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Chapter Text

There are few things more amazing to a child then to walk into a toy store for the first time. Prince Zuko and Princess Azula were no exception. They had grown up in a palace, eaten their first meals out of silver spoons, and wore silk everyday. But all those extravagences paled in comparison to that small shop and the thousands of toys on display.

“Now remember to behave yourselves,” their mother whispered to them. “This is Mr. Aang’s store and you’re his guests here.”

Mr. Aang, Zuko thought, must be a hundred years old. He walked hunched over on a cane, his face was wrinkled, and his head was bald, in contrast to the long white beard hanging off his face.

“Welcome to my humble shop Princess Ursa,” he greeted, giving a slight bow. “These are your children I presume?”

“Yes. This is Prince Zuko and Princess Azula,” their mother smiled. “They’re here to buy some toys from you.”

A smile split the old man’s face. “Of course, of course. Take a look around and let’s see if something catches your fancy.

The shop was amazing. Zuko’s eyes darted from wooden puppets on sticks to bags of glass marbles and carved knucklebones. There were rows of dolls dressed in different kinds of clothes, and rubber balls in all kinds of colours. Then something caught his eye. It was a clay whistle shaped like a turtle, nestled at the end of a row of wooden turtleducks. He picked it up and turned it over. It had been fixed. A small crack on the underside of the turtle had been carefully glued back together.

”I don’t want a stupid doll!” Azula’s voice sounded from the other side of the store.

There was a small drum on the shelf below. Zuko picked it up and spun it around in his hands. The beads on the end of the strings beat out a crisp clear rythem.

”Ahhhhh Pai Sho,” Mr. Aang said from the other side of the store. ”The game of strategists and kings. Do you know how to play Princess Azula?”

A shelf of wooden hogmonkies caught his eye and he wandered over to take a look. He scanned the row until his eye fell on a particular one. It wasn’t as big or as brightly coloured as the others, but it was different. He liked that.

”Perhaps a different kind of doll would be more to your taste. This is Lady Jiang Wu, the first woman to become Firelord.”

There was a section filled entirely with brightly coloured kites and a shelf full of flutes, drums, and various bells. A cloth platypusbear that was bigger than him sat in a corner. There was a table covered with brightly colored tops, and a wall filled with wooden masks. There were streaming ribbons, hula hoops, puzzle blocks, and throwing discs. He came upon a section filled with small fans with a pullable rope and picked one off the shelf.

The pull rope had been replaced he noted as he gave it a tug and watched the fan spin.

“And what about you young prince?” Mr. Aang asked as he came towards him. “Has anything caught your eye?”

“These ones.” Zuko said, holding out the whistle, drum, hogmonkey, and fan for the old man to see.

“Oh…” There was a strange look in the old man’s eyes as he took in the toys. “I forgot I still had those on display… You certainly made an interesting choice. Those are some very old toys you found there.”

“I like them,” Zuko said. “They’re neat.”

“Many children just like you have enjoyed those toys over the years.” Mr. Aang nodded. “You take good care of them young prince and maybe one day your own children will enjoy them too.”

—

Aang stood at the door and watched Princess Ursa herd her two children into the waiting palanquin. Princess Azula was crowing over her wooden phoenix with its brightly coloured silk tail plumes, while Prince Zuko clutched his toys close to his chest. He stood watching as the guard formed up and the royal procession headed back to the palace.

He turned back into his shop, shut the door behind him, and locked it. He laid his cane against the counter and with light airy steps he crossed the store. His eyes found the empty spots on his shelves. The spots which had once housed a wooden phoenix with silk tail plumes and the four avatar relics.

The avatar relics he had recovered from the remains of the Southern Air Temple nearly eighty years ago. The same toys that countless Avatars had played with when they were children. The same toys Aang had once played with when a dear friend of his had shared them with him.

The same toys that Prince Zuko had taken off his shelves. Aang had put them there to hide them. What better way to hide toys than in a store with shelves full of them. He had hidden them so well he himself had forgotten about them. But Prince Zuko had found them at once. Out of all the thousands of toys on display, Prince Zuko had picked those four. Those four and no others.

“From air to water to earth to fire,” he whispered to himself. “The Avatar has been reborn.”

Chapter Text

They have to find the Avatar. Firelord Azulon had been very clear on that.

The Avatar was dangerous. The stories told of Sozin’s attack on the Air Nation made that perfectly clear. But when the Avatar had failed to appear among the water tribes, it had been assumed that the Avatar cycle had been broken and that the Avatar Spirit had died with the young air avatar.

