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Sal Fisher | This Room Will Scar You | strider

Sal’s jaw set, his blue eyes narrowed as he stared back at Zuko. He didn’t want to do this. He didn’t want Zuko to do this, he didn’t want to be the one defense between this kid and something no one should have to go through.
Because he was fairly sure he knew where Zuko had gotten his scar, now. The longer he put off thinking it, the more sure he was.
This kid behind him was Zuko. This mattered to Zuko so much because it had happened to him. He had just been on the other side last time.
Was that why he was so determined? Sal wished he understood, but he couldn’t hope to, not yet. He didn’t know Zuko well enough to even begin to read what he was thinking. What he was feeling.
“But we both know it won’t matter,” he countered, his eyes flashing. “Don’t we? We both know there’s nothing anyone will be able to do to undo it.”
He was about to say more, to try and get through to him, but the kick caught him off guard and he grunted in a mix of pain and surprise, the kick strong enough to hook his leg cleanly out from under him.
He couldn’t have thought fast enough to do it. But thankfully, he didn’t need to think. Instinct took over as he fell, and he twisted, going backwards instead of to the side and landed on his hands, neatly pushing the smaller Zuko down and covering him with his own body. He’d dropped the knife, but he didn’t have time to think about that now. He wrapped one arm around the kid and held on, gritting his teeth as he prepared for Zuko to try and tear him off.

Hera | Memory room | ®Hawkpath® |

To a human, the memories would have been a blur. Flashes, one after another, the next starting before you could even start to process the first.

Humans were limited that way.

Hera could see and process every flash, every word, every noise in a fraction of a second. And then it was just there, in her brain, forever. Her mind wasn't slippery like human memories were. She liked it that way. She didn't like to forget.

"It's not your fault, you know," she said quietly, after a long moment. "You ca a- an n't stop someone from caring. From wanting to make sure you don't die."

The scene changed. In a flash, the table disappeared, replaced by hospital beds. The scene was blurred and moving both too fast and too slow, casting a veil of unreality over the entire thing - the man from before, choking and gasping for air, drowning. And the people around him. A woman with a dark braid, hands covered in blood as she held them on his chest, her face pale as a sheet as she obeyed the shouted orders from the other in the room - a balding man, moving quickly from place to place, pulling instruments from drawers.

Zuko blinked, eyes widening just a bit as Sal grabbed for the knife, holding it out like he knew how to use it. He could do a lot of damage with it, if he was going against someone who didn’t know what they were doing. It struck Zuko distantly that he wanted to teach Sal how to actually wield it, but now wasn’t the time for that. For now, he had to make sure they both survived.
“Sorry, Fisher,” Zuko replied, aiming a kick right for where Sal’s hand met the hilt. He hoped it wouldn’t break his hand, but he didn’t have another option. He was just trying to knock the weapon free. “I’ve trained for a long time against armed opponents.” His eyes narrowed and he ran forward again, doing his best to drag the younger version of himself away from Sal. The boy was clearly in shock, unable to fight back as hard as he probably wanted to. Unwilling to raise a hand against his father.

Zuko let out a strangled, frustrated cry as Sal managed to pull him backwards. He felt himself seconds away from overbalancing, but he managed to right himself as he tried to pull Sal’s arms away from him. He was still angry, still trying to sort out the whole mess in his head. He was still preparing to burn the boy that lay in front of him.
Zuko had never been the most skilled bender. He trained hard and he practiced long hours. He had spent time he didn’t have relearning the basics after his injury had left him scared and unable to produce any fire at all without flinching away from it. He had fought tooth and nail for the power he commanded. The source of his fire had changed, when he’d been burned. He didn’t know what it had been before, but afterwards… it had been anger. It wasn’t as reliable a source as whatever he had drawn from before. It fizzled out of him when he didn’t mean it to, responding to spikes in his emotion that he otherwise may not have registered.
It wasn’t intentional that his hands were smoldering as he tried to pull Sal away from him. He didn’t even realize they were until the scent of singed fabric hit his nose and he pushed Sal off with all his strength, desperate to break contact with the boy so as to prevent the burn from being worse than it already was.

