Seeing with fire.
After the agni kie the medic told him that Zuko was lucky to even have a eye after such a severe injury. But when being banished from home With a Barely healed facial scar that came with profound hearing and vision loss. It didn’t feel very lucky .
Not that it would stop him. In fact he refused to admit that there was anything wrong with his vision .
His uncle would just sigh and take that into account when training him. Giving him the skills he needed to hold his own.
Zuko would never admit it. But he noticed that uncle taken to standing on his blind side when they travelled so no one could sneak up on him. He appreciated it immensely. He hated it when people appeared out of nowhere from a point that he used to be able to see .
And with what little hearing remained he could still hear low sounds. So he could still mostly understand uncle when he stood on his deaf side. It made him feel a little less disabled . This would also subtly force people who he couldn’t hear as well to stand on his hearing side
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The only person that he openly told was toph. When he first joined the ganng They bonded over there blindness. She thought he had the bad deal. He had lost his vision . He knew what a full field of vision looked like .We’re as she was born blind . She didn’t know any difference . But she never once pitiedhim. It was one of the things he liked about her .
Zuko was fascinated by tophs ability to “see”. And she joked that if she could teatch the avatar earth banding she could teatch him to see. They laughed about it but after a lot of trial and error Zuko managed to create his own form of “ vision “ by sensing heat sources through his bending . it wasn’t as nuanced as tophs but was perfect for “seeing “ people approching from his blind side .
No one could ever sneek up on him again.
With enugh practice he even worked out that you could tell the difference between different benders and non benders. ( fire benders ran hot and water benders ran cold ) as well as sensing if people were in the next room to him.
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After the war the palaces council always descused the latest story that had emerged of what there New fire Lord had gotten up to during the war. If they asked him about the rumours Zuko would neither confirm or deny it but there is NO WAY he could have been the blue spirit ( who had been given a full pardon for there crimes ) Or had broken into the North Pole by diving in freezing tiger seal tunnels . Those things only happen in spirit tails.
But in a meeting when Zuko had calmly stood up and announced to his guards. that there was an assassination attempt happening and that there was three fire benders and two non benders on the roof about to brake in through the ceiling . Only for said men to come crashing down 10 seconds later and be quickly apprehended buy the weighting gaurd .
The council had all desided that day that the fire lord could in fact see through walls.
