ANYTHING BUT; avatar the last airbender

prologue

[prologue]

    Lian had never truly known love. She had not known the gentle caress of her mothers touch or the gentle sound of her fathers voice. She had never known uncontested affection or even the kindness of someone's tone. All her life, she is serenaded by rough orders and intrusive questions, with grabby hands and strangers arms. She does not know the people who she has grown up around. But she knows all about them. She knows everything, even when she wishes she did not.

    She had been conceived and born out of the need for an heir. A child born to a child, while a mother, screaming in the night, was stripped from her baby and hidden in dark rooms and underground tunnels. Then she is dead. She is unnamed, to Lian. She has never known her name, never heard it spoken by her father or by anyone else. No one, not a single person in her entire life.

    She is only sixteen. And she is only the Princess of the Earth Kingdom. The only daughter and child of the King, Kuei. She is born to a King who has never known responsibility or real life, and to a girl, who becomes a wife and then a mother, and dies before she even has a chance to live.

    The King experiences the entirety of his daughter's life in the fear that he will never know her. He does not know what drives her joy or fuels her anger. He does not know what inspires her sadness or ignites her happiness. He does not know her favorite color or her favorite way to bend the earth beneath her feet. He does not know her interests or her wants in life. All he knows is who Long Feng allows him to know. All he knows is that she is quiet and observant; he knows it by the way her eyes scan every room she enters, by the way she reads a person by the movement of their hands or the sound of their footsteps. He knows that she is his heir, his Princess. And he knows that he loves her.

    But he does not know how to. He does not know to show her the love he was shown by his own father before his passing. He does not know how to hold her in his arms or tell her that he loves her. He does not know, and he hates it. It is the thing that pains him most in the world. That and the disappearance, and assumed death, of his wife.

     Lian, however, is not an evil thing. She is not cruel or ugly. Not at all like the stories that are whispered among the Middle and Lower rings of her home, Ba Sing Se. She is not ill or malformed. But they would not know that. No one knows anything about her, truly, she realizes. She is a stranger to the world.

    Perhaps, even to herself.

    But Lian knows things. She may not know herself, but she does not doubt, for even a moment, her ability to understand or obtain knowledge. Which is why, when she feels the ground shift and turn under her feet, allowing no secrets to pass, the night is her friend.

    She knows the streets and paths of Ba Sing Se like she knows her own heart. She has met many people in such a way, she has lived lives that she never would have lived otherwise. She would have just been like her father—oblivious and naive to the world.

    She knows the things that no one else does. She is not naive, not innocent. She is anything but. Just as she knows the hidden corners and lines between scarred skin and untouched innocence. She knows the difference, she knows the rasp, she remembers the touch.

    As Princess, she has always been familiar with her position. With what it means; who they need her to be. Which meant the illustration of a future. And with the fuming lines between earth and fire, she finds herself in enemy territory. A place where people plot her death. A place where she is hated. Perhaps not by all, but most. She is, however, not hated by a boy with burnt skin and unshed tears. With ripping seams and a raw throat. Zuko could never hate Lian. Not ever.

    He remembers it, too. Her laugh, the quiet rumble in her throat when she speaks. The smooth, yet calloused, plains of her hands. The red scars on her knuckles and the other ones no one has seen. Just like her, he remembers the nights in the palace. In the place that is supposed to be his home.

    "Do you miss home?"

    She huffed out a laugh, turning her head over her shoulder, looking at him from where she lay on her stomach in the middle of the floor. "Not really."

    "But," Zuko frowns, his skin, not yet burnt, pulling tight. "Your whole life is there."

    "My whole life has been a plot to give the King more power. More control, yet less of a real life. He's so—it sometimes feels like he's not even human." She rolls onto her back, staring up at the ceiling. The ceiling of the room that had housed him all his life. That has sheltered him from his mothers absence and his fathers rage. Lian's head lolls to the side, her green eyes so dark that they were nearly black focused on him. On his eyes. "You would like Ba Sing Se, I think. It has the perfect mix of things—loud and quiet. Places to escape."

    Zuko hums with a small smile. "I'd like that." He moves to sit on the edge of his bed, then, leaning his elbows forward onto his knees. His hair, tied into a ponytail, dangles over his shoulder. "I—I'm excited to go to the meeting today. With my father."

    Liam's smile falls. (It wouldn't be the first time, and certainly not the last.) "Just be careful. Especially with your words."

    "I know," he quips. Only thirteen. "I know."

    The next time that she sees him again, he is bandaged and banished. He is falling apart and there is no one left to catch him, to sew him back together again. And then, before Zuko can say goodbye, before he can peel himself from his bed with his open wounds, Lian is gone.

    Three years later, when she hears the rumblings of a boy with blue arrows, accompanied by his friends, she knows who will not be far behind. And suddenly, she is anything but gone.