Lu Ten's memory is not something for someone to peer at as if it is a bug stuck through with a golden pin under glass.

Fuck, you're right. He wouldn't be quiet, he'd ask questions. About what it was like, raising a son in the Fire Nation. Going off to war with him. Where, exactly, he is buried now.


I keep thinking that there were so very many refugees into Ba Sing Se that they are the ones, for the most part, living in that new section and the sections around it. Iroh suspects that if he ventured further out, he'd find people who lived there when they were children, but even with his penchant for penitence he doesn't want to see their scars.

But, oh god, some of them will make it out of the Lower Ring, you know. As merchants or gangsters who do well for themselves or whatever. Coming up into Iroh's rich, posh tea shop, with the matrons of the Upper Ring laughing into their sleeves and the soft clink of tea bowls, smoothing down their new fine clothes, glancing across the counter into the back of the shop. Every time, Iroh wonders if someone will stop and say his name.