Zuko- nostalgia
When Zuko looked at the avatar during his time of his banishment, he saw his ticket back home, back to everything he once had and everything he knew deep down he never did.
He looked past the airbender’s youthful body and saw the palace he knew in his childhood, the cherry trees and the turtle duck ponds where he used to play before the fateful war meeting. He saw his father’s love, his approval, or really even him thinking he wasn’t a waste of space. He saw the happy summers on ember island, the silly games he would play with Azula and her friends, the fiery throne he was told he would sit on one day.
The safety and security of childhood that vanished at the age 13.
Three years at sea combing the world for the legend everyone said was long gone sharpened Zuko’s homesickness to the point of wild desperation, so when he saw a chance to regain everything he had lost in the form of a young boy with blue tattoos, he pushed away the guilt of the avatar’s young age and pursued him with a single minded obsession.
But in his travels he had changed a great deal, and it turned out that home had too.
Faced with everything he could have wanted, he was emptier than ever.
He might have returned to the red silk rooms and the cozy courtyards, but he couldn’t return to the comfort it once gave him. He could no longer ignore the hurt that the fire nation had caused in favor of a throne and his fathers acceptance, if he even really had it. Everytime he closed his eyes he could see his uncle in a prison cell that he had helped place him in.
He needed to make things right, for the world, for his uncle, for everyone his father had hurt.
So he wrote Mai a letter, strapped his dual swords to his back, challenged his father on the day of black sun, and he left it all behind
It didn’t bother him much, after all it wasn’t worth it in the end.