Disclaimer: I don't own A:tLA.

I have made some slight edits to the original story for continuity reasons.

"Few things are more satisfying than seeing your children have teenagers of their own."

—Doug Larson

At first, he hadn't understood the gesture, except insofar as it was something his mother did frequently, and that it was almost always in response to him.

"Mom! Hey Mom! Look what I've got!"

Her eyes widened as she got a good look at him. "Iroh, you're soaking wet—and look at you, you're covered with mud! What happened?"

"Well, I was in the turtle duck pond." He made the statement with all his four-year-old's surety of responding to someone who'd stated the pointless obvious and wanted to get back to the part of the conversation that was actually important. "But look what I—"

"What were you doing in the turtleduck pond?" Fire Lady Ilah's voice was rising higher with every word she spoke. "Did you fall in!?"

"No!" Iroh was fidgeting more by the minute, growing increasingly frustrated that his mother didn't seem at all interested in his accomplishment. "I had to go in there, to—"

"You're wearing your best clothes! Iroh, do you realize we're going to meet with your father in five minutes so you can present to him what you've learned? You can't present yourself to the Fire Lord looking like this!" His mother looked as if she were about to cry—and Iroh hated it when his mother cried. "What could possibly be more important than being at your absolute best when your father sees you?"

Iroh grinned triumphantly; he thought she would never ask. "Look what I got!"

He held out his hand, revealing a small yellow ball of fluff underneath a hard shell. The little duckling quacked a bit before curling back up in his palm.

His mother stared. "Iroh." At least she wasn't crying, but the look of shocked dismay on her face wasn't much of an improvement. "Are you telling me that you ruined your best clothes and risked being late to present yourself to the Fire Lord so you could catch turtle ducks?"

"And I got one!" He grinned wider, holding the duckling up proudly for her inspection in the hopes that it would cheer her up.

Slowly, the Fire Lady's hand moved from her side to her face, where she covered her eyes and rubbed her temples as if praying for patience.

Somehow, she managed to get him cleaned, dressed, and into the throne room on time. Fire Lord Azulon had nodded approvingly as Iroh recited his lessons without a single mistake, and his mother had hugged him afterward (even though she actually was crying now) and told him that he'd done very well. That was hardly the first such incident that happened, however, and after he started firebending it only got worse.

When he was ten, his mother walked into his room to find his bed a smoking ruin and the tapestries not in much better condition, and a slightly charred Iroh standing in the middle of the carnage with an extremely guilty expression.

"Um… I didn't mean to." He shifted from foot to foot, his hands behind his back. "It was raining outside, and…"

"So you decided to practice your firebending in your room?" Her relief that he hadn't been hurt was quickly giving way to outrage that he'd done something so stupid. "Iroh, do you never think things through?"

"Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time…"

The sound of her hand smacking against her forehead was nearly as loud as the next clap of thunder.

Once more, his mother not only found some servants to clean things up quickly, but also somehow managed to keep the whole incident quiet. By the time his father returned to the palace the next day, not only did his room look as if nothing had ever happened, but what he'd done also managed to not be the talk of the palace. Iroh, for his part, didn't make any mention of it himself—he didn't want to get himself into trouble with his father too—but he waited on tenterhooks all day for his father to bring it up. When he didn't, Iroh finally started to relax, assuming that his father either didn't care or hadn't found out at all. Whichever one it was, he wasn't going to push his luck. A week later the incident was forgotten completely.

From then on, however, Iroh was much more careful about what he said or did, and as he got older the number of incidents steadily decreased. By the time he was a grown man, they had stopped completely—for the most part.

The instance that Iroh remembered best, he remembered because it was the last. He'd just returned to court after yet another long campaign against the Earth Kingdom, and a royal procession had come to greet him as he disembarked from his ship.

Upon setting eyes on his mother when she stepped from the palanquin only to see that she had nearly doubled in size, her swollen belly protruding from beneath her robes, Iroh's carefully prepared formal greeting immediately flew out of his head. What he blurted out instead was:

"But aren't you and Dad way too old to be having—"

This time, the Fire Lady buried her face in both hands, her fingers digging into her hair. The guards and palanquin bearers who had accompanied her showed significantly less restraint, crown prince or not, and promptly broke into a fit of uncontrolled laughter.

He apologized, of course, once the formalities were out of the way and they were finally able to get a moment of privacy. His mother, after hearing him out, only shook her head.

"You said nothing that has not already been whispered of among every member of the Fire Nation nobility. But Iroh… you must learn to control that tongue of yours. If you don't, I fear that it will get you into serious trouble someday." The hand that she laid on his shoulder was shaking. "Promise me that you'll at least try."

