In-Extremis

to be at the point of death

"You're dying, your highness. Just very, very slowly."

"Isn't everyone?"

"Not the way you are."

He's known since almost before he can recall that he was going to die. In fact, it's his first solid memory - everything before that is just smudged fragments, worn and faded by time and distance. But this conversation, that day in the hospital, is crystal clear in his memory, even though he couldn't have been more than six.

He'd fallen. Or maybe he'd been pushed. The details of when and how are fuzzy. Somehow he'd managed to fracture four ribs and wind up with heavy internal bleeding. He isn't sure whether or not he's glad of it - they might never have discovered the monster in his bones, slowly devouring him from the inside out, if they hadn't had to operate on him. Nevertheless, it seems quite impressive to him the strides that his people's doctors have made - they can sew up tiny wounds deep inside a person and stop them from bleeding inside.

They don't know how to fix him, though. Nobody does. It's incurable. Terminal.

Uncle says he is 'self destructive'. If only he knew how Zuko claws at his skin sometimes, in the dead of night, trying hopelessly to bleed the poison from his body. It won't work, he knows, but sometimes he swears he can feel it crawling through his veins, defiling him. Condemning him. And he wants to bleed himself dry, because his own blood is a venom consuming the life in him.

Sometimes Zuko wonders if Iroh knows. He's never told anyone. Of the people who knew, his mother is gone, and his father has banished him. The secret wasn't passed to anyone else, so far as he knows; Uncle was away on the front lines when it happened, Azula was too young to be burdened with that knowledge, and it wasn't like any of them were particularly close to his grandfather. But he says things, things that Zuko can't help but question. He talks about destiny and fate and treats him like a child, the child he ceased to be the day his father sent him away to die, but sometimes he talks, says words like self-destructive, and he looks at him with a sadness in his eyes that Zuko can't explain any other way, and he thinks Iroh must know.

But then the old man will ramble about how the future Fire Lord has to be honorable and principled, and talks about how one day he will be a master bender if he'll just apply himself and learn to use his head, and Zuko can't see any hint of the lie in his eyes, so either his Uncle is Azula in another skin, or he doesn't know.

He can't bring himself to tell his Uncle that he will be dead before he reaches twenty.

Years, it's been. Three whole years. He's lost his home, his birthright, his family, his nation - and now he's lost his meaning. Three years, he searched and searched until he didn't really know why he was searching, just that he couldn't stop, because stopping meant giving up, and that was never, ever an option.

And now the search has been ended. Taken. Now there is no purpose to his existence at all, and he will die the miserable failure everyone has always said he is, and he will do it - he will die - far, far away from home.

Uncle keeps talking about a new home, and a new life, and starting over, but there's no point to that because Zuko is dying, and he doesn't know when, but lately there's a feeling in his bones that tells him the end isn't far away. And even though he feels a little guilty, he's glad, because he's got nothing left to do with himself and the waiting is driving him insane. He feels like a ghost, because all he does is haunt this city and wait for his body to catch up with his mind.

He wonders if knowing that he is on the brink of death is turning him into a philosophical nutjob like Uncle, because he is coming to poignant conclusions about his existence - although he keeps them to himself, thanks very much. He feels like the little matchgirl from the fairytales his mother used to read to him - cold and lonely and just waiting for all her illusions to fade so she can too. Just like him. All of the fire and fervor in him is gone, because he has nothing and he is nothing and he's realizing that his life was always just a story that desperately needs an ending.

His world is only a thousand shades of grey, and all the colors are faded - he only sees them when he tries to look at it through someone else's eyes. He is a phantom, a shadow, and he watches other people - creatures, he thinks, and wonders when he stopped thinking of himself as a person - because they are so beautiful and so alive and if there was any one thing he could understand before he goes, it's what that feels like. Zuko doesn't think he's ever known what it feels like to be alive, to have a future - that intangible thing that he has never possessed and cannot comprehend - instead of simply waiting around to die.

Uncle talks about the spirits and destiny as though there's some higher power guiding everything, but deep down inside Zuko just can't believe that, because what was the point of creating a person for no other reason than to die? Either they aren't real (not omnificent, anyway, he knows that such a thing as a spirit exists), or they're cruel entities who feed off suffering.

Either way, Zuko doesn't think his uncle has chosen his deities well.

"I want to go home," he says, every day. It's the automatic response, so he doesn't have to say I don't know or I want my destiny or I want my honor or why does it matter? Ironic, given that home is yet another concept he's not sure he understands. Lots of people talk about home. "Home is where the heart is," so many times he's heard. But he's pretty sure his heart, dead as it is, is firmly in his chest, and he's here in this city, dead as it is, not in the palace full of ghosts where he was born, and there's only one answer he can come to.

"Where is home?"

"The place I was supposed to belong."

11/25/15