Avatar Yang had proved them wrong. Under the guise of the Green Spirit she had been a constant thorn in the Fire Nation’s side and caused Iroh no shortage of headaches as he tried to prove himself as a General in the Earth Kingdom. Her capture and execution at his brother’s hands had eliminated one problem but did not break the cycle. The Avatar would be reborn, and they had to find them before they once again became a threat.

The problem, Iroh thinks, is that it is not entirely clear on how they are supposed to find the Avatar. By logical deduction the Avatar should be reborn among the Fire Nation. (Assuming of course the cycle didn’t skip fire like it had apparently skipped water.) But even assuming that the Avatar had been reborn in the year after the Green Spirit’s execution that still left hundreds of thousands of new babies and no way to tell which among them had the Avatar Spirit.

The fire sages had burned a mountain of oracle bones, trying to divine the identity of the new fire avatar based on the way the bone cracked and burned. But the omens proved contradictory, inconclusive, and in one case even mocking. Nothing that brought them any closer to figuring out who the Avatar was. When pressed for explanations, one sage had cautiously suggested that perhaps malicious spirits were trying to prevent the Firelord from discovering the Avatar. (Being very careful not to imply that the Firelord’s actions in any way may have angered the great spirits who guarded the Avatar cycle.)

In any case, the usual methods weren’t working. So Iroh had been tasked with finding another way of determining the Avatar. The problem Iroh was finding, as he went through the scrolls and codices in the royal library, was that there was next to no information on the Avatar at all. Firelord Sozin had been very zealous in making sure there was no information that could contradict his version of events, and his censors had gone through the library destroying nearly everything about the Avatar that they could find. The only scrolls Iroh could find that talked about the Avatar were either vague on the details or were clearly written after Sozin’s purge of the library.

It was why he had resorted to picking random scrolls off the racks and skimming through them trying to see if there was anything in them that might help. His current selection was not looking promising, talking mainly about the various kinds of toys children in the Fire Nation had played with over the ages. He was just about to put it back on the rack when a passage caught his eye.

...among the Air Nomads for example, the toys that a child chooses to play with has great significance. When the elders of the temples know that the Avatar has been born among them…

The Air Nomads. Not the Air Nation. Only the Fire Nation calls them the Air Nation. (He knows that now.) This might be one of the scrolls Sozin’s censors missed in their purge.

All the children in the temple are gathered together and one by one shown to a room filled with hundreds of toys. The children are then instructed to pick four among them to play with. Among those hundreds of toys are four particularly special ones. They are the toys that the previous air avatar played with when they were growing up. The Avatar’s reincarnated spirit will recognize those toys and be drawn to them for the fun and comfort they once provided. Thus the child who picks out those four toys and no others is known to be the Avatar reborn.

Toys! Iroh’s mind boggled at the thought. Yet it made sense the more he thought about it. Children were often closer to their past lives than adults who had grown into their current one. It was not impossible that somewhere in their soul they would recognize their old childhood playthings and be drawn to them.

I was once permitted to watch this process at work. All the young girls in the Western Air Temple were gathered together and one by one led into the room with the toys. In among those toys the elders had hidden the avatar relics: a turtle whistle, a spinning drum, a painted hogmonkey, and a wooden fan. While some of the children picked out one or two of the relics, none of them proved to be the avatar by picking out all four toys.

Iroh’s mind started to think about how they could actually try something like this. They had the national census along with the records of families who had moved to the colonies. It would certainly be possible to round up all the children of the correct age in every town or village and subject them to this test. They would need a lot of toys to do it, but that wouldn’t be a problem. However, they would need to find toys that a previous avatar had played with as a kid. Iroh silently cursed to himself. There were relics of Avatar Roku that the fire sages had preserved in their sanctuaries, but all of them were from his adult life. Avatar Yang’s family had fled to Ba Sing Se when their connection to the Green Spirit had been revealed. They were beyond the reach of the Fire Nation for now, and that was assuming they had even held onto any of Yang’s childhood toys. Perhaps they could send an expedition to the ruins of the air temples to see if they could recover the avatar relics themselves. It had been nearly a hundred years since their defeat but it was possible that such relics might have survived. Or maybe they could make replicas of the relics. There would be no way of knowing if that would work. But, if they commissioned old Mr. Aang, it would certainly be possible for the old man to make them a set. A turtle whistle, a spinning drum, a painted hogmonkey, and a wooden fan were certainly within the old man’s skill to make.

Something niggled in the back of Iroh’s mind.

A turtle whistle, a spinning drum, a painted hogmonkey, and a wooden fan.