Zuko glanced at where Sal had landed, eyes wide as he scanned the situation to make sure that Sal was still alive. He let out a soft breath, grateful that the other blinker seemed stunned but otherwise unhurt. They could deal with the burn after this room ended. For now… he took advantage of the way his younger self was exposed, running forward to stand right in front of him. It would be easy, now. He would be able to end this terrible room and the crowd wouldn’t protest, and… and Zuko knew that face. He saw that expression every morning when he looked in the mirror. That fear, barely hidden away by stone cold determination and fiery anger. This Zuko wasn’t going to fight back. He didn’t want to fight, but he knew this wasn’t fair. And he was scared, more scared than he had ever been in his life. There was no Ursa to protect him now. Nothing he could do against the man he trusted to be fair.
Zuko took a step back, the flames in his hands dying down to nothing. The boy in front of him didn’t see Zuko. He saw Ozai. No matter how much Zuko tried to convince himself Ozai was right, no matter how firmly he believed in his father, how loyal he was… he didn’t want to become him.

Zuko breathed out, staring at his younger self for a long moment. What had he most wanted to hear when he’d been in that position? What, if anything, would have helped him? He stared for a moment longer before he fell to his knees, sitting at his younger self’s level. He wanted to say something, wanted to tell himself something that would make it better, that might be capable of easing the pain… but there was nothing that powerful.
“You were right,” he whispered eventually, holding onto the boy’s golden, unbroken gaze. “Those soldiers shouldn’t be sacrificed. You… you understand the weight of war better than they do.” He stood up, turning his back on the boy and moving towards Sal. He didn’t know how they were going to get out, but at the end of the day… he was just as weak as his father said. He wasn’t going to be able to burn the boy, despite having every reason to.
Slowly, Zuko made his way back over to Sal, holding out a tentative hand to help the other boy up. He didn’t have the words to explain. He didn’t even know if he deserved the right to explain.

Zuko hated the tone of Sal’s voice, hated the accusation buried not far from the surface. He knew how it had appeared. He didn’t know how much Sal had been able to pick up on. Zuko had looked different then, between the hair and the scar and the expression that never seemed to stray very far from ‘angry.’ Zuko wouldn’t have been surprised if Sal had thought he was just aiming to hurt some random kid who he thought deserved punishment. It didn’t paint a very pretty picture, but that just meant that Sal could be added onto the very long list of people who didn’t like Zuko. He tried to tell himself that it didn’t matter, but that only worked so many times. Finding the Avatar was his main goal, it didn’t matter if he made any friends along the way. The thing was… he hadn’t had a friendly conversation with anyone his age outside the House since Lu Ten had died. He didn’t want to ruin the few chances he had to be seen as someone worth knowing by people who were a similar age as he was.
“We’re getting out of here,” Zuko said after a moment, his voice hard to hide the way it wanted to shake. A door had appeared just on the other side of the younger Zuko. “I think… I think I satisfied the room when I burned you. Sorry about that… by the way.”

Zuko glanced at the door, then looked at Sal. He noticed his hesitation, saw the way he glanced back at the younger version of him. He didn’t trust him. Which was… fine. They weren’t friends. They were barely more than strangers, and Zuko had probably seemed all too ready to burn a child to get them out of there. He felt his fingers move up to his own burn, eyes closing for just a moment as he sat with the reality that he had been ready to do it. That he could have permanently scarred himself. He could have continued the cycle, though there was no reason to break it. He felt like he was caught in between, being pulled way too many directions.
“Yeah,” he said after a moment, letting out a soft breath and forcing himself to look away from the boy. He was standing now, eyes wide as he watched Zuko and Sal leave. What would happen to him now? Would he be allowed to stay in the Fire Nation? Would he become the prince he had wanted to be? Something uncomfortable shifted in Zuko’s stomach. He had learned a lot in his time away from the Fire Nation. He still wanted to go home, but there were things he had come to realize about the outside world that it didn’t seem like the rest of the Fire Nation knew. Or… if they knew… they were ignoring it. Would the version of himself watching them leave ever know what Zuko knew?

Zuko sighed as he noticed the living room, sinking down almost immediately on the couch. He could feel his hands still shaking, though he didn’t quite know why. All he knew was that his nightmares were going to be worse the moment he closed his eyes. Would he start having the dream from his father’s perspective, too? He would never forget the expression on his own face, the fear in his own eyes… he forced himself to breathe, trying to get the shaking of his hands to calm down. He didn’t want Sal to notice. If Sal was going to question him, he might as well seem consistent about his opinion, right?
He had told the other boy he would tell him when they were out, hadn’t he? It felt… personal. Uncomfortably so. He didn’t want to talk about what had happened. He didn’t want to explain why he felt so conflicted.
Finally, Zuko forced himself to look back up at Sal.
“You… probably already figured it out,” he began quietly, pulling his arms in to his chest, “but the boy out there was me.”