Iroh swallowed; he had often seen her exasperated, but never this serious. "I promise, Mother."

A month later, his mother died giving birth to his younger brother. It was the last promise to her that Iroh ever made.

When he paid his respects at her grave, Iroh could not help but think of his impending return to the front, and of how his father wouldn't even look at the child who had stolen away his wife. His brother, he knew, was now destined to be raised by an ever-changing series of nannies and servants—Iroh had completely failed, while he was alive, to appreciate how lucky he was to have her.

"I'm sorry I couldn't have been a better son," he whispered.

His mother had loved him, he knew, in spite of his many flaws. She had always looked out for him even when he hadn't known she was doing it, and he knew now that she had only scolded him because she cared. Raising such a trouble-prone child could not have been easy on her, and more than once she had given vent to her frustration in the way that every parent inevitably does:

"I hope you have a child who's just like you!"

Little did Iroh know how badly those words would come back to haunt him.

"Uncle, I know this form! I don't need to drill it anymore; now teach me the next!"

"No, you don't!" The bandages weren't even two hours off, and already Zuko insisted on going back to his old routine as if nothing had happened, never realizing that he was pushing himself far beyond his limits by not giving himself any time to regain the muscle tone he'd lost or to adjust to his still-hampered vision. "Your stances are sloppy, and you are still not controlling your breathing. Now drill it again!"

"Argh!" Zuko actually hit the railing in frustration before storming off to his room, even going so far as to push a few crewmembers who weren't quick enough to get out of his way. He didn't turn back to see Iroh slowly dragging a hand down his face.

"Come on, jump! It's not far!"

"No." Whether Zuko had figured it out or not, Iroh was well aware of what his nephew had been up to in that Blue Spirit disguise of his, and if a jump of this height had left him with nothing more serious than a bruised tailbone, it certainly wouldn't hurt Zuko—it could not have been fear. With a sinking feeling in his stomach, Iroh realized what was coming next.

"It's time I faced Azula." Turning his back, Zuko walked out of his line of sight, disappearing behind the portion of the wall that hadn't been blasted open—no doubt to get himself captured or worse.

Given what Azula was probably plotting, there was no time to waste, and Iroh set his mind on the one person who could help him save his nephew from his own recklessness. He did, however, allow himself one small indulgence before he began his struggle out of the bush where he'd landed.

Mother, he thought as his hand moved onto a collision course with his forehead, I hope you're watching this.

"Daaaad! Grandpa!" The little girl came running into the gardens as fast as her five-year-old legs would carry her.

Zuko looked up from the turtle ducklings he and Uncle were feeding, a distinct sinking feeling working its way slowly down into his stomach. Though his daughter did not appear to be hurt, her best clothes were soaking wet and ripped beyond repair (Agni, he'd only had those made for her a week ago), her hair was loose and flying about her face, and her golden eyes were wide in a panicked expression that could only mean trouble.

"Izumi," he started, pushing himself to his feet just in time to catch his daughter as she barreled into him. "What happened?"

She had barely opened her mouth to speak, however, when Bumi came running from the same direction and skidded to a halt directly in front of them, breathing heavily. The second Izumi noticed him she turned on him with a glare, and before Zuko knew it they were pointing accusing fingers at each other.

"It's her fault!"

"It's his fault!"

Their glares intensified, a split second before they both started shouting their version of the story, so loudly in their attempts to drown each other out that their words were rendered completely incomprehensible.

"Enough!" Zuko turned the full force of his own not-inconsiderable glare on the children, who immediately quieted—though he was dismayed to find that he could now hear a series of panicked yells from indoors.

"I do believe," Uncle said, coming up behind him, "that it would be much easier to understand you if you spoke one at a time. They both nodded obediently. (How did he do that?) "Now, what happened?"

"It wasn't my fault!" Bumi started right away, and Zuko registered his words with a healthy dose of skepticism—he'd babysat this particular child far too many times to believe him fully innocent—and made a mental note to talk to Katara about his punishment rather than Aang, who was still far too much of a pushover when it came to disciplining his children. "Uncle Sokka was telling us about some of your adventures before the war and that time you tied Mom to a tree—"

Sokka was a dead man!

"—and all of you ended up fighting with a bunch of pirates on the river and Mom and Dad and Uncle Sokka went over a waterfall and we wanted to try doing something like that—"

Zuko held a hand up to put a stop to the rest of Bumi's rambling; he didn't think he wanted to hear the end. "Izumi." He could already feel the beginnings of yet another migraine building behind his eyes. "Is this true?"

