.

So, uh, Netflix Avatar, huh? Yeah. I guess I'll make a really long post about it because ATLA brainrot has is a cornerstone of my personality at this point.

So.

It's okay. B, maybe a C+.

That's it.

Now for the spoilers:

ATLA Headcanon (this is very much spoilers and I'm pretty sure this isn't a super original thought):

Ozai was always thought of as kind of a useless coward in the Fire Nation, before he grabbed power. He was the spare prince next to the Dragon of the West, and this motivates him in everything that he does.

It makes a lot of sense and provides some depth of character to him - which, let me be clear, I don't think he needs: within the story, he works perfectly fine as just a cruel, narcissistic monster. Any detour into his motivations would have distracted from the overall story.

But think about it. Why does he hate Zuko so much? Because Zuko reminds him of his own (perceived) failures, as the disappointing son, and as a narcissist, he can not bear thinking about anything that makes him less than perfect. He wants to get rid of Zuko because he sees himself in Zuko, and this is only compounded by Zuko and Azula's dynamic resembling the dynamic between him and Iroh. Of course, in this case, it's the younger sibling that is the favoured, more capable child. Ozai wants to see himself in Azula, but actually sees himself in Zuko.

Now, I know that the more overt explanation is that he cares about his legacy, and wants Azula to succeed him because she's the stronger heir, but I don't think that matters to Ozai that much. It certainly matters a little bit, because the greater glory of his heir reflects well on him, and obviously he wants that. But I don't think Ozai is actually all that concerned with what happens after he dies. To that, Zhao, whom Ozai promotes and clearly favours to some degree, expresses open disdain at Iroh's spirituality - it's reasonable to think that this sort of attitude thrives under Ozai, or it might just be the Fire Nation in general.

I think Ozai operates under a belief that the world will end with him, and doesn't believe in an afterlife. I don't necessarily mean that he is actually cognisant of this belief - I mean that he is only concerned with himself, so to him, once he stops existing, everything of value will have left the world. If he'd still been in power once he was at the age where death becomes a real concern instead of an abstract possibility, he probably would have sought some form of immortality.

He is very quick to cast Azula aside with a meaningless title, after all. He doesn't value Azula, he just hates the reminder that is Zuko. Zuko also resembles him physically - and to that point, his method of punishing Zuko before getting rid of him is to disfigure him. To further distance himself from Zuko.

In Zuko Alone, Azula refers to Iroh as "his royal tea-loving kookiness" - and we have to remember that Azula probably parrots Ozai's words. Why is this significant? Because at the time, Iroh has just broken through the Outer Wall of Ba Sing Se, a tremendous military accomplishment. He's living up to the Fire Nation's greatest values of military power and glory in battle. And still Ozai disparages him to Azula.

Because Ozai is a wounded narcissist who's always been jealous of his brother. I'm intentionally paraphrasing Zuko's words from The Avatar State here, because it's very likely that those words are also originally Ozai's. An attempt to drive a wedge between his successful older brother and his son.

Ozai's plan to literally burn down the Earth Kingdom is, aside from being monstrous, a terrible strategic decision. What, does the think that the ashes are going to pay him taxes? What's the end goal? At that point, the Fire Nation has effectively won the war. Sure, they are likely still facing resistance, and the Earth Kingdom might be able to rally in the future and challenge them for hegemony. But, considering other conquering military states in our history, a large chunk of their economy probably relies on war. On levying taxes on subjugated territories in order to prop up the economy of the homeland. So, he's intentionally handicapping his own nation by literally burning down a massive source of income.

In the context of erasing his own profound narcissistic injury, however, that makes perfect sense. Who's going to remember Iroh's glorious victories in the Earth Kingdom when there is no Earth Kingdom?

So, there you have it. Ozai is the disappointing child in the shadow of his heroic older brother, the cowardly prince who never went to war in a nation that idolizes war and war heroics above all else, and he spends the rest of his life covering that wound up with blood and fire.

And I do think it's a very beautiful sort of karma that he ends up without his firebending after a short reign and without any meaningful triumphs or accomplishments to his name. Because fuck that guy.