“Yeah,” Zuko replied quietly, hating how small his voice sounded. He didn’t’ like thinking about it. He didn’t like remembering the sounds of his own screams, the way they sometimes woke him up in the middle of the night. It was like he couldn’t get rid of that day. And yet he’d been ready to inflict that on another version of himself. Another boy who, regardless of whether or not he deserved it, was going to carry the scars from it (and not just the physical ones) for the rest of his life. Zuko’s stomach turned at the thought. He didn’t want to force that on anyone, even himself.
“I was supposed to fight my father. I… refused. I was cowardly and disrespectful.” His voice was dull as he spoke, clearly repeating the things he had been told for years. Things he had forced himself to believe, because if that was what his father said, how could he be wrong? Ozai’s one job was to be right about how to rule. It was to be right about what it meant to be part of the Fire Nation.

Zuko blinked, frowning just a little bit. He hadn’t thought Sal was close enough to hear that, but he was. Which meant that he needed to decide if he really believed what he said. It was… complicated. He couldn’t explain the whole situation to Sal unless the other boy knew… well, a lot of context. Context he wasn’t sure he had the energy to explain.
“He was right,” Zuko conceded after a moment, arms crossing uncomfortably. “He… I… spoke out against a general who suggested sacrificing a battalion of new recruits. Using them as bait.” The familiar anger stoked inside of him, but he didn’t react to it outwardly. He was used to it, by now. “Those recruits shouldn’t have been used like that. But… he… I… shouldn’t have said anything. It doesn’t matter that I was right. I was told not to speak, but I did. I disrespected the general, and I disrespected my father.” He looked away, exposing only the scarred side of his face to the light. “I should have fought. Both of those things can be true at the same time.”

Zuko was on the path to realizing that what he had gone through was wrong. It was going to take him much longer to fully come to terms with it, and it would require some time on his own, but… he would get there, eventually. He didn’t know that yet, of course. He had spent the last two years trying to convince himself that what had happened was right. That he was going to prove to his father that he had changed, that he was capable of doing something right. His father had banished him to teach him a lesson. As soon as Zuko learned that lesson, he’d be able to come home. He had spent the past two years vehemently disagreeing with anyone who dared to say that his father didn’t intend for him to return home. It wasn’t a lost cause. It wasn’t a wild goose chase. He was going to find the Avatar, and he was going to reclaim his honor.
“I don’t remember,” Zuko admitted, shrugging a little bit. “I was… pretty out of it for some time afterwards. But it healed as well as it could have, and I didn’t lose any vision, so I assume so.” He breathed out, eying Sal for a few moments as he tried to decide how much to say. He didn’t know the first thing about Sal, but here he was, telling him his whole story. He didn’t do that even with people he had known for much longer. But... Sal had risked everything to protect the younger version of him. He at least deserved to know if that was the right choice, right?
“I woke up on a boat,” he added, eyes downcast. “My uncle told me I’d been banished. It was about two weeks after I’d been burned. There was at least a week that I was being cared for by Fire Nation medics before they set sail.”

It was hard to believe sometimes that there were people who weren’t aware of everything that had happened in Zuko’s life. People who didn’t see him as the Banished Prince and nothing more. People who saw him as a person first before they learned who he was. What he was trying to do. That was something he was grateful to the House for. He wanted to be more than just the banished prince. He wanted to figure out who he was beyond that. Who he might be when he got back home.
“Not… permanently banished. I just have to find the Avatar and bring him back to my father, then I’ll be allowed to return home. Nobody’s seen him in over a hundred years, but… nobody’s looked as hard as I’m looking. I’m going to find him, and then I’m going to go back home. There are only so many places a hundred year old man can go, right?” He shook his head, not really caring if Sal answered or not. Zuko believed he would find him, and in the long run it didn’t matter what anyone else thought. It just mattered what Zuko ended up finding.
“My Uncle went with me,” he confirmed, letting his gaze drop to the floor again. “I… don’t know if he was compelled to by my father or if he came of his own volition, but… I’m glad he’s there.”