"Um… yes?" She scuffled her feet guiltily against the ground, and Zuko heard yet another scream of despair from one of the palace staff—it was a matter of minutes, at most, before someone deduced where he was and came running straight to him.

"And how, exactly, did you decide to 'try doing something like that'?"

His question was answered for him, however, when the servant in question burst into the gardens at last, wailing loudly about the state of the bath house. Slowly, determinedly ignoring the knowing look Uncle was giving him, Zuko pressed his palm into his face.

Izumi was enjoying her morning newspaper over her morning cup of tea when she was unpleasantly jolted away from the topic of the Equalist demonstrations in Republic City by an explosion and a lot of shouting from the direction of the training grounds.

Common sense told her to ignore it—not a week passed by when something like this didn't happen, and it was almost always due to some reckless young firebender who'd decided to show off and ended up blowing something up. This morning, however, she ignored common sense, just as she'd ignored it every other time this had happened—the most prudent course of action, she'd decided, would usually be the best, especially since said reckless young firebender almost always turned out to be her son.

As usual, it was the right decision, as she'd barely finished setting down her teacup when a young military officer burst into the room without heed to formality or procedure—not a good sign. "Princess Izumi!" he shouted, skidding to a halt in front of her. "The prince—!"

That was all she needed to hear. Jolts of dread shot through her chest at his words and the note of panic in his voice, and without waiting for further explanation Izumi was running out the door and straight to the training grounds, so hastily that by the time she got there she was short a shoe and her glasses had slid halfway down her nose. The first thing she noticed was that the other officers on the training grounds were all gathered around in a circle. As soon as Izumi made herself known they hastily parted to let her through—all, that is, except for the two medics who were busy tending the injuries of a very battered-looking fifteen-year-old prince.

"Hi… Mom." Iroh tried to smile—though not, Izumi noted, without a distinct note of guilt—but the expression quickly turned to a wince as one of the medics dabbed antiseptic over a cut on his forehead.

"It would be best for him to see a water healer, just to be sure," the other one reassured her as they moved Iroh onto a stretcher, "but we're fairly certain it looks worse than it is. Your son doesn't seem to have any life-threatening injuries."

Thankfully, Kya did happen to be visiting the Fire Nation that day, and was all too happy to oblige. Getting Iroh to sit still long enough for Kya to work on him, however, turned out to be a task on par with convincing the Earth Queen to part with a favored piece of jewelry.

"Mom, I'm fine!" he protested as Kya ran water over his chest and stomach. "I just got a little scraped up. I don't need a water healer for a few scratches!"

"First of all, missing half the skin on your elbow is not 'a few scratches'," Kya retorted, shooting Izumi a covert look of sympathy. Izumi, for her part, could only hope that Iroh would eventually grow out of this phase; if Kya and Tenzin's stories were anything to go by, Bumi never had. "Secondly, you could have internal injuries and still feel perfectly 'fine' right up until you collapse, by which point there'll be nothing that I or anyone else can do."

"You're lucky you got away as lightly as you did!" Izumi picked up seamlessly right where Kya had left off. "What were you doing this time, anyway?"

"Well, there was something I've been wanting to try with some of the old war balloons…"

Izumi crossed her arms. "War balloons?" she asked, raising an eyebrow. Those things were antiques; as a matter of fact, they'd been invented when her father was fairly close to Iroh's age.

"Yeah, Grandfather was telling me about some of the things he did during the war. He had this story about fighting his sister on top of a couple of airships, and I thought I'd see how they did it…"

"Without any safety measures? Without any supervision?" Izumi could practically feel her hair turning gray. "Didn't your grandfather tell you he nearly fell to his death in that fight?" Without even realizing she was doing it, she began to pace. "Did it even once occur to you to think this through?"

"Um…"

She would definitely be having a few words with her father as soon as he returned from the Earth Kingdom—he needed to know what a bad influence he'd been. Then again, she thought as she covered her face with her hand, maybe that was his intention all along.

A/N: This story was a gift for AttackFishScales, who is currently suffering from whooping cough. (On a side note, if you have children, get them vaccinated. This isn't just for their protection, it's for the protection of everyone around them, including people who can't get vaccinated due to compromised immune systems, or babies who are too young to be immunized.)

She gave me a prompt of "Iroh: facepalm." While I'm not entirely sure about the merits of sending a humor fic to someone who is still coughing uncontrollably, I did what I could with what I had to work with. Hope you enjoy!