His memory flashed back to a warm sunny morning. Lu Ten had been playing in the garden and Princess Ursa had brought her own children out to enjoy the day. He had even sat down with little Azula and showed her how to play pai sho. She had picked it up with surprising speed, he remembered.

Lu Ten had gone off to play with Zuko, who had brought some of his own toys with him. One of them had been a whistle, he remembered that. Had it been shaped like a turtle? There had been a drum too, one of the ones you spun around so that the beads on the end of the strings made the rhythm. Mr. Aang made excellent ones. Practically every child in the Fire Nation had one. There had been a wooden fan, one with a little string you pulled to make the fan spin. Lu Ten had shown it to him, fascinated with how it worked. Had that been a wooden hogmonkey they had played with on the edge of the terrace?

He couldn’t remember.

Chapter Text

Prince Lu Ten was heading out on an expedition to find the Avatar. That, at least, everyone could agree was a good thing.

It was becoming harder and harder to find things people could agree on. With Firelord Azulon sick, speculation had naturally turned towards which of the Firelord’s sons would take the crown after his death.

Iroh was the eldest. By rights he should inherit. But he was also the general who retreated from Ba Sing Se when he had almost succeeded in breaching the inner walls.

Ozai had been the one to capture the Green Spirit. But that was the only major achievement he could boast of. He did not have the successful record of military success and victory his elder brother did.

Some argued that Iroh had somehow snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, and his cowardice had cost them a decisive victory in the war. Ozai was the obvious choice if they wanted to actually win. Others pointed out the reinforcements from Omashu that had broken General Gaoli and were rushing to help the city. Surely Iroh had prevented an unimaginable disaster by retreating before his forces could find themselves trapped between Ba Sing Se’s walls. Some thought Ozai’s ambition would be just what the nation needed to lead it to victory. Other’s feared it would be the one thing that led it to ruin.

Azulon on his sickbed said nothing either way. And the divisions in the Fire Nation continued to fester.

But few found reasons to dislike the young prince Lu Ten. He was dynamic, with years serving on the front line of the war and awards attesting to his valour and bravery. Some thought Azulon should just bypass his two feuding sons and make his eldest grandson his heir. Fresh blood, they argued, would give strength to the nation and allow them to finally end the century long war. Even some hardline Ozai supporters would privately admit that they would consider Lu Ten an acceptable compromise.

That young Lu Ten would be setting off to personally hunt the avatar, with three state-of-the-art battleships and a handpicked crew of elite sailors and soldiers, seemed fitting. Who better to find the next incarnation of the hated Green Spirit who had done so much to thwart their destiny. Many expected that they would soon hear news of great deeds as the prince brought battle to the Avatar.

Furthermore, it had been announced that Prince Zuko would be accompanying his cousin on the expedition. Officially the young prince would be learning the intricacies of command under his older cousin’s tutelage to prepare him for his future duties. It made sense at least. Prince Zuko was due to turn sixteen soon. Soon he would be a man grown and would need to learn the skills needed to serve his nation. Some hoped that this was a sign that the rifts in the royal family were not beyond repair.

Others merely figured that this was just so Lu Ten could keep an eye on the cousin who stood most to gain if Ozai should take the throne instead of Iroh.

—

“You wanted to see me father?”

“Indeed,” Iroh motioned for his son to take a seat. “I wanted to have a few private words with you before you set out on your journey.”

Lu Ten sat down on the cushion his father indicated, taking the cup of tea in front of him and breathing in the aroma. No servants around, he noted. And guards stood at the gates to prevent prying ears from hearing things they weren’t supposed to.

“You are about to set out to find the Avatar,” His father said at last. “This is a monumental task being set for you. I should know. I spent nearly a decade trying to find the Avatar myself with no success, despite the great effort I made.”

“Indeed Father,” Lu Ten nodded. “You must have given toys to every single child in the Fire Nation.”

“No every child.” Iroh set his teacup down and looked his son straight in the eye. “As you know, the purpose of my little ‘moral boosting’ expedition was to see if the Air Nomad’s toy test would reveal the Avatar among us. I tested every child in the fire nation that was of the correct age, except for one.” Lu Ten had never seen his father look so serious before. “Your cousin Zuko was born a year after his father captured Avatar Yang.”

Lu Ten almost dropped his cup. “Father… you don’t think?”

“I don’t know,” Iroh answered. “I didn’t test your cousin myself for fear your uncle Ozai might also learn the result. And I suspect your cousin would have no interest in the replicas I presented to all the children of the Fire Nation. Cast your mind back my son, to when you yourself were a child. When you played with your cousin, what toys did you play with?”

