a/n: I know, I know. I'm a terrible author. I've been neglecting my other fics for a while now and here I am starting another one. I just can't get this idea out of my head until I wrote it so I might as well post it.

I am sorry for not updating my other stories, I truly am. I've just really been in a slump lately; my life just seems so... bleak. Damn, I think I'm depressed. Y'all go easy on me, okay?

This prologue might seem a bit vague, but I'll clear it up later. Probably.

I've watched the first season of Korra and that's it, so let's all pretend it never happened, yes? Okay.

Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. - Lance Armstrong

FORGING FIRE

Prologue

Deliriously blinking his only operable eye in the dim light, he struggled to place where he was.

Memories assaulted his mind. Not his, yet belonging to him.

Innocent, naive, hopeful... there was a boy atop a grassy hill with a happy smile, a proud father beside him. It's as if they were on the other side of a mirror; intangible, unreal. He knew it so because the mirror started to crack, a spiderweb of fizzures tracing the reflective surface, before it finally shattered into a thousand pieces.

He remembered wandering around large, empty halls, searching for something, someone whom had left him behind. He saw serpents lurking in the corners, eyes fierce and gleaming with malice.

"Who's gonna make me? Mom?" a girl taunted, gripping his prized dagger with a smug smirk.

An image of a woman in the dark of the night flashed in his mind, and he tried to grasp onto her, but she disappeared like the shadows of a forgotten dream.

A man stood before him, proud and powerful and strong, a hand outstretched toward his face, and then...

He lifted a hand to his face, coming to a stop at the edge of the cloth that covered half his head. It was with numb shock that he realized that he'd been injured; burned and scarred and shamed, and his other eye couldn't see.

Perhaps to a normal person, the pain of the injury could've been unbearable. But for him, it was nothing compared to the agony of fraying his nerves day after day, which had always felt like shoving hot iron rod through his spine while his body was set ablaze. The pain was distant, so was all the sensory details fed to his brain. As if he was just someone inside looking out; an alien in his own body.

He stretched his hand above him, looking it over with a mixture of awe and fascination. It almost unnerved him how small and delicate the appandages looked, so unlike the large and worn out ones he was so used to see.

These, these aren't his hands. He knew, because he'd already lived a life. He had already been reborn in the flickering embers of a cursed fire, and then died pursuing an impossible dream. Would fate be so ironic as to give him a cursed life once more?

It had happened so long ago, and yet he could still vividly recall the crackles of the burning inferno lapping on his heels, the anguished cries of those he left behind so that he could live, and the poignant smell of smoke and sulfur, tainted, black icor, and roasted flesh suffocating his senses.

Where hundreds of others had lost their lives, he had been saved.

No different than a new born babe, that burning hell had been his first memory, and his salvation became the foundation of his hopes, dreams, and personality. Lying empty and hopeless, seeing that sad, broken man smiling so beautifully while crying tears of joy as he held his small hand to his cheek, it had mesmerized him.

He had wanted to smile like that.

The last night he spent with that man, he had imparted an unfulfilled dream to him. Before the man took his last breath, he promised that he'd fulfill that dream in his stead. He knew it wouldn't be easy, but he had never been prepared for the difficulties that lay ahead.

In his single-minded pursuit of that dream, he realized that everything came at a price. The path he chose to walk was wrought with hard decisions. It was a measure of his determination, of how much of his principles and morals were he willing to sacrifice.

Would he abandon the few for the salvation of the many? Was he willing enough to part with the people he cared about, to leave a place that he'd grown to know, or was the dream not worth it after all? He weighed the worth of people on a scale, balanced lives precariously on the palm of his hands, that the beautiful dream he tried so hard to achieve became ugly and tainted.

To be betrayed by your own ideals, it was devastatingly painful.

Nothing but a life full of regrets lulled him to death; the cold darkness a bitter solace from the burn of his exhausted magic circuits and the pain and ache of wounds and broken bones.

And now he was born anew, once upon a time from a cursed fire, and once more in a nation of fire. How truly ironic.

