Dark Firelord Zuko x Isekai'ed Modern Reader
The first thing you noticed was the heat.
Not the comfortable warmth of a blanket pulled too tight, not the dry bite of a heater left on overnight.
This was living heat, thick and amber, pressing against your skin like a second layer you hadn't asked for. The second thing you noticed was the ceiling. Lacquered wood. Red silk hangings. An oil lamp swaying on a chain of hammered bronze.
Not your apartment, the room looks like it's from a completely different time era.
You sat up so fast the room tilted, and the silk sheets pooled around your waist.
A room materialized around you in pieces, a carved vanity, a screen painted with twin phoenixes, shuttered windows bleeding gold light through their slats. A tray of food sat on the low table nearby. Someone had been anticipating your consciousness.
The door opened before you could fully panic.
He was younger than you expected, given the room. Given everything. He couldn't have been more than a few years older than you, but the way he carried himself, straight spine, measured steps, one hand clasped behind his back, made the space rearrange itself around him like the room itself was paying attention. A scar pulled at the left side of his face, pink and permanent.
He looked at you the way someone looks at a problem they have already decided to solve.
"You're awake," he stated with a small smile.
"Where am I?" Your voice came out rougher than you intended.
"The Fire Nation Capital." He moved to stand near the window, not approaching, not retreating. "The palace, specifically. You were found unconscious near the outer gates three days ago. The guards assumed you were a threat." A pause, something flickering through his expression. "You were not a threat."
Fire Nation Capital? You have never heard of a palace like this before in geography.
Three days. You touched your own face, half-expecting to find something different.
"I don't... I'm not from here. I don't know how I got here. I don't know where here is, exactly, I mean I've never heard of..." You stopped. That sentence had no safe ending.
He watched you flounder with patience that didn't quite look like kindness. "You'll stay in the palace," he said, as if the matter had been considered and settled long before this conversation. "Until we understand how you arrived and where you belong."
"You don't have to do that."
The sentence was said with a desperate voice which sounded like 'Please don't throw me out!'
"I know. But it is not honorable to leave a lady in need."
He left before you could find the words for the particular feeling that sentence left behind.
The palace was enormous and you were given a corner of it: the room, an adjoining bathing chamber, a small garden terrace that looked out over red rooftops cascading down toward the harbor.
You were not a prisoner. No one said you were a prisoner. But the world outside those walls was entirely illegible to you, the currency, the customs, the way people spoke around you like you were something fragile that had arrived without instructions.
Also people bended elements like Zuko who bends fire, and bending is something you are unable to do in any way or form.
Fire Lord Zuko or simple Zuko, you kept having to remind yourself, which felt absurd and then slowly stopped feeling absurd, checked on you with a regularity that was either conscientious or deliberate.
You hadn't yet decided which. He answered your questions about the world with the directness of someone who had run out of patience for anything indirect, and you found that, unexpectedly, you preferred it. He didn't soften things. He didn't perform warmth.
When he sat across from you at dinner and told you the history of the war like it was something he needed to say out loud to someone who had no prior judgment about it, you understood it was a different kind of intimacy than most people offered.
You thought, sometimes, that you were beginning to understand this world and it might not be that different from the world you came from.
But mostly you understood Zuko.
Or at least you thought you understood him.
He came to your terrace one evening near the end of your second month.
The sun was going down and taking the heat with it, and the harbor below had gone from silver to copper to something deeper, and you were watching it with the specific pleasure of someone who has learned not to take anything for granted.
You heard his footsteps before you saw him, as you had learned his footsteps patterns.
"You look like you're thinking," he said.
He came to stand beside you at the railing. For a while he said nothing, which was one of the things about him you had come to understand.
The silences were never empty with Zuko. They were weighted, working.
"There is something I need to discuss with you." He said it to the harbor.
"The servants talk." He paused. "The court notices things. You've been living in the palace for two months. You eat with me. You walk the grounds with me." Another pause, shorter. "They have come to certain conclusions about the nature of your stay."
You turned to look at him. "What kind of conclusions?"
His jaw moved. "The kind that have become difficult to ignore. Word travels fast in the capital. There are rumors in the city now about a woman living in the Fire Lord's wing." He finally turned to look at you. In the low gold light, the scar looked less like damage and more like topography, just part of the landscape of him. "It puts you in a complicated position. Without status and protection."
Your stomach did something uncomfortable. "Zuko..."
"I've thought about this carefully." He said it with the clipped certainty of someone who had, in fact, thought about it carefully, and did not want to be interrupted mid-conclusion. "The most practical solution, the one that resolves the problem entirely, is marriage."
The word landed in the warm air between you and just sat there.
"Marriage," you repeated.
"You don't know the outer city. You don't know how things work here. If you were to leave the palace without status, you would be..." He stopped. Looked back at the harbor. "Vulnerable. People would take advantage. The simplest way to protect you, to make it impossible for anyone to use your position against you, is to give you a position that cannot be questioned."
You stared at the side of his face. He stared at the harbor.
"If you don't want that," he said, and something in his voice changed register very slightly, "I'll find another solution. But it would be more complicated."
You thought about the city below, which you didn't know. You thought about the currency you didn't have, the language you were still learning at the edges, the fact that you had arrived here with nothing and been handed warmth and silk and someone's careful, unasked-for attention.
He finally looked at you. Something moved behind his good eye and vanished before you could name it.
"Okay," he repeated, quieter.
The sun went below the harbor. Somewhere in the city below, lanterns were beginning to come on.
His head secretary, would have mentioned it. His advisors, who watched the city's pulse like old men watching weather, would have brought it to council.
The servants' gossip ran through the palace like water through stone and none of it, none of it, had ever surfaced in any report about a woman in the Fire Lord's east wing.
He had known it when he rehearsed the conversation on his terrace the night before, parsing the words until they sat right.
He had known you would agree because you had the faith of someone who did not yet understand how the world here worked, who was relying on the one person in it she knew.
He stood at the window of his own chamber long after you'd retired for the evening.
It wasn't something he was proud of, exactly.
But you had arrived with nothing, out of nowhere, and the palace was the only world you knew, and he had watched you for two months learning to trust this place, learning to trust him, and the thought of you leaving, of someone else finding you first, of you being out in the city where he couldn't...
He stopped that thought, it's already decided that you would become his wife.
He was the Fire Lord. He had spent enough of his life doing things he wasn't proud of for reasons that seemed, at the time, like the only available reasons.
Zuko went to his desk and began drafting the announcement.
He was not his father. Zuko had told himself this so many times it had become something close to prayer. He was not his father. He had ended the war, burned the war councils and rebuilt the ministries and sat across from Aang in rooms full of people who had every reason to hate him and done the work anyway, year after year, because that was what it meant to not be his father.
Zuko also promised himself he would find a way to deserve being your husband. He told himself he would spend however long it took making the cage into something that didn't feel like one. He told himself this was different.