“Well there was a wooden hogmonkey, one of those spinning hand drums, that clever fan with the pull rope and a clay whistle shaped like... a turtle.”

Iroh nodded as the pieces fell into place in his son’s mind. “I do not know if those are somehow the real avatar relics, or if he was drawn to them because of their resemblance to the real avatar relics. And that is assuming your cousin is in fact the avatar at all, and this is not merely a coincidence. That is what you must find out my son. We cannot ignore this possibility. You must find proof that your cousin is the Avatar, or proof that he is not. If he is not the Avatar then you must put all your energy into finding the real Avatar and eliminating the threat to our nation.”

“And what if Zuko is the Avatar, Father?”

There was a long silence. “You will be Firelord one day my son.” Iroh finally answered. “As you travel, you will get to know your cousin better. I trust you to know what the correct course of action will be if the situation arrives. However, above all else, your uncle Ozai must not find out the true nature of your mission under any circumstances. For your sake and your cousin’s.”

—

As a prince of the Fire Nation, Zuko had servants who packed all his essential items, clothes, writing utensils, bedding, etc. But his personal effects were another matter.

“Take only what you can fit in one trunk,” his cousin had instructed him, and Zuko was taking that advice seriously. One small trunk was open before him and he was carefully packing it with anything he thought he might need.

His swords were naturally the first things to go in. They were chasing the Avatar, battle was to be expected. He also added a couple of firebending manuals for the same reason. Lu Ten had also warned him that sea voyages were long and tedious, so he also packed several thick scrolls of theater-scripts to study, along with a volume of the classics to help develop his moral character. (Hopefully his mom would approve.) He also packed the pearl-hilted knife his uncle had given him (right before the disastrous retreat from Ba Sing Sei.)

His hands hovered over the four toys he had gotten so long ago from Mr. Aang’s shop. They were childish things. He had long ago outgrown them. There was no reason to pack them.

Except Mr. Aang’s words, all those years ago, still ran through his head. Maybe one day his own children would play with those toys like he used to. He liked the idea of it.

He could also picture his sister's face as she told him that she had absolutely no idea what had happened to his old childhood toys.

Safekeeping, he decided. He would pack them for safekeeping. Carefully, he wrapped each of them in silk and tucked them away beside the scrolls so they would not be damaged.

Speaking of safekeeping. He turned to the turtleduck sitting comfortably on his bed. He was not leaving her behind for his father to discover. Or leaving Azula with the chance to get her revenge for that brazen bite she had received all those years ago. “It won’t be for long,” he assured her. “Lu Ten said we can let you out once the ship leaves harbour.”

The turtleduck didn’t look pleased. But she tucked her head into her shell and let Zuko place her on top of the items he had already packed in his trunk.

“I’ve got some roast cricketworms for you when we’re on the ship,” Zuko promised, as he shut the lid and locked it. He then signalled to the servants waiting outside his door, and prepared himself to say his farewells and depart.

—

“Don’t you worry Mr. Aang,” the blacksmith’s burley son said, “We’ll make sure nothing happens to your store while you’re away.”

“I appreciate it,” Aang smiled as he bolted the door to his shop and locked it. “I don’t like leaving my store for so long, but duty must be done.”

“Family is important,” the blacksmith’s son nodded. “I will admit, it does worry us all that a man of your age is still making the voyage to the colonies.”

“It is getting weary,” Aang admitted. “And every time I go, I start to wonder if I should stay. But the old shop keeps drawing me back. I suspect as long as I can still carry my own bag to the dock, I’ll keep going.”

“We’ll be praying for your safe journey,” the blacksmith’s son said with a tone of complete seriousness. “I hope Agni watches over you wherever you go.”

“Thank you,” Aang smiled. “It always warms my heart to know there are people like you in this world.” He hoisted his bag over his shoulder, gave one last wave to his neighbour and set off down the street in the direction of the docks.

Except he didn’t head for the docks. Not quite. No one really noticed as he tottered down the stone steps to the beach, or watched as he made his way across the sand, away from the city and into the dawn mists. There was no one around to witness him put a wooden whistle to his mouth and blow a soundless note that no human could hear.

No one saw Aang slip into the hidden cove, concealed from view by bramble and bushes. And most definitely no one saw the dark shape come floating over the water and into the cove to meet the old man.

“Well Appa, my old friend,” Aang said, running his hands through the sky bison’s coarse fur and stroking the long beard hanging off its chin. “We have a long journey ahead of us.” He tossed his bag into the saddle-box and leapt onto the bison’s head with the grace of a master airbender. “I have a feeling it might be our greatest one yet.”