Avatar: The Last Dragon Prince

Chapter Nine: Wants and Needs

Meanwhile

Zuko, Claudia was beginning to understand, was very one-track-minded.

He took his pursuit of this 'avatar' very seriously. Even she and Soren joked around a bit – okay, a lot – when they were tasked with the mission from their father. But Zuko barely engaged with them unless it was to roll his eyes or to complain about how they were slowing him down.

Even so, he didn't up and leave in the middle of the night and shed the burden of two travellers he never wanted. And he very well could have. They didn't understand why. Neither did Zuko.

At a base level, in an innermost part of himself he didn't want to acknowledge, he wanted their company. Their alliance. Their dependability. Restoring his honour alone was harder than he thought it would be when he brazenly decided to part ways with Uncle Iroh. Secretly, he wished that Iroh would appear by his side again, even only to impart the most inane wisdom.

He often sunk into bouts of sour nostalgia when he was alone, and he hadn't gone down that memory lane since being preoccupied with these two outlanders and their sibling antics. His own relationship with his sibling was... strained, to put it lightly. In another life, maybe he and Azula could have had what Soren and Claudia had.

When it came to Azula-related matters in real life, he was more than happy not to see her again for a while. The tracks he was following earlier ended miles ago – tracks he knew could have only come from a Fire Nation machine – but the desert winds alerted him to clumps of fur dispersed on the ground in an arrangement that looked too linear to be random. Fur that looked much like the fur of the avatar's flying bison. Pursuing Azula would have to wait.

Where there was the bison, there was the avatar.

"So if you do find the avatar," Claudia started, "what should we expect? Because I haven't got much magical juice left in my reserve."

Zuko furrowed his eyebrows. "I thought you could... make lightning whenever you want."

Whenever she wanted if she had the sky primal stone. But because she had used it before, embers of its magic still coursed through her veins. That lightning show used of the last of it. Because of all the dark magic she had performed throughout the years, her body stored up enough residual magic for very simple spells. Elementary spells. Spells that would be a minor inconvenience at best. So she did not feel too confident about using her last ammo in a fight.

All that was more than she wanted to explain to Zuko – because she knew she'd have to expound on everything from what a primal stone was to the nitty-gritties of dark magic – so she settled on a redacted easily-digestible answer.

"Not whenever I want. It doesn't work like that. The source of my magic is draining fast. And the lightning last time was a one-time thing."

"So we should expect to fight?" Soren asked.

"You shouldn't get involved actually," Zuko answered instead. "Claudia's powers would have been helpful if she had them right now but she doesn't. I can subdue the avatar by myself. Even if he's with that waterbender friend of his."

Soren simply huffed and kept riding. Even in a world with no magic, having it was still more relevant than his swordsmanship.

"Water comes out of her?!" Claudia gasped, completely oblivious to her brother's mood.

Not for the first time since he met her, Zuko narrowed his eyes at her and tried to make sense of her ever puzzling statements. "No," he said slowly. "Water does not come out of her."

She frowned. "So it's like earthbending where she can bend water instead of water coming out of her the way fire comes out of you?"

He nodded.