AU where the best firebenders, only the ones most in touch with Agni and their inner fire, are capable of photosynthesis, not needing to eat human sustenance unless they choose to. Except there hasn’t been a recorded case of this since before sozins time. Not even azula or ozai or iroh can. Which is why zuko is so surprised when he just randomly stops feeling hungry one day (please muffin, I’m begging you. I just want to redeem myself after accidentally helping to spawn Kindling AU)
Are you... are you daring me to make photosynthetic Zuko give you feels? Because that's how you get Zuko first starting to realize this while on that raft after the North Pole. That's how you get his hunger waning, and he's reasonably sure that maybe he's dying because he should feel hungry, shouldn't he? Not feeling hungry at all is probably not... not...
But. But Uncle is older than him and already suffering so much from the lack of water, it's been two days since the last rain fall, so when Zuko manages to catch a fish while Uncle was sleeping
(Sleeping or unconscious and he couldn't cross the few feet between them to check because what if this was the time that Uncle didn't wake up when Zuko shook him--)
when he catches the stupid fish he tells Uncle he actually caught two, he already ate his, stupid lazy old man just take it Zuko isn't hungry, no he will not eat half.
(Uncle's stomach can still growl.)
And somehow they make it to the colonies and neither of them are dead. Zuko... still isn't hungry.
He isn't hungry when he's traveling alone, and he meets a boy named Lee and (badly) fixes a roof and accepts only the bare minimum of food at their table, because it's clear that they're hungry.
Other travelers wear layers to keep off the burning sun; he sheds his until he's down to a thin sleeveless robe, and basks.
He isn't hungry again until Ba Sing Se. Until shifts at Pao's tea shop, stuck inside from sunup to sundown, and Uncle finds him out back hunched over his stomach and promises that things will get better, here, have the other half of his lunch, you've barely been eating nephew--
(Zuko hadn't recognized that he was hungry until there was food in his hand, and then he was ravenous.)
When he goes to free the Avatar's bison (how did the Avatar lose a bison) (how did the Avatar not realize the Dai Li were behind every disappearance in this city), when he sees it down in that lightless cave, growling and backing away as far as its chains allow, the revulsion hits him like hunger pains, the kind that stab and twist. How dare they lock it away in this too-small stagnant hole with the darkness pressing down--
He's already freeing it when Uncle shows up, how did Uncle get in here, well good because it's not like he can free a bison and not free all of the actual human beings trapped down in this awful place, if Uncle is here he can help.
(Nephew when I said you were not thinking this through and questioned where you would store a bison, that also applied to all of these people--)
And then they run into the Avatar and his gaggle of combat prodigies including Jet--
Could we not. Try to stab each other. For five minutes?
Anyway, he's done prison breaks with the Avatar before. And Long Feng can drop all the rocks he wants, they have the Dragon of the West with them. Turns out selective parts of Lake Laogai, namely the ones that were never supposed to be there, are highly flammable. With the application of enough fire.
Zuko is starving by the time they get out. He doesn't really remember getting ushered on the bison by his Uncle, or the glares and/or bewilderment the Avatar's people shoot at him. (Or the extra toothy smile Uncle has for Jet, who looks away with a grumbled knew you were firebenders.)
"Thank you, Miss Katara," Uncle smiles later, in a much different way, and brings a bowl of rice out to his nephew in the courtyard next to their house.
The Avatar's children (plus some Freedom Fighters) stare out the window as Nephew Grumpy And Mildly Incoherent rolls away from his Uncle's attempts to coax him into eating, sprawling out in a patch of sun.
"Is someone going to explain why Prince Zuko is shirtless in our courtyard?" Sokka asks, because someone has to. "Did Long Feng get him in the head?"
Appa lumbers over for licks and cuddles. Inexplicably Shirtless Prince shoves his giant head away, grumbling about six-ton furballs blocking his light.
"Oh," Aang says, like something just clicked. "He's a Fire Lily!"
"He gets his energy right from the sun!" There is something both delighted and vaguely threatening in the Avatar's expression when he states, with no regard for the consent of the person he's speaking on behalf of: "He's my firebending teacher."
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