#calidity

They were both cautious with their hearts, more cautious than they should be. But they had never known any different, and so at arm’s length they held.

It didn’t help that, much like any aspect of a person, image shifted. Traits overlapping, changing, twisting, warping, until Zuko could no longer associate the Zhao he knew before to the Zhao he knew now. At its core, it still wasn’t love that bound them together. It was a lack of option, the prospect of the unknown, the need to clutch onto familiarity even when there was none.

As if to affirm it, Zuko whispered into Zhao’s ear, fingers running over a bare back, feeling the jut of shoulder blades, the length of his spine – “I don’t love you.”

Zhao’s head turned, lips brushing Zuko’s temple, neither a kiss nor an accident, and murmured back, words against skin, “I don’t love you either.”

Zuko had heard there was a thin line between love and hate, but he couldn’t help thinking it was bullshit. For he and Zhao toed it by the day, treading it with their careful hearts, watching their steps with guarded eyes.

One morning, when the sky was barely tainted with light, stars fading into barely-there twinkles, Zhao found himself leaning against the railings on one of the Jasmine Dragon’s balconies. Zuko had snuck out of the house in the middle of the night again, and Zhao, who had been on the boundary between wake and sleep, had watched him go, slipping out of the window like a wraith.

The prince still wasn’t back, but it didn’t stop another, different, prince from approaching him cautiously, a tray of steaming tea balanced in steady hands like an offering.

“May I talk to you?” Iroh asked, placing the tray on the wide handrail between them.

Zhao gave a hum of assent but made no move to take the proffered cup of tea.

“I’d like to…” Iroh trailed off, seemingly trying to find his voice. “I’d like to ask you something.”

Well, that was a first.

“Sure,” Zhao said dully.

Iroh solemnly looked out over the city, which was beginning to wake with the bustling workers starting their day.

“What does being in rut feel like, if it is not too personal a question?”

Of all the questions Zhao had anticipated, imagined, even, he’d never had thought that this would be the question Iroh would ask. Still, he thought it over, mulling the words carefully in his mouth before he set them free. For this was the first time Iroh had ever asked him about something so deeply personal to him as a classified, to all alphas that had ever gone through a rut.

“It feels,” Zhao began slowly. “First, it starts with fire. Just… spreading from your chest. It robs you of your own will, but not so much that you can claim you weren’t in your right mind. Your body is your own, but your mind fluctuates between yours and the rut’s. You want to fight. You want to rest. You want to be alone. You want to be with a mate. It’s hard to say what your mind wants when it’s warring with your body all the damn time.”

“Is that the same feeling,” Iroh said carefully. “As when you’ve induced rut?”

“To a lesser extent, yes,” Zhao replied, now taking the cup of tea. He sniffed it carefully. Oolong.

Iroh let out a long sigh. “Ba Sing Se was an oversight on my part.”

At once, whatever amiable mood Zhao had evaporated in an instant.

Zhao’s lip curled in disgust. “An oversight? Are you fucking kidding me? An oversight? Is that really what you’re calling it?”

He’s suffered through so much utter bullshit in his life that now, to have such a tragic incident, something that had shaken the entire world of classifieds, be bequeathed the claim of ‘oversight’… it almost nauseated him.

“I am an alpha,” Zhao said thinly. “I very well could have been used for your own gains. You didn’t have to make them induce rut. You didn’t have to force them into that state. You… you were the one who made the call. You were the one who made the decision. It was in your hands! It was their blood on your hands!”

With every acrimonious word that spewed from Zhao’s mouth, Iroh’s head bowed lower and lower. What could the old general possibly be thinking? Repentance was no lenient mistress. And with such heft of his crimes weighing him down, it would be easier to feign ignorance than to face the music.

“At so many points in my life, I’d have given everything to be ‘normal.’” Zhao whispered, curling his hands tighter around the teacup. “When I speak, people stare at my fangs. When I go into rut, I’m treated as an animal. And you know what’s even better? I’m a bender. That’s just another thing I can be used for.”

There had been a time when he had prided himself on being an alpha and a bender. When he had been naïve and thought that it meant that it afforded him higher status. But it all came to a head the moment Jeong Jeong had looked upon him in disgust when it was revealed that he had killed a fellow alpha in a farce of an Agni Kai.

Where was the pride he had when it was tainted by derision and disapproval? Where did it all go? Here, in Ba Sing Se, what little pride he had was whittled to splinters. For what pride could be born from being one of the Avatar’s lackeys, being the uncle of a bunch of mixed breed brats, and an admiral that was likely presumed dead at this point?

“It doesn’t have to be that way anymore,” Iroh implored. “Zhao, I want to make things right. Atonement is not easy, but I am willing to learn.”

“And how will you do that?” Zhao scoffed. “You are saying you are willing to learn our ways?”

Iroh lifted his chin. “I would be. But I am not the only one who has blood on my hands.”

Zhao rankled. “What are you implying?”

“I would warn you not to be a hypocrite,” Iroh stated flatly, eyes hard. Dragon of the West indeed. Somehow, Zhao was no longer as intimidated by the man’s indomitable reputation.

They stared each other down, coming to a standstill.

Instinct, as it always did, peeled Zhao’s lips back, baring his fangs. “Is this truly about Ba Sing Se? Or is this about Zuko?”

Iroh’s guarded expression did not falter. “Could it not be both?”