If he just closed his eyes, he could feel the crackles of a flame pulsating in his core like a second heartbeat. It begged and pleaded to be let out; to consume and devour, resonating with the twenty-seven dormant circuits mapping the entirety of his body.

Trace. On.

Almost instinctively, the hammer had been pulled, the gun cocked, and the bullet was fired.

He gritted his teeth, suppressing the cry of pain from escaping his lips as the darkness behind his eyelids exploded in painful, hypnotic swirls. His entire body burned, but none as intense as the sudden blazing agony that suffused his healing wound. He couldn't help it; he screamed.

A figure of a man towered over him as he kneeled, as he begged, fire blooming on his hand.

"You will learn respect, and suffering will be your teacher."

The man's fire had burned more than the surface. It left a scar in his soul that would never heal.

His Reality Marble, his inner world, shied away from his touch. It was still there, but somewhat different. It had changed, just as how he had changed, and it was so very painful. It was as if his very being had been ripped apart and then shoved back together incorrectly.

An eternity could have come and gone before the pain finally subsided, leaving a searing throb behind his burned skin. It felt like it was still sizzling even when the wound was already healing.

When he opened his uncovered eye again, the door to his cramped metal room had clicked shut. An old, stout man decked in elaborate, fancy red and gold robes glided to his side, the aroma of freshly brewed tea wafting from the tray he brought. The burning torches illuminated the wisdom that swam in the depths of the man's amber eyes, concern and sympathy obvious in its shallows.

The man stared at his ragged and sweaty form before he sighed, laying down the tray and taking a seat beside his cot. The slow, rhythmic sway of the waves gave his iridescent eyes the allure of serenity in the dim candlelight.

"Uncle," he called rasply, testing his voice and the name on his tongue.

As if he'd finally grasped the key that opened the proverbial Pandora's box, the puzzle pieces fell into place. He remembered what his father had decreed; why he was inside this small metal ship, injured, and with only his uncle and a crew of misfits as company.

Find and capture the Avatar, only then could he come home.

There was something so woefully amusing about the irony of it all; how he had stubbornly chased an unattainable ideal in his past, and now he was forced to pursue something equally impossible.

General Iroh watched as a bitter laugh escaped from the boy's lips, his visible eye rolling at the back of his head as unconsciousness claimed him once more.

His nephew's scream was what brought him to the boy's private cabin, thinking that the pain and confusion upon awakening in an unfamiliar place had assaulted the poor prince. Looking at him now, though, the retired general couldn't mistake that something had changed since this morning when he last checked on the boy.

The old general had seen many things; had went through a number of things a man like him had no business experiencing, and he could tell that something in the grand scale of things had shifted. Something new had been added to the board; something that could, mayhap, tip the outcome of the game either way. The atmosphere around him shimmered, as if the spirits themselves were unsettled.

The former crown prince of the Fire Nation and Grandmaster of the Order of the White Lotus smiled. Perhaps there was still lingering hope for the world yet.

a/n: It's like, have you ever wondered what would happen if Zuko was just a little bit more wise and less the raging, emotionally stunted, indecisive teenage spoiled prince in the series? I mean, he could've been really likable from the start. Shirou was just Shirou, and he's my favorite anime character. Inserting him in Zuko after his banishment was a bit hard to explain. So basically, everything was Zuko before he was burned by Ozai. The rest would be a mix of both. Oh, and he's keeping the scar, too.

The Shirou I used here is pre-Archer. Instead of being hanged for false accusations and sacrificing his afterlife to Alaya, he just died bitter and exhausted. Note that he wasn't contented when he died, so he'd be a bit more cynical and ruthless than the Counter Guardian (to my knowledge, CG EMIYA became bitter not because he died condemned by the people he saved, but because Alaya used him to slaughter and massacre people, not save them). And he won't have full access to his Reality Marble yet, either, since I'm changing his Aria. Using his circuits and firebending would be really painful for him as well. I'll explain why later.

So what you think?

Thanks for reading.